perhaps in England and Australia. what about other countries? pls throw some light on why did Bradman not tour any other place than England in his career? And why in this case should he be compared with modern greats?
Steyn’s career avg is well below 25 which I admit, is not a threshold of a great bowler but just an indication. throwing in some more names from 80s onwards: warne, murli, Imran, marshall, Hadlee, Holding, Lily,kapil, kumble, swann, Akram, Ambrose, Waqar, Walsh, Donald, Mcgrath, Akhter, Bond, Lee, Pollock, Morkel, gillespie, Flintoff, Ian Bishop, Anderson . Did Bradman’s era have proportional number of great bowlers? I think not.
I think pretty clearly the best batsman in my time watching cricket was Greg Chappell. He carried the Australian team at a time when the most dominant attack in cricket was the West Indians. Against them he averaged 56.00 with 5 hundreds in only 17 tests. Overall 53.86 with 24 hundreds in 87 tests. One third of Tendulkar’s hundreds have been scored against Bangladesh, Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka in 41 tests during an era dominated by batsmen. Chappell only got to play one innings against sides like this in an era dominated by bowlers.
A recent piece in the Sydney Morning Herald mocked the idea that Ricky Ponting is the second best Aussie batsman. From the look of their figures it may be Lara. And why not he was awesome too.
Can you think of a single reason why the fastest bowlers of any era wouldn’t have been comparable? Same sized ball, same length pitch, same generic action.
Jack Gregory would have been bowling 150km plus in the 1920s. Fred Spofforth would have been high 130s way back in 1886, and given the standard of pitches that would have been diabolical.
Larwood, Lindwall, Miller Griffiths, Hall etc would also have been capable of 140km plus and they weren’t the only quicks going around even at their peak. Yes, teams began to pick more quicks in the 80s, but individually the cream were not better than the cream of their grandfathers generation.
How do I infer this? Because I have a 16yo in the junior team I coach who’s been clocked at 132km. He’s very raw but with some hard work we might get him as quick as Pat Cummins. But equally he might not even be good enough to play grade.
As stated above bowling average @ <25 isn’t a realistic benchmark. Shane Warne didn’t achieve that, though not by much.
Probably colonial superiority attitudes came into play. But equally I’ve never heard of any viable proposal for a tour of other destinations or indication they could provide 1st class, let alone Test class, opposition. “The Don” was averaging 100 against the best in the world at the time.
I’m sure India/Pakistan/South Africa were of Test standard a long time before the powers of England/Australia allowed them into the Test club. However, even in the 1960s playing on the sub-continent meant playing on coir-matting wickets and the significant chance of being invalided with hepatitis etc. You wouldn’t have got “The Don” there for all the tea in China in the 1930s
Probably because none of the modern players consider themselves to be within his shadow.
Firstly, its cool that you work with young cricketers. Hope your student makes it big.
Popularization of the game outside of England and Australia, more competition, better infrastructure, improved living standards, nutrition, professionalism and science in sports. these factors would have improved the quantity as well as quality (pace, accuracy, variety, endurance etc) of bowlers. Take 100m sprint example, every runner who completed the race in 2012 Olympics finals ran in under 10sec, 1952 Olympics, the gold medalist had the time of 10.79secs
Coming back to Bradman, he also wouldn’t have had to play on rank turners(as he only toured England) or reverse swing.
I concede the points about lower quality bats and uncovered pitches. Taking all things into account, I’d still say its appropriate to not compare across eras. Bradman is the greatest of his era, Sachin (arguably?) the greatest of his.
you are right, 25 avg isn’t a threshold as I’d mentioned. But any bowler below 25 must have been great…
Besides probably England, other teams wouldn’t be on par on that standard. Pls do not treat the number of bowlers in my list as any standard. I had listed some of the top ones that I remembered at that time and had left out many many talented bowlers…such as vaas, srinath, ntini, zaheer, Harbhajan, gough, fanie de Villiars, Dillon, vettori, hilfenhouse, ajmal etc
This argument comes up in any sport. How do you compare Jim Brown to Barry Sanders? Babe Ruth to Willie Mays to Barry Bonds? How do you adjust for the different conditions to compare Maurice Richard, Wayne Gretzky, and Sidney Crosby? How can you possibly match up the eye-bulging numbers Wilt Chamberlain put up to the norms of today? Is Usain Bolt really a better sprinter than Jesse Owens? Lionel Messi is dominating players who are far, far better conditioned and systematically trained than the players Pele was embarassing, which is to say nothing of the footballers of the pre-war days, so who’s better?
