Bradman, the greatest sportsperson ever?

[Spark]

Oh get off the grass. He looks like chubby hick barely able to bowl quicker than Ricky Ponting.

Still pretty good figures all the same though. Appearances can be deceptive.

The idea that bowlers of earlier eras bowled without a plan is one the more foolish modern conceits.

As for fitness look at how easily modern bowlers break down

Aside from specific occasional plans (such as, say... Bodyline) I really wonder what you need beyond "hit the top of off stump with some movement"

 

[Ruckus]

No one's saying that. Its just that its unimportant. You're deluded if you think people are just so much more talented now. That's just crap. People now are just luckier, not better and have improved because of the advances made by those before them.

Why did you make the comparison with Philander then (i.e. as though bowlers from that era might have looked innocuous but were actually as good as him)?

And I definitely have never said anything of the kind that people are more talented now.

 

[the big bambino]

Why did you make the comparison with Philander then (i.e. as though bowlers from that era might have looked innocuous but were actually as good as him)?

.

That you'd be pretty stupid to judge someone on a bit of old film safe behind your computer when those who actually face the bowlers tell you a different story.

That's all.

 

[The Sean]

Given we are dealing with a sport that has a evolved (which everyone agrees on), how someone is relative to their peers has little validity when comparing players across eras - times and circumstances change. It's analogous to me saying 'x player has dominated relative to his peers in shield cricket, therefore that means he should be in the test XI'. Sure, it might provide an indication the player should be in the test XI, but that's all it can ever be.

Na...getting tired of people pretending cricketers from that era were as good as they are today. They weren't, I'm sorry. The game has evolved and improved, and there is to reason why they should have been.

Is your opinion that the quality of someone from the past should be judged purely on how they would go if they were transported instantly through time to the present day and compared to what is happening now, without historical context or any modern training or advancements?

To put a non-sport slant on it for example, would you be comfortable judging Galileo's quality as an astronomer by the fact that - transported directly here from 1615 - he would almost certainly fail a basic university-level Astronomy 101 exam.

For the record, I'm not trying to wind you up or force an answer - it's a genuine question.

 

[dhillon28]

You know what is ironical about the highlighted? It actually fits Richards more than Bradman. There was no side better than Richard's West Indians.

However Eng beat Aus more often from the time Bradman debuted up to the war.

Coincidentally the Saffies, whom you wrongly describe as minnows, beat that same English team in 2 series.

Therefore DGB hardly played any games against minnows.

Whereas modern players play minnows far more often and derive a greater benefit from doing so than Bradman ever did.

Are you crazy? Viv batted against Imran, Wasim, Abdul Qadir, Hadleigh, Lille, Thomson, Willis, Botham, Kapil etc so whilst he may not have faced the best fast bowling unit of his time-he still came accross plenty of class bowlers (some of which are also ATGs). The fact that he still faced so many premier bowlers despite having the best of the lot in his own team is indicative of how competitive Viv's era was relative to Bradman's.

 

[Dan]

Disagree. He would have ****ing dominated - his success was built on extraordinary natural hand-eye coordination, concentration and natural skill, which would serve him just as well nowadays.

Human beings didn't suddenly naturally get better at hitting a cricket ball in 1950 or so. That's the whole point.

I agree with you completely - I have no doubt whatsoever Bradman would be as good if he were born in 1978 or 1988 as he was when born in 1908.

But in saying that, translating people from one era to another is hardly clear cut - changing laws, regulations and technology muddy the waters. The fact that Bradman had to sacrifice 5 years of his career to fight in a war muddies the waters.

But what my post is essentially trying to do is completely discredit this notion that the abolition of amateur status in 1962 marked some overnight increase in the ability of everyone to play cricket. Cricketers, like anything else, are the products of their societies and contexts. Just like analysing a 1900s silent film by modern standards is unfair, so is analysing Don Bradman by modern standards. The difference is, Bradman still holds up to those modern standards, and exceeds them, like nobody else (hence why he is the greatest).

 

[Ruckus]

Is your opinion that the quality of someone from the past should be judged purely on how they would go if they were transported instantly through time to the present day and compared to what is happening now, without historical context or any modern training or advancements?

To put a non-sport slant on it for example, would you be comfortable judging Galileo's quality as an astronomer by the fact that - transported directly here from 1615 - he would almost certainly fail a basic university-level Astronomy 101 exam.

For the record, I'm not trying to wind you up or force an answer - it's a genuine question.

No. I've made this pretty clear now, but the quality of someone from the past can only be judged by how they performed relative to their peers, and confined only to their era. You cannot easily, if at all, judge the relative quality of players between eras. Just as you can't say with any certainty whatsoever what kind of achievements Galileo would have if he were raised today.

 

[Daemon]

imo Ruckus is right in saying that the game now is of a clearly higher standard compared to back then, but like someone else mentioned, human beings can't improve so drastically at hitting a ball or bowling enough for Bradman to be not the greatest if he were born in say the 1980s. Obviously there is no way to verify that which makes this discussion mind numbingly dull and my post irrelevant.

 

[Jono]

You ****s that argue that Bradman is the greatest of all time against the same people who say he's not are the true idiots. Why do you do it to yourself? Crazy stuff. And there are threads popping up everytime when this is occurring.

Approaching Warne vs. Murali status, and has definitely surpassed the Lara vs. Tendulkar stuff from years gone by.

Edit: This doesn't take into account the Ruckus debate, which is different.

