Four successful run-chases in a relatively short timespan give rise to a few questions: are these targets being hunted down more often now than in the past? Has fourth-innings batting generally become easier over the last few years? Let the numbers tell the story.

However, these fourth-innings wins only highlight the success stories, without looking at the number of opportunities teams have had to chase such targets. To know the success rate in these situations, you’d also have to know the number of times teams have been set such targets, in the last few years and earlier.

In fact, the six-year period between 2003 and 2008 was a particularly good one for fourth-innings batting: of the 24 successful chases of 200-plus targets in that period, 15 were in excess of 249. (That’s 27% of the total such chases since 1960.) In 2007, too, the fourth-innings average exceeded that of the first three innings, while the ratios were very close to 1 in 2003 and 2006. Overall, in those six years, the runs per wicket in the fourth innings was 32.97, and in the first three innings it was 35.14, a ratio of 0.94. The outlier in that period was 2005, when the ratio dropped to 0.78.

The decade of the 2000s was generally an excellent one for batters – pitches were, relatively speaking, flat the world over; bowling attacks were thin; and that is also reflected in the fact that even stiff fourth-innings targets didn’t faze batting teams.