Or not ... Sanga played in 9 foreign countries meeting that criteria and averaged btwn 60 to 140 in 6 of them. Coincidentally when his number of tests rises in foreign conditions his average tends to drops. Exactly the opposite to your contention. Besides I don't give Ponting a free pass based on his Zim record. Even with it included he is superior to Sanga. I just make an allowance on the very high likelihood he would have improved it immensely because of the quality of the opposition.
Without a sufficient sample size, normal variance will give you some strange numbers. Some will be very high and some low. Ponting averaged 31 in Zim and 119 in Pak. You can't read anything into either of these based on 1 match. These figures would be closer to inverse than where they currently sit given enough matches.
Re. your second sentence, you can't really draw a trend. Results are all over the place, as you would expect variance to show. He tended to do better in countries with weaker bowling attacks/ easier batting conditions, but variance exists anyway. Not much to see here.
You base one part of your conclusion on a metric (overall away averages) which you then undermine by claiming its individual components are distortions. You think that amalgamating them smooths over the distortions but its simply covers them; as the example with Ponting v India shows. Only when you look beneath the headline average do you find he had difficulty in a specific set of conditions.
Interesting point. I'm trying to smooth over statistical noise though. A distortion in average caused by being bad in a set of conditions is a distortion, but it reflects on quality, and isn't simply an expected expression of probability, as we see with low numbers of matches. Ponting in Zim shows a bad innings. Ponting in India shows a bat with a flaw. That they are given proportional weight to number of innings in overall average is appropriate.
But that is your contradiction not mine. You can rely on data when comparing 2 players of the same era facing the same opponents in the same conditions and playing roughly the same number of matches. which shows Ponting succeeding in more conditions than Sanga. A fact not revealed when you look at the headline averages which in Ponting's case is overly impacted by the proportion of away matches he had in India.
I shouldn't be taking this bait, because I'm not really interested in discussing Sanga vs Ponting anymore, but rather looking at the principle of low matches and using them to illustrate it, but anyway:
On a reasonable cutoff of 10 matches and using 40 as as a magic point, Ponting has failed in 1 country, Sanga in 0.
40 is an arbitrary number for failure. If you define it at 35, Ponting has failed in 2, Sanga 1. @30, Ponting has failed in one, Sanga in 0.
Defining success @ 60, sanga has succeeded in 7 countries, Ponting in 5.
None of this means very much, because noise, but the overall away average tells a story. Alternatively, Asia vs Sena or ROW has some merit. Individual countries doesn't. Pontings played the second most matches ever. Players from most countries will never be able to match this- there are 4 test nations who haven't played anywhere near as many games as him in their history. There are more test nations now than in his time, but ponting still played either 1 or 2 tests in 4 different countries. You can't draw anything from these low numbers, as his record in Zim indicates, and you will be seeing this more and more with modern players. It is simply non-sensensical to nitpick records of modern bats by country anymore, other than by looking at their home country.