 

[NUFAN]

It's evolution, baby

Yeeessssssssssss

 

[Jono]

 

[Dan]

Given we are dealing with a sport that has a evolved (which everyone agrees on), how someone is relative to their peers has little validity when comparing players across eras - times and circumstances change. It's analogous to me saying 'x player has dominated relative to his peers in shield cricket, therefore that means he should be in the test XI'. Sure, it might provide an indication the player should be in the test XI, but that's all it can ever be.

...but this is the essence of ATG XI selection AFAIC. We can never know how Bradman would perform in a contextless game against the Martians in a sociocultural vacuum, and we can never know how Richards or Tendulkar would fare. But what they did in context, IMO, coupled with some common sense analysis, gives the indication that they should be there.

Bradman's efforts were so dominant in his era that it provides a damning indication that even Andrew Hilditch would select him for the Martian game.

 

[Tom Halsey]

If you want to compare people statistically, then what is important is not how many multitudes better than the next best/the average player Bradman was, but how many standard deviations above either second or the mean he was.

I have never checked the actual answer to this question, but I'd be surprised if Bradman wasn't statistically quite a lot more dominant than Grace. Wouldn't surprise me at all if he wasn't the most dominant sportsperson ever, though I assume he must at least be close.

This only counts for so much though, and I think to base this argument entirely on statistics would be a pretty flawed idea.

 

[Tom Halsey]

No one's saying that. Its just that its unimportant. You're deluded if you think people are just so much more talented now. That's just crap. People now are just luckier, not better and have improved because of the advances made by those before them.

Yeah, this.

 

[Dan]

You know what is ironical about the highlighted? It actually fits Richards more than Bradman. There was no side better than Richard's West Indians.

However Eng beat Aus more often from the time Bradman debuted up to the war.

Coincidentally the Saffies, whom you wrongly describe as minnows, beat that same English team in 2 series.

Therefore DGB hardly played any games against minnows.

Whereas modern players play minnows far more often and derive a greater benefit from doing so than Bradman ever did.

It also enters circular logic territory where being that good devalues the achievements of those you did it against. Larwood and Verity, as far as I'm concerned, would be ranked far higher as bowlers if it was not for Bradman being as good as he was. The bowlers weren't park standard trundlers, Bradman just made them look like they were (and they had very little other opposition to play regularly to improve their stats).

Arguably, if one uses that logic, Richards is inferior for not making all those bowlers look like plodders (I do not subscribe to this for the circular nature of the logic, and the important distinction that the great 70s and 80s bowlers had other teams to show their worth against. Although I can't say I've heard of this Hadleigh character)

 

[The Sean]

You ****s that argue that Bradman is the greatest of all time against the same people who say he's not are the true idiots. Why do you do it to yourself? Crazy stuff. And there are threads popping up everytime when this is occurring.

Approaching Warne vs. Murali status, and has definitely surpassed the Lara vs. Tendulkar stuff from years gone by.

Edit: This doesn't take into account the Ruckus debate, which is different.

Fair play. I took a break from CC for a while because every ****ing thread was turning into this same **** with the same people. I should just leave it alone.

 

[Ikki]

Yeah totally agree with this. It doesn't strike me as a coincidence that you more often get these freakish 'outlier' athletes in either fringe sports, like squash/darts etc., or sports in their relative nascency, like cricket in Bradman's era or Baseball in Ruth's. That's not to say those players weren't exceptional, but it does make it very difficult to compare with more popular sports or more modern equivalents. That's why I don't think you can say with any certainty something like " this player from a fringe sport statistically dominated their peers way more than MJ, so they must be better". Given MJ likely competed in a much more competitive sport (both by number and quality of participants), the smaller statistical margins he achieved should surely be weighted much higher.

MJ shouldn't be in this discussion at all really. The era where he won titles was actually relatively weak - the 80s were far tougher than the 90s. He doesn't have any trophy or statistic that puts him far above anyone really.

I would still lean towards Bradman in terms of a legitimate answer. We've witnessed cricketers and its pretty straightforward what the strength of players have been, through overlapping generations, and the margin of greatness is still 50-60 batting average and Bradman absolutely smashes that. He simply had a skill or ability that was not replicable by any other human that has ever played the sport.

 

[Daemon]

Yeeessssssssssss

/thread

 

[Ruckus]

MJ shouldn't be in this discussion at all really. The era where he won titles was actually relatively weak - the 80s were far tougher than the 90s. He doesn't have any trophy or statistic that puts him far above anyone really.

Well technically, it wasn't even a question of stats, and I think the fact Jordan isn't statistically that much ahead of the field is just another example of why stats don't provide a complete picture. But yeah, I actually pretty much agree with you that he shouldn't really be in a discussion about the greatest sportsmen ever (he was awesome, but probably not a candidate for such supremacy). I dunno why I used him in the example, just the first that came to mind.

 

[honestbharani]

Actually its extremely tough to compare guys who play different sports,
But I think Bradman's career is similar to Rocky Marciano, he had a great record as a boxer, did not loose a single fight, but the problem is that he played at a time when he didn't face much competition nor did he have the skills comparable to the future generation of boxers. Rocky Marciano is the best example of why number alone don't prove a players supremacy, there are a lot more factors that should be considered while rating someone. Marciano isn't rated as the greatest boxer ever in the boxing world, but yes, he is widely respected because of what he achieved in his career. And despite of his extraordinary record, he isn't rated higher than someone like Muhammad Ali who didn't have equally good numbers but faced a really tough competition.

Seeing posts like this makes me feel GIMH was spot on in his earlier post in this thread.. *Awaits the inevitable SRT reference now*