Short spells strategy

A few years back I was watching the IPL and watched with interest the strategy of changing up the bowling almost every over. In 10 overs, 6 or 7 bowlers were used and in some cases they had bowlers changing ends. The intention was that, at no point was the batsman able to settle and get used to what the bowlers were doing.

I thought this was an interesting strategy and anecdotally at club level it seemed to make complete sense. It seemed to me that the majority of the wickets in all the games I played in, fell in the bowlers first few overs. I asked a few people initially about the idea, other bowlers, my captain and people with a lot more experience than me and they were sceptical. Bowlers especially, seemed to be in denial arguing that once they got settled they were more effective. I wasn't convinced, so I started to photograph as many score-books as possible at my own and other clubs and in the end gathered together data for 565 wickets taken.

I then counted all those that were taken in the first 10 overs and here's the results from my sample...

By quite some way, wickets are taken most frequently in the first 2 overs when the batsman is trying to figure out how he's going to play the bowler. Whether the bowler bowls better in the those overs is a moot point and it maybe in part down to relatively poor bowling that the wickets fall? Once a bowler settles he/she potentially settles into a pattern - but that might also play into the batsman's hands because it then becomes predictable?

Could we adopt an approach whereby the bowlers are rotated every two overs as well as being deployed from different ends. The bowlers might argue that they don't get into a rhythm, but if we're trying to win who cares - just look at the data! We might make a concession and meet the bowler part of the way by giving him/her additional overs say if they bowl an over that returns 2 or less runs? But as soon as they've gone for more than two we're looking for wickets and if they've not got wickets in the next 2 overs they're out of the attack and its in with the next bloke. You could also as a concession to your bowlers adopt an approach where 1 or more wickets in an over buys another over.