Top Five Most Underrated Cricketers Ever.

[wpdavid]

Might be worth while having a look at Sobers bowl.....

Despite Sobers being in the twilight of his career (1973), he still looks pretty good to me. Might not be up to new-ball standard, but could easily fullfill the role of first change seamer without too many issues I reckon.

The footage also includes Boycott hitting a 6 at 1:22 - a moment to treasure, even if his team's performance was dire.

I remember the consensus at the time was that this was a pretty lively WI attack.
Of course, we had to revise that view somewhat when they returned three years later with Roberts, Holding and Daniel.

 

[The Sean]

The other observation I would make is that many player evaluations now seem to be based almost exclusively on their statistical records without any reference to the historical context in which these achievements occurred. One classic example is the relative standing of two Surrey batsmen, Peter May and Ken Barrington. They were fairly close contemporaries, born just four years apart, although May retired early. Although every cricketer who played with or against them considered May to be easily the greater batsman, many of today's fans - who did not see either man bat - have been swayed by Barrington's Test average of 58 and regard him as the superior player. It's hard to accept this, unless you think that every player and journalist of the period was totally misinformed or inept. The fact is that, valuable though Stats Guru is, official statistics do not tell the whole story about a player's ability and achievements.

I've had the May-Barrington (and May generally) discussion here at length several times before, and he is a fascinating one. Taken as a whole, May's career record is that of a very, very good Test batsman, but no more than that. And yet, as you say, the opinions of him being not only greater than Barrington but greater than any other batsman produced by England since the war is near-universal. Richie Benaud claimed that he was not just the greatest but the only great one. Some (Tom Graveney is one) go even further and claim that he is the greatest post-War England batsman full stop, meaning that they rate him even above the two legends who debuted just before hostilities commenced - Hutton and Compton.

What jars, when considering such a ranking, is that it's not a case of Barrington's numbers being slightly better than May's, it's that his career statistics are leagues better. Even that can be misleading though. As has been noted before in these parts, Barrington - without wishing to take anything away from his superb Test record - was dropped from the side early in his career when he wasn't ready, and didn't play on after his best to the detriment of his numbers, so was essentially only picked in the Test side at his peak. When runs were hard to come by and averages were often suffering in the mid-'50s he was out of the side and spared the impact. Those years, on the other hand, were May's peak and you could argue that he had the statistical misfortune to spend his prime years as a batsman making some of the most difficult runs of the 20th century.

May's reputation is no doubt helped as well by the fact that he was the classic English batsman. Tall, elegant, a schoolboy prodigy, technique to delight the purists, flair to delight to crowds and a straight drive arguably finer than any in the history of the game. He was what English batsmanship was all about. Phillip Derriman, writing about Arthur Morris, noted that old cricketers and writers tended to rate Morris above all the other great Australian openers due not so much to the scorebook but because of the sheer class and quality of his batting. I reckon many feel the same way about Peter May. Indeed, Christopher Martin-Jenkins once wrote of May scoring a century in a session for MCC in a tour match against an Australian XI with "batting that maybe half a dozen players in history could have equalled."

Barrington, on the other hand, was seen as a stonewaller, a gritty accumulator, a batsman to play for your life but not to quicken the pulse. If Barrington was in, you could pop to the shops, put the kettle on, have a quick one at the pub, whatever, and know that when you tuned back into the Test he'd still be there, and would probably be bringing up yet another bloody hundred. May might only have made 50, but by jove he would have looked classy doing it, and you'd have not wanted to miss a single ball.

 

[The Sean]

Two outstanding, Scottish-monikered Australian pacemen - Graham McKenzie and Craig McDermott might almost fit into this thread. Perhaps they're not strictly underrated, but IMO they definitely suffer a little from Paul Ince Syndrome in that they were excellent performers for their teams while having the misfortune to be preceeded and succeeded by blokes who were even better.

Big Garth McKenzie, after a few years being partnered by Davidson, carried the Australian pace attack on his shoulders for most of the 1960s, and as happened to Kapil Dev two decades later, this burden saw his average and strike rate suffer relative to his quality. This didn't diminish his performances though, and he was rightly considered a top class, big-hearted champion. Unfortunately, he not only came straight after the era of such legends as Lindwall, Miller and Davidson but was then followed by one DK Lillee and, a couple of years later, by Thommo as well. Suddenly McKenzie (and other fine Australian pacemen of the '60s such as Connolly and Hawke) looked rather tame by comparison.

