The idea of a cricketing career is that you go through ups and downs; that's what separates the good players from the bad, in that their peaks last a lot longer and a lot more frequent then their troughs. You simply can't just remove a few games because they'd been going badly for a while, that's just how cricket works.
Analysis of a cricketer's career is
all about that - you've got to get rid of odd little irrelevant matters, because some of them make bigger impacts on certain things than others, pull things away from the real picture more. McGrath until the Fifth Test in 1994/95 was nowhere near a Test-class bowler, so it's unfair to suggest the fact that some of his games in that time happened to be against SA means anything as to any later failures against SA. Likewise, it's utterly ridiculous to suggest those last 3 Tests in 2001/02 mean a thing where Donald's record against Aus is concerned, because he'd have been terrible in those games whoever they were against. He'd just lost it - his body had given-up on him.
However, this pushes Donald's average up by 4, it pushes McGrath's average up by 2. But both are equally irrelevant, as neither are relevant to the bowlers McGrath and Donald were for the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of their careers. And I don't know about you, but when I go looking at bowlers as good as they, it's the majority, not the tiny minority, that I care about.
When you're doing your 'in-depth' analysis of someone like Matthew Hayden, do you remove his run of poor form from the end of the 2004 Sri Lanka series to the end of the 2005 Ashes, or do you conveniently put that down to him being 'found out?'
Yes, indeed, batsmen can be found-out - bowlers can't, and certainly bowlers as good as Donald and McGrath can't. Doesn't mean
every bad run a batsman has is due to such a thing, of course, but Hayden was
Obviously, though, if you want to find the pattern of most of Hayden's career 2001/02-current-day, you'd remove 2004/05 and 2005. And yes, I would do such a thing.
Maybe that's because Australia, and McGrath's bowling, had more than a little to do with them apparently playing badly. A team getting thrashed is normally somewhat down to poor playing, but it's more so because they're playing against an opposition that's simply playing better than they are. Australia has bad days against substandard teams but they still come away with wins.
That's because Australia don't generally tend to go anywhere near as bad as SA went that game - and it started long, long before McGrath picked-up the ball. Seriously, I don't know whether you watched that Wanderers 2001/02 game, but it was about the worst demonstration of how not to play cricket that you could wish to see.
