Kenya's Stats: Time for Improvement

Doing some playing around on the net this afternoon, I was got sucked in to a good hour playing around with the stats searcher on Testmatch Stats. Link courtesy of Stu at Stumpcam.
I was struck by a couple of things, and neither made me feel very happy. Basically, Kenya needs a couple of players who can achieve and maintain decent averages both with the bat, and ball.
Kenya's best batsman, Steve Tikolo, only averages 28, and only himself and Kennedy Otieno of the present crop have made centuries in ODIs. Kenya's average score in ODIs is 182, while our opponents average 213. It is a similar situation with our bowlers: Only Thomas Odoyo and Martin Suji average less than 5 runs an over, and the best average is again Tikolo with 38 balls per wicket. We must learn to be much more economical with our bowling, and need to find the penetration to get through opposing line-ups.

Tikolo, and several other of the Kenyan batsmen are, I believe, better than their current averages show. This tour has to be the time to start to put this right - the better players out there are averaging 40 plus, and Kenya needs a couple of batsmen to do this for us on a regular basis. Our bowlers need to reduce their runs per over to around 4, and get their averages down into the twenties. If someone can step up to the mark and achieve this in the coming series, it will make life a lot easier in terms of Kenya winning matches.

It is also disconcerting to see that almost all of Kenya's better partnerships have included players who have since left the team. Again, a perfect chance for some of the youngsters to step up, or the established players to make up some lost ground. We are a better team than our stats and history show, lets hope we can prove this over the next couple of months.