Without going into a ridiculous level of statistical analysis, debate, and subjective argument, what really matters is to what extent did the player dominate his contemporaries? And here’s the thing about Bradman;** nobody else in his time did the things he did. **Say what you will about the advantages he had (and he had many) but everyone else he played with and against had the same ones, and they didn’t average a century. In terms of how much he affected the games he was playing, Bradman was the best.
Now, I think you can legitimately argue that Test cricket in the 1930s isn’t the same as it is today, but the time machine arguments you get into are kind of pointless (okay, so if you put Don Bradman in a time machine and took him to today… he’d be blown away by the bowling… but if you brought him as a kid and let him train today… blah blah blah.) Really what matters is that he dominated the game at the time he played.
Would be fascinated by the views of others … but IMHO if you time-warped a 24yo Bradman into the current Test side he’d still average 85-90 using his 1930s equipment.
Reason why his average would stay so high, Bradman didn’t hit the ball in the air.
Reason why it would drop a bit; video replay and technical enhancements like Hawk Eye systems reduce benefit of the doubt.
On the Bradman issue, if he had played modern cricket.
He did struggle against Bodyline, so I would say he would have difficulties against the Windies pace quartet of the 1970’s and 1980’s. But he did average 56 in the body line series so I don’t know how much it would have degraded him. I think he would have done fine against spinner of the modern era, the spinners of his time were also of the same level.
Reverse swing is the great outlier, it did not exist in his time. I suspect he would have done poorly against a 99mph reverse swinging yorker, but then everyone would do poorly there. While reverse swing and an inability to deal with in dealt a fatal blow to the careers of otherwise excellent batsman ( Graeme Hick I am looking at you), the ones who have had the most success against it are those with superb reflexes and the Don had unmatched reflexes from what I have read.
BTW, Bradmans own choice for best of all time? Victor Trumper, who I do not see mentioned here. I think Bill O’Rielly thought Stand McCabe was better,
I don’t think he’d average half that, at least not at first. I think you’re vastly underestimating the improvement in all athletic endeavours in every field of sport. The best bowler of 1936, brought forward in the same time warp, would struggle to make a Test team today. Bradman would, every time he picked up his bat, be facing a better bowler than anyone he’d ever seen before in his life.
If cricket has not advanced significantly in the overall quality and ferocity of play since the 1930s, it is quite literally the only sport in the world about which that can be said.
Morning all - I had been meaning to join this site after lurking for some time, and wouldn’t you know, I start with another thread about cricket.
A couple of points I would make re the Bradman and next in line debate:
Bradman played most of the tests he was able to - you have to remember that back in the 1930s, an overseas trip to play sport was a pretty major undertaking for a team - the only overseas trips he missed were the 1935 trip to SA (seriously ill), and the one-off test against New Zealand in 1946 (when he was ill and unfit). So he didn’t ‘hide’ from anyone. England and Australia were clearly the best teams.
Averages. Cricket is an interesting sport, in that averages have, over the years, been pretty consistent. There has been a slight rise in the number of players who seem to be averaging in the low-mid 50s, but in fact it is about the same proportion of players as in Bradman’s time. If you did a bell curve of batting averages then and now, the two graphs would look the same - there would just be far more observations in the ‘now’ category.
I think it is fair to compare averages across the years - sure there have been improvements in bats, outfields, etc which contribute to making batting easier, but there have been as many improvements in bowling - fielding, new techniques, players being fitter. They balance each other out - as proved by the average scores in Test cricket from the 1920s onwards. There are many more teams, many more tests - but the scores are similar.
Bodyline. Yes, Bodyline did slow down Bradman. However it is worth remembering that the bodyline ‘tactics’ (just aim the ball at the batsman’s body every single time) were declared illegal - not by Australia, but by England- the country who invented the tactic. Once the English touring team brought bodyline back to England and used it in their local comps, the local players basically revolted and demanded its withdrawal (this included several players who had been on tour with the English team in Australia, and had been responsible for ‘dishing it out’ to the Australians). It wasn’t just fast bowling - it was dangerous bowling. It also worth remembering that under Bodyline (which was invented strictly for the purposes of containing Bradman, but aimed at all the Australians) Bradman still averaged 56 - and the next best Australian averaged 42. And 56 is the both Bradman’s worst-ever series average, and a higher average than almost anybody else’s career. Even his ‘slump’ was as good or better than anyone else’s average.
