The rise and fall of the number one test team

Looking at the last 3 decades of Indian test cricket, 80s was a year of resilience, 90s the nadir and 2000-2010 victorious. I don’t even want to second guess, what would 2010-20 look like, as it seems like a decade of clean sweeps. The Indian team has always been strong at home but as a touring side has had a history of capitulation.

India is the wealthiest cricket team in the world, they practically run ICC, have the greatest batsmen in international cricket, hold almost all batting records, access to the best coaches and coaching facilities. Name it, we got it. Yet India until 2000 had won 3 test matches out of 76 tour games, that’s a win probability of fewer than 4%. They had won just one series against England in 1986 for 20 years, not including a fledgling Sri Lanka in 93. Touring games were virtually over before they began; India was at best a boost for the home team, before a major tour. Out of form batsmen got back into form, bowlers bowled their career best spells and teams strolled to victories.

Towards the end of 90s India hit rock bottom with the match fixing scandals. India’s greatest cricketing son struggled to lead the team with the same success he enjoyed with the bat. With the turn of the millennium when everything was doom and gloom, in walked Sourav Ganguly. Unfairly cast aside after a one match opportunity in 1992, he came back roaring with a century on debut in 1996. It was a sign of a character with steely resolve, focus and one of the feistiest players cricket has seen. A team that lacked all three of Sourav’s virtues received the perfect tonic with his captaincy. Combined with John Wright’s perseverance and focus on getting the basics right, was a success formula like none other in the history of Indian cricket.

Between 2000 and 2010, India won 9 series out of 22 while touring abroad. This included wins against England, Pakistan, West Indies, Sri Lanka and New Zealand, four of them more than a handful in home conditions. But what was truly incredible for a country that won 3 matches in 20 years, won 23 matches while touring in 10 years. During this period India showed incredible resolve, belief and came back from virtually impossible positions to win. Unlike the 90s, when India usually went flat and let oppositions walk all over them, Sourav’s fire was the ideal fillip for flagging spirits. He was also not one to shy away from mind games and intimidation. He was in fact one step ahead of them when he made Steve Waugh wait for the toss before the match or did the now famous T-shirt act. The aggression brought adrenaline and intent, to what was a rather timid team.

If 2010 was a glorious decade in Indian cricket history. 2020 seems like a decade for 20-20. The IPL has virtually transformed cricket in India. Cricket was a sport played by half a billion Indians on dusty dirt tracks, but it was maybe a handful of batsmen in the playing eleven who made the big media contracts, the rest were impoverished struggling cricketers. IPL changed all of that, a six weeks extravaganza that saw new stars emerge and made many more millionaires. All of a sudden all batsmen were practicing lap sweeps off fast bowlers, right-handers played left handed and helicopter shots. Dravid who is by far a thoroughbred technician, was playing scoops across the line and over the covers, showing the new crop of talent the future of cricket.

The fab-four got an extended lease, while BCCI bought time, playing merry go round tours with Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. During this time the selectors tried Ajinkya Rahane, Cheteshwar Pujara, Suresh Raina, Yuvraj Singh, Murali Vijay, Virat Kohli and Abhinav Mukund. All bright talents in the shorter swashbuckling form, but completely lacked the technique for sterner tests, where bowlers were not push over dummies. An ageing fab four stood behind numbers taller than their shrinking forms, from years of carrying the burden of a billion cricket-crazy fans and insane tour schedules. An appropriate glorious parting gift would have been the world cup, but who will take their place? All of a sudden Indian test batsmen are a scarce commodity as coaching manuals were burnt. Some in fact predicted the demise of a tradition over a 100 years old, as the popular lucrative format seemed to replace the old. Fortunately cricket lies in more reliable hands. Only time will tell if an increasingly corporate BCCI may have killed the golden goose, as they are left with an average crop of inexperienced test cricketers and extremely irate fans after watching their country’s pride and glory getting publicly flogged. But something tells me we wouldn’t have to wait very long.

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IPL auction : Country, cricket, dollars and more drama

Country, cricket or just dollars?

There's still a generation that firmly believes cricket must be played for the pride of the country, not for money. In fact some of them feel IPL cricketers are overpaid and that’s hastening retirement in cricket. I suggest let us take an honest look at the numbers in comparison to other international sports. 78.5 million dollars was spent so far in the IPL auction. The numbers saw a lot of jaws drop, but IPL is still a fair distance from becoming the highest paying sporting event.

