Sir Donald Bradman

[Chrish]

Haha. That thread started from a cricinfo profile dinit? Isn't there a strong subcon influence on that site?

Look you may be right about others motivation. But I'm focusing on yours ...

Just pointing out that your claim of anyone who points finger at Bradman's record is some sort of jingoistic troll is simply laughable.

Different opinions do exist..

 

[the big bambino]

Just pointing out that your claim of anyone who points finger at Bradman's record is some sort of jingoistic troll is simply laughable.

Different opinions do exist..

To repeat, I'm focusing on your motivation. Not anyone else's. Stop trying to disguise your own reason by hiding it amongst others.

 

[Chrish]

To repeat, I'm focusing on your motivation. Not anyone else's. Stop trying to disguise your own reason by hiding it amongst others.

ROFLMAO!

Okay guess we are done for now.

 

[OverratedSanity]

To repeat, I'm focusing on your motivation. Not anyone else's. Stop trying to disguise your own reason by hiding it amongst others.

Quite honestly it's you being unreasonable and jingoistic here, not him. If you don't want to discuss Bradman at all then leave the thread be.

Oh I forgot... I'm Indian. That means I'm a blind pro-sachin troll

 

[the big bambino]

Look if it's all the same to you I won't leave the thread. I hope you don't think my defiance to your suggestion is unreasonable. I will continue to discuss all things cricket on a cricket site if you don't mind. Including some peoples sachin is best fetish. It is an enduring and contemporary cricketing phenomenon.

 

[stephen]

To believe that Bradman's 100 average was the equivalent of today's 50 average one basically has to assume that Bradman was the equivalent of a modern test batsman playing in a contest that was no better than a modern first or second grade side.

The reason that you have to make this assumption is that there are no test match cricketers who have achieved a first class average of 100 over the course of their career.

Let's look at a few batsmen who average around the 50 mark.

Hayden Tests - 50, First Class 52
Smith Tests - 56, First Class 57
Kohli Tests - 49, First Class 51
Tendulkar - Tests 54, First Class 58
Border Tests - 50, First Class 51
Sobers Tests - 57, First Class 55
Chappell G Tests - 53, First Class 52

None of these Great batsmen managed any more than a differential of 5 between their test and first class averages. So even these quality batsmen would need to have gone down to first or second grade level to average 100 consistently.

So what happened in the 30s and 40s that made batsmen and bowlers the equivalent of modern 1st or 2nd graders?

 

[Burner]

Haha, did not know that the Bradman fanboys were touchier than the Sachin fanboys. I guess that's one other thing he has over Sachin.

 

[the big bambino]

Well that and an extra 46 run average

 

[mr_mister]

To believe that Bradman's 100 average was the equivalent of today's 50 average one basically has to assume that Bradman was the equivalent of a modern test batsman playing in a contest that was no better than a modern first or second grade side.

The reason that you have to make this assumption is that there are no test match cricketers who have achieved a first class average of 100 over the course of their career.

Let's look at a few batsmen who average around the 50 mark.

Hayden Tests - 50, First Class 52
Smith Tests - 56, First Class 57
Kohli Tests - 49, First Class 51
Tendulkar - Tests 54, First Class 58
Border Tests - 50, First Class 51
Sobers Tests - 57, First Class 55
Chappell G Tests - 53, First Class 52

None of these Great batsmen managed any more than a differential of 5 between their test and first class averages. So even these quality batsmen would need to have gone down to first or second grade level to average 100 consistently.

So what happened in the 30s and 40s that made batsmen and bowlers the equivalent of modern 1st or 2nd graders?

Haha this downgrades Hammond and Headley to Kyle Hope level

 

[_00_deathscar]

To believe that Bradman's 100 average was the equivalent of today's 50 average one basically has to assume that Bradman was the equivalent of a modern test batsman playing in a contest that was no better than a modern first or second grade side.

The reason that you have to make this assumption is that there are no test match cricketers who have achieved a first class average of 100 over the course of their career.

Let's look at a few batsmen who average around the 50 mark.

Hayden Tests - 50, First Class 52
Smith Tests - 56, First Class 57
Kohli Tests - 49, First Class 51
Tendulkar - Tests 54, First Class 58
Border Tests - 50, First Class 51
Sobers Tests - 57, First Class 55
Chappell G Tests - 53, First Class 52

None of these Great batsmen managed any more than a differential of 5 between their test and first class averages. So even these quality batsmen would need to have gone down to first or second grade level to average 100 consistently.

So what happened in the 30s and 40s that made batsmen and bowlers the equivalent of modern 1st or 2nd graders?

Not saying it's true, but just devil's advocate here - I'm not entirely sure about many on the list, but Sachin barely played any first class cricket that wasn't test match cricket, and the little he did, he was rather young wasn't he? From a young age he's been pitted up against players many years his senior.

Vijay Merchant has a 70+ first class average in India. Are you telling me a prime Sachin wouldn't pummel first class opposition in India to a 70/80 run average?

 

[OverratedSanity]

Not saying it's true, but just devil's advocate here - I'm not entirely sure about many on the list, but Sachin barely played any first class cricket that wasn't test match cricket, and the little he did, he was rather young wasn't he? From a young age he's been pitted up against players many years his senior.

Vijay Merchant has a 70+ first class average in India. Are you telling me a prime Sachin wouldn't pummel first class opposition in India to a 70/80 run average?

He averaged 87 in the Ranji Trophy, so I don't see why not.

