marc71178
Eyes not spreadsheets
Thing is you end with a statement of we can safely say he'd average 40 when batting in a foreign position based on 4 years out of 10 in a different position. That to me is stretching a lot of things especially when you consider that in order to end up at 33, he must have had 6 bad years to counter the other 4 years.Yes and no. It's part hunch, part commonsense.
Engineer averaged 40 runs 40% of the time (4 years out of 10). That doesn't sound a lot until you realise that many of those runs were made after keeping wicket all day then opening the batting.
With the relative luxury of batting at No.7 it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to work out that Engineer's average may have climbed an extra 7 runs if unburdened with facing the new ball, and hence coincided with Sangakkara's keeping average of 40.
Incidently marc, the what-ifs and guesswork are half-the-fun when it comes to thinking and writing about cricketers. If everyone on Cricketweb refused to speculate, then we all be gnawing our collective right-arms in boredom. There is also a difference between wild speculation, and speculation based on a little imagination and gentle massaging of the numbers.