KEVIN PIETERSEN’S is 133. Clive Radley’s is 83. Nick Knight’s is 40. David Gower’s is 30. Michael Vaughan’s is 28. Ian Botham’s is 23. Welcome to the wacky world of one-day international batting averages. Every time a player comes out to bat, up pops his average on the screen, which is accidentally appropriate because averages are like cameras: they lie more often than we think, which makes their fibs all the more plausible.

Pietersen’s average is a slippery mixture of truth and spin. He has never actually made 133 for England; his highest score is 116. So that’s misleading for a start. All cricket averages give too much credit for a not out. Some are a thing of brilliance, such as Pietersen’s unbeaten 91 last Sunday, which turned a hard run chase into a comfortable victory. But others are routine, such as his first innings for England, a 27 not out at Harare Sports Club last November. He faced 47 balls and hit only one of them for four.

In his second match, also at Harare, he found his inner gladiator and scored 77 not out at a run a ball, with three sixes. He had now made a hundred runs without being out, which has coloured his statistics ever since, and will for ever more. By getting a duck in his third match, he acquired an average — 104. It has oscillated a little but has never descended into two figures. It will stay higher than 100 even if he gets a duck against Bangladesh tomorrow.

His colossal average is good knockabout stuff, grist for the swotty schoolboys and pub-quiz addicts who form two of cricket’s constituencies. It neatly encapsulates his superhuman start. And he almost earns it by so often being undefeated, which makes him doubly useful — both firestarter and finisher, Michael Bevan, with a dash of Shahid Afridi.

But there is a more telling figure that we seldom see. His strike rate is 103 — ie, he scores 103 runs per hundred balls. This is decidedly faster than the previous fastest England bombardiers, Andrew Flintoff and Ian Blackwell (both around 92). It is five behind the fastest scorer of all time, Afridi. But we are never told this. You have to dig around on the web to establish it, even at Cricinfo, the greatest statistical machine assembled, apart from the one created some years ago by a Mr and Mrs Frindall.

Afridi’s average is a mere 24, but he is a match-winner. Strike rates go to the heart of one-day cricket, averages don’t, yet the game still doggedly gives averages precedence, because that is how things were done before anyone got round to working out that one-day cricket might have wide appeal.

Even in Tests, averages are a flawed mechanism, and becoming more so. Ian Bell’s Test batting average is 297. He could start the Ashes with a pair of golden ducks and still have stats to match Bradman’s. The reason is that, apart from showing a fine cool head in a miniature crisis against West Indies last September, he filled his boots against Bangladesh, making 227 without being out.

In three matches, he has made more runs than Graham Gooch did in his first three years. Bell’s success means that he is now widely regarded as indispensable, even though it might entail leaving Pietersen out. Both are thrilling prospects in their different ways, but only one of them has made runs against top bowlers in his international career so far — Pietersen, who made mincemeat of Pollock and Ntini in South Africa, and of Gillespie and Kasprowicz the other day.

Bangladesh and Zimbabwe are making averages less informative by the month. Marcus Trescothick — 16 and 0 against his Australia nemeses in this series, has nonetheless lifted his average by a point because he is a master Bangladesh-basher (100 not out and 86). His Test average went up 2.5 to 45.47 during the recent two-rout series. If he weren’t such a good team man, Trescothick might stand accused of doing a Kallis.

Against Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, Jacques Kallis has shamelessly amassed 893 runs at an average of 223. His overall Test average, 56, slips to a more realistic 51 in matches against the game’s established nations. Against Australia, it’s 32. Just because Bangladesh have had a one-day triumph, it doesn’t mean they are up to Test cricket: to assume so is to repeat the mistake the ICC made after their shock win over Pakistan in 1999. The statisticians would be better off excluding performances against cricket’s axis of feeble.

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• Graham Spiers