Heef is going to
you.
Who is Heef?
I was referring to your Lara in SL 2001 comment, which struck me as entirely pointless.
I was trying to remember where another batsman had a similarly huge series in terms of runs and that was the one that came to mind straightaway.
It's not really just about that. How important the performances were and how difficult they were to achieve are two entirely different things. The argument against counting those innings the same as an innings against a better attack isn't really that they didn't matter, but that the quality of the opposition made it easier and in some cases so much easier that it wasn't a reflection at all of how well they'd be likely to play against every other team in world cricket. If Ponting and Clarke came together 70/9 chasing another 200 to win against an attack of Laxman, Dravid, Gambhir and Ishant Sharma then they'd back themselves to get it and it'd one of the most remarkable scoreboard-pressure match-winning partnerships of all time, but the quality of the attack would still lessen it regardless because it's relatively easier to score runs against relatively worse bowling, no matter how much your team needs you to score 'em.
Players play really important innings when the chips are down in domestic cricket all the time but we don't rate them up with Test knocks but the quality is lower; when you get teams like Bangladesh who are genuinely worse than some domestic teams, it becomes tricky to decide what to 'do' with the performances against them. Me, I've always been one for weighting them and make each run "count for less" if you like (standardised averages etc
) but then I've always been a big advocate of looking closely at domestic performances too so it's not really contradictory there. Giving Vettori massive credit for playing an important match-winning iunnings against against a poor attack in a Test and then shrugging your shoulders when Ramprakash does it against a quality county attack or Sinclair does it against an attack with two ex NZ Test bowlers in it etc just doesn't make much sense to me.
Here are a couple of points
If you won't value the knock Clarke and Ponting would have played against Dravid, Laxman, Gambhir and Ishant because they are bad, how the hell does Australia find themselves 70/9 against that attack? Do you get what I am trying to say? That means Ishant, Dravid, Laxman and Gambhir must have bowled well to get those 9 wickets on that day? And if they have bowled well, why won't you value Ponting and Clarke for scoring runs against bowlers who bowled well just because the reputations of said bowlers were crap? Especially when Ponting and Clarke succeeded where some of the other batsmen in the team failed? In fact, it is possible that since Australia find them 70/9, Dravid, Laxman, Gambhir and Ishant might have bowled better than the bowling attack Australia faced in
this match. That is cricket. Sometimes the guy averaging 23 scores a century and the guy averaging 50 scores a duck. Sometimes the guy averaging 38 takes 5 wickets and the guy averaging 21 takes 0.
I am criticising the assumption that just because a bowling attack has bowlers who have poor bowling averages, they are likely to bowl extremely poorly on a certain day when the match situation might say a totally different story. Siddle and Hilfenhaus do not have great bowling averages but look at how they bowled in this series.
When Clarke scored 329, in order to mock the snobbish attitude of dismissing performances because they were against an attack perceived as poor, I had said that Clarke should be accused of minnow bashing. The first response to that point was 36/3 which means people conveniently consider the performances of the bowling attack perceived as poor on the given day when it suits them, but will ignore when Bangladeshi bowlers have bowled well on a particular day because 'oh its Bangladesh'.
The example pointed by Flem274 about Vettori, yes Bangladesh is a terrible attack but New Zealand were
losing that match..which means on that particular day, that terrible attack bowled
well because Saturn was in a certain position. Things like that happen in cricket. Hence it is an unpredictable game.
Inzamam played a match winning century against Bangladesh in 2003 and most people will dismiss that "oh it was Bangladesh". Pakistan were
losing that match..which means the dire Bangladeshi bowlers managed to bowl well.
And herein lies the flaw in not considering other qualitative factors when looking at statistics. Yes Bangladesh bowlers apart from Shakib have poor records, have poor achievements and are generally poor bowlers. But if your team finds themselves in a difficult situation, then that means that attack bowled well that day.
Now I am not advocating that the innings played by Vettori or Inzamam against Bangladesh were the greatest of all time..all I am saying is that you have to consider a host of factors when assessing a performance and not just the quality of the bowling attack based on the track records of the bowlers.