My personal choice for No 2 is Sobers. I think he stood out amongst his contemporaries as a batsman probably more than anyone (other than you-know-who).
As this appears to be the current catch all cricket thread:
Jesus, NZ are getting stuffed already on Day 1 in South Africa. Shot out for 45 (after winning the toss and batting) and SA are already beyond that, scoring at nearly 5 an over.
Is anyone watching this? How can you get all out for 45 on a pitch that allows batsmen to score 5 an over?
…if you haven’t followed the drama that has surrounded NZ cricket over the last two years its a bit hard to explain. But the TLDR version: NZ Cricket has revealed itself to be a dis-functional basket case. John Wright lasted a year as coach before walking away shaking his head: and the coaching was taken over by a second rate coach named Mike Hesson. Hesson is “mates” with McCullum: and since Hesson took over as coach he orchestrated a coup to oust the incumbant Captain Ross Taylor and replaced him with McCullum. The coup was horribly handled and Hesson has been outed as a liar: however that was ignored by NZ Cricket who proceeded to back the coach and not the Captain.
So the NZ Cricket Team playing in South Africa right now is without its best batsman in Taylor, Jessie Ryder is also sitting out the game on a semi-self imposed exile, Vettori is injured (but bizzarely, still playing) and so is Southee. While McCullum has been trumpeted as a “better Captain” than Taylor by his proponents: his statistics don’t bear that out. He has always been a lousy captain and this match is showing up his worse traits.
If what I’m writing sounds bitter: its because it is. The decision to drop Taylor ignited a huge amount of passion in the average NZ cricket supporter: we have suffered for years by a poor cricket administration the dropping of Taylor as Captain was really the last straw.
So the real TLDR version: bad Captain who on form is lucky to be in the team: inexperienced coach who is lucky to be signed into a contract for the next four years, a batting line-up lacking the mettle of Taylor, Ryder and Vettori, and a bowling line-up without a leader. The “all out in a session” is shocking: but considering the circumstances was not unexpected. And of course, we are playin the best team in the world, which doesn’t really help matters.
Well, I knew it was bad, on a watching from a distance level. But I had no clue that this has been going on for the better part of 2 years.
On the game in question, the lack of those players injured/ousted is going to make a big difference, I guess. Still. 45. And all out in a session. We’d be fucked if we had 4 or 5 of our front line guys out but I’d hope we’d make more than 45.
Yes - anyway, as I said, this seems to be the catch all cricket thread, so thought I’d ask the question here. Now returning to your regularly scheduled bunfight on comparing cricketers from different eras.
Because the progression of other sports tell us that the fastest bowlers of earlier eras were not remotely the athletes their contemporaries are. Professional sportsmen today (with a very few exceptions) are stronger and faster than those of yesteryear in just about every measurable way. It’s true that fast bowling is something of a dying art right now, but it was clearly at its apex from the 70s to 90s, not the 1920 to the 1940s.
Ain’nt that the truth. I remember that even bowlers like McGrath, Pollack, Razzaq woukd routinely touch 90mph and the turly fast men averaged above 90mph at all times. Somebody gets to 90 today once of twice a match and it’s considered fast bowling. As someone who missed a decade of cricket, you must have been shocked at how poor the “quicks” are today.
I had sort of assumed that every local team had its own Wasim/Waqar unit by now. When I was at school everyone wanted to bowl for pace. I only became a spinner because I had a noodle arm.
I have done a lot of research on Trumper (who many thought was the best around the turn of that century) and I have never seen that Bradman thought he was the best. Indeed, I don’t know that Bradman would have seen very much of him given that Trumper died in 1915 and Bradman was only born in 1908- and Trumper was clearly past his best in his 30’s (Bright’s Disease did take its toll)*.
O’Reilly- well he had a hatred for Bradman- he was not the only one as there was a huge Catholic/ Protestant divide. Fingleton was another. I don’t know that O’Reilly ever named a best but he did say he gave himself a chance against Bradman, but never against Ponsford. Bradman was more generous in naming O’Reilly the best bowler he had seen.
As an aside, there was every chance that Trumper was actually a Kiwi. His family history is largely absent and there is a school of thought he was adopted from an orphanage in NZ.