Craig McDermott shared a similar fate. While he can't have been said to carry quite the same burden that Big Garth did, due to the quality of men like Lawson, Alderman, Reid and especially Merv Hughes alongside him over the course of his career, he was Australia's outstanding paceman from the mid-80s to the mid-90s and a genuinely world class performer at his peak. Like McKenzie, however, his career was sandwiched between the careers of blokes who were even greater, in this case Lillee immediately before and then McGrath immediately after and so once again you could argue for McDermott to be a little overlooked and underappreciated.

 

[kyear2]

I've had the May-Barrington (and May generally) discussion here at length several times before, and he is a fascinating one. Taken as a whole, May's career record is that of a very, very good Test batsman, but no more than that. And yet, as you say, the opinions of him being not only greater than Barrington but greater than any other batsman produced by England since the war is near-universal. Richie Benaud claimed that he was not just the greatest but the only great one. Some (Tom Graveney is one) go even further and claim that he is the greatest post-War England batsman full stop, meaning that they rate him even above the two legends who debuted just before hostilities commenced - Hutton and Compton.

What jars, when considering such a ranking, is that it's not a case of Barrington's numbers being slightly better than May's, it's that his career statistics are leagues better. Even that can be misleading though. As has been noted before in these parts, Barrington - without wishing to take anything away from his superb Test record - was dropped from the side early in his career when he wasn't ready, and didn't play on after his best to the detriment of his numbers, so was essentially only picked in the Test side at his peak. When runs were hard to come by and averages were often suffering in the mid-'50s he was out of the side and spared the impact. Those years, on the other hand, were May's peak and you could argue that he had the statistical misfortune to spend his prime years as a batsman making some of the most difficult runs of the 20th century.

May's reputation is no doubt helped as well by the fact that he was the classic English batsman. Tall, elegant, a schoolboy prodigy, technique to delight the purists, flair to delight to crowds and a straight drive arguably finer than any in the history of the game. He was what English batsmanship was all about. Phillip Derriman, writing about Arthur Morris, noted that old cricketers and writers tended to rate Morris above all the other great Australian openers due not so much to the scorebook but because of the sheer class and quality of his batting. I reckon many feel the same way about Peter May. Indeed, Christopher Martin-Jenkins once wrote of May scoring a century in a session for MCC in a tour match against an Australian XI with "batting that maybe half a dozen players in history could have equalled."

Barrington, on the other hand, was seen as a stonewaller, a gritty accumulator, a batsman to play for your life but not to quicken the pulse. If Barrington was in, you could pop to the shops, put the kettle on, have a quick one at the pub, whatever, and know that when you tuned back into the Test he'd still be there, and would probably be bringing up yet another bloody hundred. May might only have made 50, but by jove he would have looked classy doing it, and you'd have not wanted to miss a single ball.

Brilliant post

 

[fredfertang]

Another factor is that Peter May's great innings generally won Test matches, whereas Kenny Barrington's more often saved them

 

[BoyBrumby]

Is there maybe the faintest whiff of class snobbery about their ratings by some observers too? May very much the artistic public school prodigy; Kenny the grafting working class artisan.

 

[fredfertang]

Both Reading born

 

[viriya]

Barrington, on the other hand, was seen as a stonewaller, a gritty accumulator, a batsman to play for your life but not to quicken the pulse. If Barrington was in, you could pop to the shops, put the kettle on, have a quick one at the pub, whatever, and know that when you tuned back into the Test he'd still be there, and would probably be bringing up yet another bloody hundred. May might only have made 50, but by jove he would have looked classy doing it, and you'd have not wanted to miss a single ball.

Great post. A small point about this. Although we have no balls faced data for these matches, it's possible to get decent estimates based on the minutes played and the overall # of overs bowled + total minutes. Those estimates show that Barrington's career SR was ~42 (basically Dravid-esque), but surprisingly May comes up at 40. It's obviously an estimate and could be wrong, but based on Bradman coming up with a SR of 61 (there's a book that goes through his innings and estimates it at ~65), I don't think the estimates are far off.

