Athers and Kapil are only partly right

On the occasion of Sachin Tendulkar completing 20 years in international cricket, Kapil Dev opined in 'The Asian Age' that Tendulkar had under-achieved.

It depends on how you look at it. For someone who started off playing so aggressively and making bowlers scared of bowling to him, Tendulkar most definitely doesn't strike fear in bowlers any more. But that's true for pretty much every player who has been around for any length of time. I'm sure that towards the late 80s and early 90s, bowlers were queueing up to bowl to Viv. Murali hasn't been too good over the past year or so and there are enough questions asked about his place in the side. Kapil himself was about as quick as Mohinder Amarnath (with Jimmy at his fastest) in the last 2-3 years of his career. Lara's magic only happened in spurts towards the end. Steve Waugh fared little better.

Besides, all players change their styles to suit the team's needs, their own physical & mental state of being, etc. Until around the mid-90s, Tendulkar played in a very aggressive manner a lot of the time. But he could do that because the likes of Azhar, Sidhu and Manjrekar were around. From after the mid-90s, Tendulkar became the mainstay, and the batting revolved around him. From around the start of this decade to around 2004/2005, Dravid took over the mantle as the 'go-to' guy. Over the last 3 years, it has been Sehwag. Even though these changes happened, Tendulkar's wicket would undoubtedly have been the #1 wicket as far as the opposition was concerned.

So he could never ever have gone back to thrashing the bowling around every game, like he used to. In just the same manner as Kapil himself transformed from being a quick (let's say 140 kph types) bowler to being a fast-medium (130-135 kph) swing bowler because he realized that he would never have a long career if he'd continued as a quick bowler. Did that mean batsmen feared him less? Perhaps yes. But given he had now added a dimension of swing to his ability, it made him even better and batsmen obviously respected his ability to "make the ball talk".

Mike Atherton, writing in 'The Times', felt that calling Tendulkar the best ever was not right, because he had the benefit of so much body armour (helmets, better pads, chest guards, etc.)

That's fair enough. Anyone who tries to compare across generations is obviously being stupid. At most, you can compare folks with peers and players who played within a 10 year time period, with sufficient overlap in careers. Only Dennis Lilee would be able to get away with claiming that Mitchell Johnson was a oiag player. Either Lillee's memory is poor, or Aussie define a generation as 5 years.

But the point Athers misses is that those who played in a different era did so when there were no (or very few) ODIs or T20 games, no IPL or Champions League, no talk of burnout, test series had at least 3 warm-up games, etc.

It's interesting to think of how Hobbs, Bradman, Hammond, Sobers, Hutton, Bill O'Reilly, Harvey, Hanif, Bedi, Miller, Sutcliffe, etc. would have coped with all the travel, playing with 'niggling' injuries, spending so much time away from home, playing back-to-back tests/ODIs, playing back-to-back series in the span of a couple of months, etc.

Labels: atherton, burnout, greats, kapil, tendulkar

Thus spake Jagadish @ 1:21 pm | Sledge/Read 1 sledge(s)
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Ricky Ponting gets 10000 test runs

As was perhaps widely predicted from the moment he made his debut 13 years ago, Ricky Ponting went past 10,000 test runs last week, during the second test against West Indies, 2 months after his statistical twin did so.

Of course, Dravid's recent run of inconsistency (and early-career inability to convert 50s into 100s) has meant that Ponting has gone way past him in terms of test batting average (58 v/s 54) and centuries (35 v/s 25).

Brian Lara, with 11,953 runs, currently is top of the pile, closely followed by Sachin Tendulkar (11,782).

Unless his career is cruelly cut short by injury or some other self-inflicted damage, there's absolutely no doubt that Ponting will end up breaking the test records for most runs and most centuries.

Labels: 10000, australia, batting, dravid, greats, ponting, statistic

Thus spake Jagadish @ 6:54 pm | Sledge/Read 0 sledge(s)
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He's not a bad one-day batsman, is he?

Yes, he's played 300-odd games. But that's perhaps 200 more than a a whopping majority of Indian cricket followers would have predicted for him when his one-day career came to a near standstill shortly after his 1(21) against Bangladesh. The revival came during India's tour of New Zealand where he played a fair amount of shots over the infield without ever looking ugly. Then came the 1999 World Cup. After that, no real looking back.

Today, he went past 10000 ODI runs, against Sri Lanka at Goa.

The only others who've got more international runs than Rahul Dravid (19218) are Sachin Tendulkar (25450), Brian Lara (22089), Inzamam-ul-Haq (20478) and Ricky Ponting (19224). Point to be noted: Dravid and Ponting's numbers are identical, yet again!

Analyzing the numbers further, in terms of runs per innings in tests, the rankings are BC Lara (51.52), RT Ponting (51.19), R Dravid (50.41), SR Tendulkar (49.16) and Inzamam-ul-Haq (44.51). For ODIs, the rankings (runs per innings) are SR Tendulkar (39.95), RT Ponting (37.48), BC Lara (36.07), R Dravid (35.12) and Inzamam-ul-Haq (33.71). Inzamam's numbers are clearly inferior to the rest. So I'm going to drop him from the comparison.

The next analysis is a ratio of test runs to ODI runs. My personal preference is for test cricket. So a higher ratio is preferable. The rankings are BC Lara (1.18), RT Ponting (0.95), R Dravid (0.91) and SR Tendulkar (0.72). A similar analysis of test runs/innings to ODI runs/innings gives R Dravid (1.44), BC Lara (1.43), RT Ponting (1.37) and SR Tendulkar (1.23).

Then I assign a weightage for each player's test and ODI runs per innings numbers. This is how it turns out. If I rank ODI and test runs on par with each other, the rankings are SR Tendulkar (89.11), RT Ponting (88.67), BC Lara (87.59) and R Dravid (85.53). If I gave ODI runs a 75% weightage compared to test runs, the rankings are RT Ponting (79.30), SR Tendulkar (79.12), BC Lara (78.57) and R Dravid (76.75). If ODIs get 50% weightage compared to test runs, the rankings are RT Ponting (69.93), BC Lara (69.56), SR Tendulkar (69.14) and R Dravid (67.97). If ODIs get 25% weightage compared to test runs, the rankings are RT Ponting (60.56), BC Lara (60.54), R Dravid (59.19) and SR Tendulkar (59.15).

What this analysis tells me is that there's almost no real difference between the fearsome foursome. Ricky Ponting leads on just about every count, Brian Lara comes a very close second a lot of the time. But the margins are really wafer thin. When I normalize all the rankings for each weightage system, the highest gap is between Dravid (0.9597) and Tendulkar when ODI runs getting the same weightage as test runs. In the other three weightages, the gaps are Tendulkar (0.9767) v Ponting for the 25% weightage, Dravid (0.9719) v Ponting for the 50% weightage and Dravid (0.9678) v Ponting for the 75% weightage.

Lara is due to retire after the 2007 World Cup. Tendulkar could last for another 2 years at most. The two cricketing twins will keep making bowling attacks feel miserable for at least another half a decade! It'll be awesome to follow the race.

Previous stuff on Dravid: Highest batting avg, Ponting and Dravid's similar stats, comparing Ponting and Dravid in ODIs, comparing Kallis, Ponting and Dravid, second fastest to 8000 test runs, most consecutive test appearances from debut, second highest average among those with 7000 test runs, combining well with Kumble, century in each test playing nation and drawing level with Gavaskar's catches count.

Labels: 10000, batting, dravid, greats, inzamam, ponting, tendulkar

Thus spake Jagadish @ 6:59 pm | Sledge/Read 10 sledge(s)
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