Lets draw a few comparisons with another international team sport like basketball. Currently basketball is the third highest paying team sport int the world. The average salary for an NBA player is $5m, compared to IPL's $565,000. The highest paid NBA player last season was Tracy McGrady who landed a whopping $23m contract compared to Gambhir who won $2.4m. NBA pays 10 times more for any player compared to the IPL. One might argue the US GDP is 10 times India's, but sporting events are not measured by GDP but by TRP. The average number of viewers for the NBA finals last year was 3.6m when compared to 8.34m viewers per day throughout the tournament. This puts the enormity of the IPL in perspective, so let us take note of the facts before we get carried away by the number of millionair cricketers. So if you think this is too much there is more to come folks.

The rich did get richer…but what’s cricket got to do with this?

So while many believe in the 80-20 rule, the IPLs 20-20 formula seems to work on a 50-20 rule, in other words 50% of the $78.5m was spent on 20% of the players. The top 20% won bids at an average cost of $1.5m per player. A mere $10m was spent on the remaining 50% at an average cost of $158,696, or 1/10 the cost of the top 28 players. So, not everyone gets rich at the IPL.What this also demonstrates is that not all franchisee owners were smart bidders. They overpaid for some and were left with a lot less for other valuable players. Since there is ai salary cap per team, bid price is an equation of the amount left in the kitty and not the intrinsic value per player. A few glaring instances are Irfan Pathan, who was paid $1.9m compared to Mike Hussey, ranked No.3 in the ODI rankings, was paid a measly $0.43m. Another instance is of misplaced investments was Ravindra Jadeja who doesn't even make the Indian playing 11 , fetched $950,000. Compare this with Daniel Vettori, one of the most economical one day bowlers ranked No.1 in ODIs and a useful lower order batsman, was sold for $550,000. So auctioning is a complex subject and I am no expert, but certainly think the minimum bid price must be fixed based on a performance based pricing to ensure it not just all business after all.

Veterans ignored

The once famed left hand legends, Lara and Ganguly, find no place in the IPL. I am left searching for clues to understand why Ganguly persists after making three poor shows in the IPL and almost crossing the age limit. Someone who was once the god of offside batting looked rather meek against the swashbuckling T20 players. Class is permanent but does not always translate to runs on the cricket field.

Lara’s case is also understandable as no one has seen him bat since 2007 World Cup and to expect people to put their money on him might be premature. He might stand a chance if he can perform in the forthcoming English season and prove his mettle before he chooses to go under the hammer.

While the West Indians don’t seem to care if Lara played in the IPL or not; the Bongs went bonkers, burnt effigies and staged protests. It was not until King Khan soothed their nerves by saying “There is no KKR without Dada”, no one heard him whisper “As a mentor”.

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Who's the greatest of them all

“Who is the world’s greatest batsman?” is a question that has kept many a cricket commentators busy. The players of yester years talk about Bradman’s genius, in fact bradmanesque became an expression often used to describe a perfect innings.

Then in the 70s an era when fast bowlers dominated world cricket, a man rather short in stature walked tall amongst the West Indian giants. Gavaskar almost single handedly turned the tide for the Indian team. From a team that had almost resigned to defeat, to a team that once again learnt how not to lose.

If the 70s was a golden era for fast bowling the 90s marked the decline. As one day cricket became a popular format, unorthodox stroke play slowly crept into test cricket, greatly helped by flat, batsman friendly tracks. As one might expect, we saw a crop of new batting greats that included the likes of Brian Lara, Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Ricky Ponting and Virender Sehwag.

What makes the job of picking the greatest so difficult is establishing the criteria to measure these stalwarts of cricket. Each of these batsmen batted in a time when conditions were very different. For instance, Bradman and Gavaskar played in a time when batsmen had very little protective gear. Gavaskar and Lara were lone rangers while the likes of Bradman and Ponting played in the company of formidable batting line ups. Does any of this make one any less than the other? The truth is, it’s really hard to tell.

If you sift through all the parameters, batting averages, aggregate runs or even hundreds scored, it’s clear that none of them really reflect the batsmen’s contribution to the team adequately. Ultimately cricket like any other sport is played to win and in my mind the man who could influence the team’s success the most is the greater batsman. While statistics do not show the beautiful cover drives and on drives it does present a point of view.

“The main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team”- John Wooden. The team’s success determines the batsman’s success. In an ideal world every player’s goal is to ensure the team wins. So in my view a 100 scored to win a match is more valuable than one that saves or loses the game. So the following criteria measure the batsman’s performance relative to the team’s:

• How many times has the team won when the batsman scored more than 50 runs? The counter argument could be, how many times, has the team won despite the batsman not scoring runs. The two factors put together is Contribution to Success and measures the team’s reliance on the batsman’s success.