Maybe May just looked better and classier when batting, but didn't actually score runs faster than Barrington? It could be just the impression. I would think someone like Barrington would be appreciated more in this day and age.

 

[fredfertang]

Kenny wasn't always slow and in this game scored what by 1960s standards was a blistering ton

He has the reputation he has because of needless stonewalling, like here and backs to the wall innings like this

 

[watson]

Here is Bob Simpson's opinion on Barrington

CRICKET CORNER

An underrated batsman

ONE of the admirable traits of cricket supporters in India is their love of the game and all who play it.

Obviously they hero-worship their own, but they also appreciate the overseas stars. In addition, they love and respect the players of the past.

Even today I am immediately recognised and greeted with almost embarrassing affection but received by me with great appreciation.

The late Ken Barrington was a great favourite and they responded to his wonderful ability, sense of humour, friendliness and his ability to interact with them even in the tightest situation.

Ken Barrington is probably the most successful England batsman since the War and in many ways the most underrated.

I am biased, because I became a close friend of Ken and because I rate so highly, quality, guts, attitude and all the things which Barrington and so many of the genuine cricketers of the world stand for.

Look at his record against Australia, in particular, and tell me why he never achieved the lasting fame he obviously deserved.

Wally Grout, the great Australian wicket-keeper once remarked, "Whenever I saw Ken coming to the wicket I thought a Union Jack was trailing behind him."

On many occasions Ken carried the weight of England's chances on his shoulders. Yet, he was good enough to finish with a Test average of 58.67.

In England he played 13 Test matches and scored 1065 runs at an average of 59.16. In Australia he played 10 Tests and made 1046 at 69.73.

The players of a generation pitted against him admired and respected a real competitor, a true Englishman who fought for his country as hard as they fought for theirs and then smiled his broken smile over a beer afterwards.

It always seemed to me he never received the recognition he deserved.

Part of that was probably because of his adopted style of batting, which was admittedly very unglamorous, and his perceived slowness at the crease.

He was even dropped by England for batting too slow after making 137 against New Zealand, perhaps because England were expected to wallop New Zealand in the 1960s and Ken's seven and a half hours for 137 was too much to take.

Couldn't they do with that sort of stickability now! And simply rattling off the bare statistics of a long innings is deceptive, especially across the generations.

When I made 311 at Manchester in 1964 to secure the Ashes it was considered ultra slow. However, it is usual for batsmen who make 200 these days to take longer getting there than I did on my way to a triple century.

Times and expectations change. Batsmen nowadays don't receive as many deliveries in an hour as we did, but history does show that so called attacking players were not as quick scoring as their image suggests. A pleasing style often gives a false impression of speed - and poor Ken certainly couldn't lay claim to that.

Ironically enough, he was a thrasher when he began with Surrey in the English county championship, a batsman who went after everything he could reach.

While it worked he was praised, but when the same flashing stroke got him out he was accused of irresponsibility and inconsistency.

So he changed his approach and became a really tough customer to remove.

He opened his stance so that sometimes his left shoulder pointed in the direction of mid-wicket.

Consequently, he always looked as though he would be easy meat for an inswinger - but he never was.

Even Alan Davidson, the greatest left-arm swing bowler of them all, found him hard to dislodge.

Ken's wide-open stance and method of playing back and across should have left him as a lay-down misery for a bowler of Davo's class - but Ken's record says otherwise.

Sometimes he would show glimpses of his old attacking self. Then he could be quite devastating, a great hooker in the safe short arm jab mould and a wonderful square cutter of the ball.

Such an open stance meant he needed the ball really well up rather than just slightly overpitched, but he was still able to smash it through the offside.

Being a leg-spinner himself - and always ready to talk about the art - he was a very competent player of the leg spin, whereas most English batsmen have no ideas.

He may well have been the first English leg-spinner to learn how to bowl a flipper after picking it up from Richie Benaud on a Ron Roberts tour to South Africa and Rhodesia in 1959.

We Australians virtually adopted Ken on that tour. I think he liked our Egalitarian approach to the game and he repaid us by scoring more Test runs against us than any other batsmen of the time.

His image as a dour man at the crease was nothing like the Barrington the players knew, off it - always good for a laugh, a great practical joker and impersonator and a wonderful mangler of the language.

