Michael Vaughan v Michael Atherton

[BoyBrumby]

Vaughan for mine. Atherton had the greater powers of concentration, but MPV is clearly the more lavishly gifted. His cover drive is one of the most attractive shots any cricketer plays.

 

[Fiery]

Vaughan has always been a class test player but hugely disappointing in OD cricket. Far more asthetically pleasing than Athers so I'll go with him

 

[steds]

Atherton not being an honorary frog gives him a bit of a head start.

 

[Perm]

Pretty tough question actually. Statistically, Vaughan is the much better batsman. What stats don't show is how mentally tough Atherton was, I'm pretty confident he would pile up a lot of runs against the bowling nowadays. I'm not too sure who the better batsman is, but I think I would prefer to have Atherton in my team, whereas I'd rather watch Vaughan bat.

 

[four_or_six]

Warne v Atherton was the most painful cricket I've ever seen, Atherton would stonewall away, get the odd long hop and clip it for a single. Inevitably he'd get out after an hour or two of course. You must love the bloke to love watching him.

I do love him Like I said though, I just can't get fired up by Vaughan. I guess I enjoy watching certain players more than others, and it's not really the 'beautiful shot' that I enjoy the most. Otherwise I expect I would prefer Vaughan.

 

[Manee]

Atherton. You have to respect his fighting nature at the top of a poor England batting order. He had to face all these greats with the new ball, many in their prime:

-McGrath
-Gillespie
-Pollock
-Donald
-Waqar
-Wasim
-Walsh
-Ambrose
-Srinath (had to slip him in there)
-Vaas

With an average of 37.69 and strike rate of 31.31, he would on average score 38 off 119 balls, this would protect the middle order from these great new ball bowlers for a substantial amount of time while the new ball loses its shine and a early morning pitch loses its moisture. Not the prettiest batsman, but an effective fighter.

 

[Manee]

Pretty tough question actually. Statistically, Vaughan is the much better batsman. What stats don't show is how mentally tough Atherton was, I'm pretty confident he would pile up a lot of runs against the bowling nowadays. I'm not too sure who the better batsman is, but I think I would prefer to have Atherton in my team, whereas I'd rather watch Vaughan bat.

Totally agree

 

[pasag]

Atherton. You have to respect his fighting nature at the top of a poor England batting order. He had to face all these greats with the new ball, many in their prime:

-McGrath
-Gillespie
-Pollock
-Donald
-Waqar
-Wasim
-Walsh
-Ambrose
-Srinath (had to slip him in there)
-Vaas

With an average of 37.69 and strike rate of 31.31, he would on average score 38 off 119 balls, this would protect the middle order from these great new ball bowlers for a substantial amount of time while the new ball loses its shine and a early morning pitch loses its moisture. Not the prettiest batsman, but an effective fighter.

I'm not saying one way or another (and I don't care about these comparison debates very much tbh), but merely batting in a time when there were better bowlers knocking about doesn't mean much to me unless you can show that the batsmen in question did well aginst those superstars. You list McGrath there for instance, but he dismissed Atherton 19 times at an average of 9.89! (If I've understood how to use this stats guru thingy correctly).

 

[Manee]

And yet, he managed the respectable average of 37 against those guns after having it dented by Mcgrath.

 

[Mister Wright]

Atherton's average against McGrath is not 9.89. It is just a culmination of the scores that Atherton was on when dismissed by McGrath divided by the amount of times that McGrath dismissed Atherton. I'm sure Atherton's 'true' average against McGrath would be slightly higher, and I'm sure Lara's would be much higher than the one credited to him. For instance, those averages do not include (particularly in Lara's case) the amount of times they scored half centuries, centuries or even more against an attack containing McGrath but were not dismissed by them.

What the average of 9.89 tells you is that McGrath had a knack of getting Atherton out early.

 

[honestbharani]

McGrath had a habit of dissecting the beating heart of his opponent's batting and totally dominating them. Look what he did to Lara.

I'll plump for Atherton.

Also, look what Lara did to him.

 

[honestbharani]

Vaughan... It is true that Athers was good technically and that he had great powers of concentration but he took grafting to some ridiculous levels (the words of Bob Willis)... I mean, it was a flat track, England won the toss and are batting and he scores 75 with 76 overs gone.... I think people tend to overrate him just because he used to score slowly. Not every batsman who scores at snail's pace has a great technique and not every such batsman can be construed to have been of "great mental strength" and "ability to draw games", although I should add that Athers has played one or two of the better match saving innings that I have seen......

 

[pasag]

And yet, he managed the respectable average of 37 against those guns after having it dented by Mcgrath.