 

[morgieb]

Haha, did not know that the Bradman fanboys were touchier than the Sachin fanboys. I guess that's one other thing he has over Sachin.

It's more that to question his superority requires so much logical fallicies that it's not worth arguing.

 

[Victor Ian]

He averaged 87 in the Ranji Trophy, so I don't see why not.

Because Vijay averaged more -98.75. I think this just shows that the Ranji Trophy is a weaker first class comp to the ones Bradman played in.

The mantra when equating people with Bradman is that he has no peers - everyone else does.

 

[fredfertang]

They both played in England in the days when the counties put their strongest sides out against the tourists

Bradman toured here four times between 1930 and 1948 averaging 98.66, 84.16, 115.66 and 89.92

Merchant did so twice in 1936 and 1946, averaging 51.31 and 74.53

 

[Victor Ian]

I've been trying to find a good explanation that would explain why old footage of bowlers makes them look slow. So far all I'm finding is the opposite, in that old footage was filmed at 18fps and later played at 24 fps which made it appear faster (and jerkier). I know this is not the right answer and once came across the right answer that explained the reason old bowlers look slow. Can anyone remember the thread or shed some light on this. It would help eliminate the wrong idea that the earlier bowlers were slow trundlers that has been expressed on here recently. I was hoping to find actual footage with correction applied to see exactly how the old film produces this illusion but I have become tired of looking after spending the whole day on it. I know it's out there - I read a few pages on the way fps conversion created this illusion and was convinced by it once before.

 

[TestMatch]

Or he might be just clearing up doubts he has regarding the way game was played back then.

You are convinced about player's greatness but others may be skeptical and I don't see why one can't debate their opinions.

Thank you. I post on other cricket forums (a English, West Indies and Pakpassion message board, as well as Reddit Cricket), and the English and West Indians rarely talk about Bradman. To most of them, he's a glitch caused by that era being "amateur hour". On Reddit, I also rarely see Bradman discussed (unless the legend Rob Moody brings him up to troll Indians).

Last week though there was a great post on Pakpassion where some HD footage was posted of Bradman and some points were made "for" and "against" him. Watching the footage of him - thoroughly modern batting, with a kind of whip-like aggression that reminded me of Kanhai - and reading the arguments, made me start thinking about him seriously for the first time.

Since then I've been reading a lot about him. All these discussions might be old to you guys, but my intimate knowledge of pre-war cricket stopped at the West Indies and English, so it's all new to me.

I think what strikes me about Bradman is how rapidly innovative he was. You get the sense of a brain working at a different speed tactically than his opponents. The way he'd flip the batting order, handle wet pitches and Bodyline, even the stories of him constantly in his dressing room writing and writing or listening to his phonograph, paints a picture of someone who was different to his peers.

 

[the big bambino]

To be fair he seemed different to cricketers even in a more modern era and a lot were united in their dislike of him, Chappelli most notable.

 

[TestMatch]

To be fair he seemed different to cricketers even in a more modern era and a lot were united in their dislike of him, Chappelli most notable.

What was Chappell's issue with him?

None of these Great batsmen managed any more than a differential of 5 between their test and first class averages.

And the "Bradman provides us only with a small sample" argument goes out the window when you look at his first class average. 230+ games, 95+ average.

 

[stephen]

What was Chappell's issue with him?

And the "Bradman provides us only with a small sample" argument goes out the window when you look at his first class average. 230+ games, 95+ average.

Bradman was a bit of a conservative in the 70s and believed that the players should mostly be amateurs. The Chappell brothers were key figures in World Series Cricket. They were on opposite sides of a pay war basically.

And yep nobody can argue that Bradman wasn't special for his time. Those who argue against him basically are arguing that the game has gotten way more professional and that the gap between him and the rest wouldn't be as high in the modern era. Some even argue that Tendulkar or Lara or whoever were as good as Bradman or better. Of course there is no way of proving either side right or wrong, but it's pretty hard to see Bradman as anything other than a legend or a myth he was that far ahead of the rest.

I'd just like to point out that you can pick a chain of players from the 40s to now and look at other players whos careers overlapped and make a case that Bradman would be just as far ahead of modern batsmen as he was ahead of the batsmen of his era.

For example:

Bradman's career overlapped with Compton's career. Compton averaged 50 in tests.
Compton's career overlapped with Sobers' career. Sobers averaged 57 in tests.
Sobers' career overlapped with Gavaskar's career. Gavaskar averaged 51 in tests.
Gavaskar's career overlapped with Border's career. Border averaged 50 in tests.
Border's career overlapped with Tendulkar's career. Tendulkar averaged 54 in tests.
Tendulkar's career overlapped with Cook's career. Cook averages 48 in tests.

By virtue of these overlapped careers, we can clearly see that there is no real escalation in averages. The guys who played in Bradman's era didn't average much differently from the guys who played the era after his. The guys who played half in his era and half in the next didn't find batting significantly more or less challenging after his retirement. The guys who had careers which half overlapped those guys didn't suddenly get better or worse in the latter half of their career. And so on and so forth we go until we get to the modern era where, if anything, batsmen are said to have things easier than they did in the 90s or 80s.

In mathematics we call this a "proof by induction". Knock one domino over and the rest follow. In this case the dominos falling tells us that Bradman would likely have averaged a very similar number, if he played today as a 20-40 year old.

 

[Coronis]

Hopefully in another 70 years we'll be seeing silly arguments to denigrate legends of this era too.