According to Ken target shooters used 'high philosophy bullets'. He woke one morning having 'slept like a lark'. And he described the players at a buffet in Pakistan as 'a swarm of lotuses'. He loved brass bands and would take up the baton at the drop of a baton.

And he had high ideals about the game he loved, one of the few players prepared to come out publicly against the highly controversial bowling action of Charlie Griffith when the topic was political dynamite in the mid-1960s.

That issue took a lot out of Ken emotionally, but he felt an important principle was at stake.

Ken had a mild heart attack during the double-wicket tournament in Australia in 1968, after which he announced his retirement from first class cricket.

However, he stayed involved in top class cricket as Manager of England tours.

He was Assistant Manager in Barbados in 1981 when he suffered a second heart attack and died in the arms of his wife Anne.

It says a lot for the respect in which he was held that the ultra-competitive fleet street contingent on tour agreed to delay the news of his death until it had been broken to his son, Guy, at boarding school.

Kenny Barrington had a technique which may not have suited every batsman but certainly worked for him. He had courage, enormous tenacity and integrity.

He loved to chat between overs on the field, but once we discovered that we made sure he had nobody to talk to.

I loved the bloke but gave instructions, "Don't let's make Kenny feel too much at home."

Not that it seemed to affect him. Kenny, wrapped in his Union Jack, knew just what we were doing.

http://www.sportstaronnet.com/tss2524/25240680.htm

 

[Red Devil]

1. Subramaniam Badrinath - He is not a flashy batsmen but does the job, He got called upto National squad on some occasions but didnt get many chances in playing Xl

2. Charl Langeveldt - One of the best death overs specialist, because of the bowling talent South Africa has, he was not talked highly.

3. Nuwan Kulasekara - People always talk about Malinga, but this guy has a good inswing and very good at death overs.

4. Samuel Badree - I haven't seen anybody consistently bowling in the first few overs of a T20 overs without getting hammered.

5. Brad Hodge - He made loads of runs in the first class and list-A because He didnt make an impression in International level people never talk about him highly.

 

[Red]

5. Brad Hodge - He made loads of runs in the first class and list-A because He didnt make an impression in International level people never talk about him highly.

I'd say he made an impression. Test batting avg of 55 and a high score of 200!

 

[Red Devil]

I'd say he made an impression. Test batting avg of 55 and a high score of 200!

I think for a guy who made more than 17000 runs in First class, just playing just 6 test matches is not an impression

 

[Goughy]

I'm pretty sure that there are computer programmes which do that kind of thing. However, judging by where the keeper and slips are standing, and by the type of dismissals, I think that low 130s is a safe bet.

All three of Sober's dismissals though were caused by swing so pace is less of an issue anyway. It was obvious to me that the English batsman were having real trouble with his late inswing - something that was expected of left armers of that era. Hayes did get caught at third slip but only because he played down the wrong line to an unusually straight ball that took off.

No comment on the quality of the bowling but 115kph would be far closer than 130. Sobers could bowl but we dont need to exaggerate the pace.

 

[the big bambino]

Well if James Hopes is 127-132k then so is that.

 

[watson]

No comment on the quality of the bowling but 115kph would be far closer than 130. Sobers could bowl but we dont need to exaggerate the pace.

You're kidding right?

 

[Goughy]

You're kidding right?

No, of course not. Plenty of seamers have been successful bowling at or around 70mph. It is only since the speed of every ball is flashed up that we have lost the real Medium-Fast bowlers. You are out of your mind if you think Sobers is bowling in the 130s in the clip you posted - everything from the length of time the ball takes to arrive, the position of slips and keeper, the trajectory of the ball from hand show it to be way below 130. Only possible explanation is that you are confusing Bernard Julien and even then I am not convince Julien is bowling mid 130s in that clip.

 

[the big bambino]

Well if dan Christian bowls 130 then so was that

 

[andmark]

Sydney Barnes- people barely know him
Paul Collingwood- solid player and one of the best fielders ever. 20-20 World Cup winning captain
Javagal Srinath- only found out about him yesterday and his bowling was great. Never mentioned as a great Indian bowler
Stuart MacGill- Unfortunate Warne came at pretty much the same time
Jacques Kallis- Should be better appreciated as a great all rounder. Currently not fully acknowledged

 

[OverratedSanity]

Sydney Barnes- people barely know him

You're joking right?