Who's the greatest of them all ~ A Value Creator's Blog

“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.