Hi Guys,
I may be taking this a bit off topic, but i feel its still relevant.
Whenever the question - 'which was the toughest era to bat?' is posed - people go on and on about this fast bowler who was express quick, and that fast bowler who was an expert at cracking skulls etc..etc.
It's not just about that guys...you often ignore
1. Variety of bowling
2. Strength of Cricket as a competition
3. A unit is only as strong as its weakest element
If there are only one or two strong bowling attacks around the world, the strength of the Competition is weak and it is far easier to score big in such scenarios. Also it is far tougher to score runs when the player is exposed to varied condition, a vareity of bowling type and bowling attack. Proof for this is that, if you consider the averages of Sachin and Lara against Sri Lanka, England and Australia alone, their average is in the high 60s and early 70 range. Lastly you often speak about the great strike bowlers, but what about the rest? Because it will be far easier to eek out an average if the opponent has only one or two strong bowlers and others are pie throwers....Sometimes it is easy for a batsmen to suss out a particular type of bowling attack, however good it is, but it is a lot harder to that when the competition keeps throwing new challenges at you. We saw this very competition drive us to innovations such as reverse swing and the off spinners wrong-one, slider etc in the late 80s and early 90s.
Going purely on statistics which provides a rough estimation of all factors - I would say the 90s were a harder period to score than the 80s. The addition of South Africa and Zimbabwe to the tour program, added more variety and brought in some world class competition especially from Wessels' and Cronje's teams. Sri Lanka announced themselves as a force to be reckoned with in mid 90s, and they brought one of the most deadliest bowlers, who never actually tried to crack open a batsman's cranium. The combinations available in Spin and Pace bowling in any Cricket season in the 90s was unbelievable.
We had Spin bowlers like Kumble, Warne, Murali, Quadir and later on players like Harbhajan and Saqlain turn on the screws.
While we had fast strike bowlers like - Ambrose, Walsh, Akram, Waqar Younis, McGrath, Alan Donald, Fraser, Pollock and we still had some of the legends from the 80s playing around in early 90s likeImran Khan, McDermott, Kapil Dev, Hadlee etc.
More importantly - the second rung of bowlers (slow and fast) Mushtaq Ahmed, Raju, Chauhan, Srinath, Kallis, Klusener, Cronje, Gough, Vaas, Devon Malcom, Morisson - the support act was stronger than ever.
This is also seen statistically with the 90s being the hardest era to bat in. So quite literally the number of easy overs in international cricket was decreasing. The top 7 averaged lesser and it was just not easy to score a century.
The decade of the batsmen | Regulars | Cricinfo Magazine | Cricinfo.com
I really don't see how this is even up for debate.
So on this basis - if Lara averaged more than what Richards averaged in the 80, then Lara's ability can't be played down in anyway.
I get it, Richards played with a winners swagger, but Lara i guess was the better test batsman, even if it is marginal.