• Percentage of Loss, when a batsman is successful, indicates if the player scores runs when needed the most. But it cannot be looked at in isolation; when viewed in conjunction with the team’s Loss rate, we know if the batsman was crucial to the team saving or winning a game.

Batsman's team score card

Contribution to team’s success

Don Bradman being the greatest batsman that he was, forces us to discount him in any statistical analysis as an anomaly. For a player in a very successful team his Contribution to Success (CS) was as high as 63%, which means he had a great role to play in the team’s phenomenal W/L ratio. In fact only 16 innings of his above 50 have resulted in defeats for Australia. The next highest is Brian Lara who had a 46% CS, understandably a team with a 0.51 W/L ratio was heavily reliant on Lara scoring big runs. Also what is noteworthy is he scored some mammoth totals when he did score runs.

Probability of the team’s failure when the batsman was successful

Dravid more popularly known as “The Wall” of cricket has a formidable 16% Probability of Failure when successful. This is extraordinary since the team had a Loss rate of 27% during his time. But it comes as no surprise to an avid Indian fan as Dravid has saved the game for India several times when the batting was in shambles. Virendar Sehwag at 22% takes the second place since his Probability of Failure is the same as the team’s Loss Ratio. Sehwag’s devastating knocks can take the wind out of any opponent’s sails and very rarely do you see India lose when he scores due to his formidable strike rate and ability to score big tons.

When you look at team contribution the Don and Dravid stand right at the top, where Don had a lot to do with the team’s phenomenal W/L ration and Dravid’s innings have saved India many a blushes. Followed by Lara and Sehwag, where Lara propped a struggling West Indies batting line up and Sehwag’s aggressive stoke play put India in insurmountable positions. It’s strange that you don’t see Gavaskar, Ponting or Tendulkar feature when you look at the world from a different eye glass. But can numbers lie? A reason why one must also look at other aspects of the game as well.

A lone star can shine bright. Batsman like Gavaskar and Lara played for teams that rarely won matches. In such circumstances we must look at the batsman’s individual endurance, consistency and brilliance. My chosen measures are:

• Longevity by number of innings played. It takes immense physical endurance to play the sport for long and that in my mind deserves recognition as maintaining high degrees of performance becomes harder over longer periods of time.

• Consistency is measured by a batsman’s success rate. If a batsman can consistently score 50 or more runs every other innings. It gives the team great confidence to bat around him. Australia was a team that was very hard to beat because they had a number of batsman with a high success rate and bowlers with a high strike rate

• If every time a batsman scores a 50, he can go on to score a big ton, it makes him all the more dangerous to the opponent. Conversion rate can measure how often the batsman does that.

Batsman's career summary

Longevity

Tendulkar has played the most number of test innings and the only one who is even close is Ricky Ponting. It is a phenomenal feat for both batsmen to achieve with averages in the mid to high 50s . Tendulkar a child prodigy, started his career at the age of 16. He has played the game and performed at such heights for more than 20 years which makes one wonder if he is a man or machine. Ricky on the other hand started the game at 19, which is a testament to his batting genius, as most Aussies don’t serve their country until their mid 20s.. Having played the game for 16 years he has clocked as many as 251 games since Aussies play more test cricket in a year than the Indians. What is most noteworthy is that he has shouldered the burden of captaincy and yet did not let his performance drop, something that Sachin found hard to handle.

Success Rate

No surprises here again, Don is unarguably the most successful batsman of all time with a 53% success rate. Through the 80 innings he played, he has scored 50 or more runs in 55 of them. What is mindboggling is that 29 of those were hundreds. Tendulkar is second at 38% but leaves very little to chose between him and the likes of Ponting and Gavaskar who are at 37%, or Dravid and Lara at 35%. Making them all seem like mere mortals when compared to the Don.

Conversion rate

Bradman’s individual batting brilliance stands out yet again. He had a phenomenal conversion rate of 69%. In a short career span of 80 innings he has scored more triple and double tons than any other batsman. Sehwag is a close second with a conversion rate of 52% with very similar readings to the Don. As he too has more 100s than 50s 23/21.Much like the Don Sehwag has 2 triple tons and 6 double hundreds. That makes Sehwag, in this respect, close to being bradmanesque.

If we assume that the Don to be the god of cricket there is no clear second. Lara was the biggest team contributor, Dravid was the most reliable in the hour of need, Sehwag the most prolific and Sachin the longest playing batsman.

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