My point is though, you could replicate your post for any player that played in that era to praise them, a statement that on its own means very little to me and is certainly not an argument to prove the worth of any batsmen unless you show me that the player in question did well against the very bowlers that you're using to show that the era was a great one for bowling. Again, I'm not arguing one way or another here, just that this sort of post that I see creep up often around here holds very little weight (for me at least).

 

[pasag]

Atherton's average against McGrath is not 9.89. It is just a culmination of the scores that Atherton was on when dismissed by McGrath divided by the amount of times that McGrath dismissed Atherton. I'm sure Atherton's 'true' average against McGrath would be slightly higher, and I'm sure Lara's would be much higher than the one credited to him. For instance, those averages do not include (particularly in Lara's case) the amount of times they scored half centuries, centuries or even more against an attack containing McGrath but were not dismissed by them.

What the average of 9.89 tells you is that McGrath had a knack of getting Atherton out early.

Is there a way to find out player vs player averages? Ie runs scored against the bowler by the batsmen divided by the amount of wickets the bowler has taken against the said batsmen?

 

[Mister Wright]

Is there a way to find out player vs player averages? Ie runs scored against the bowler by the batsmen divided by the amount of wickets the bowler has taken against the said batsmen?

Find me someone who would pay me to research that and I'll find out for you.

 

[pasag]

Find me someone who would pay me to research that and I'll find out for you.

How about a cookie?

 

[Craig]

Loved watching Vaughan bat.

 

[Richard]

For me, it's a bit of a difficult comparison. Only as openers can they be compared, once you get onto Vaughan the middle-order batsman (and I much, much prefer him in the middle to the top and always have done) it's rather a danger to compare.

I've said it many times, Atherton is vastly underrated by pretty much most people. Too many are simplistic, look at his overall career average and say "not that good". Well, frankly, that's just wrong. A better summation of Atherton's worth is an average of 41, and I've shown why many times. I couldn't care less, either, for the view that "McGrath got him out loads of times, so he couldn't hack it against the best". Apart from the fact that there were 2 contemparary bowlers better than McGrath (Donald and Ambrose, both of whom he scored plenty of runs against) for me, that argument has always been nonsense to me in any case, every bit as much as the "he performed against the best, who cares about the rest?" one.

An average of 41 at the time Atherton played, when a weak attack was an extreme rarity, is outstanding and nothing less.

Now it's also pretty common knowledge on this board that Vaughan the opener is extremely overrated IMO. Between May and November 2002 he received an almost unbelievable amount of let-offs and this massively inflated his average in that time. By and large, if you look at the true (first-chance) picture, you see a very obvious pattern: loads and loads of scores between 10 and 49, only a very occasional score over 50 (but usually a really, really big one when it was). Which, for an opener, is just about the cardinal sin. His score breakdown is as such: out of 51 dismissals (Zim and Ban excluded obviously) as an opener, 29 were between 10 and 49 (and 10 in single-figures). But there were 6 massive scores in there too, which means the average is still decent.

As a middle-order (three, four and six) batsman I've always rated Vaughan very highly, but you can't really comare him to an opener in Atherton.

 

[pasag]

For me, it's a bit of a difficult comparison. Only as openers can they be compared, once you get onto Vaughan the middle-order batsman (and I much, much prefer him in the middle to the top and always have done) it's rather a danger to compare.

I've said it many times, Atherton is vastly underrated by pretty much most people. Too many are simplistic, look at his overall career average and say "not that good". Well, frankly, that's just wrong. A better summation of Atherton's worth is an average of 41, and I've shown why many times. I couldn't care less, either, for the view that "McGrath got him out loads of times, so he couldn't hack it against the best". Apart from the fact that there were 2 contemparary bowlers better than McGrath (Donald and Ambrose, both of whom he scored plenty of runs against) for me, that argument has always been nonsense to me in any case, every bit as much as the "he performed against the best, who cares about the rest?" one.

An average of 41 at the time Atherton played, when a weak attack was an extreme rarity, is outstanding and nothing less.

Now it's also pretty common knowledge on this board that Vaughan the opener is extremely overrated IMO. Between May and November 2002 he received an almost unbelievable amount of let-offs and this massively inflated his average in that time. By and large, if you look at the true (first-chance) picture, you see a very obvious pattern: loads and loads of scores between 10 and 49, only a very occasional score over 50 (but usually a really, really big one when it was). Which, for an opener, is just about the cardinal sin. His score breakdown is as such: out of 51 dismissals (Zim and Ban excluded obviously) as an opener, 29 were between 10 and 49 (and 10 in single-figures). But there were 6 massive scores in there too, which means the average is still decent.

As a middle-order (three, four and six) batsman I've always rated Vaughan very highly, but you can't really comare him to an opener in Atherton.

Welcome back, haven't seen you in a while.

 

[Richard]

Well I assure you it never went anywhere...