What are we to make of this, do you think? Purely a coincidence or do you think it's a conditions-related thing, albeit you've standardized things? I suspect it's coincidence tbh, in that there happened to be a stack of really good/ great bowlers who came around form the mid-70s until the late 80s. Starting with Lillee and running through Imran, all the WI blokes, Hadlee etc.
Keeping that in mind, do you factor in there's a heap of good bowlers around, or do you (a generic you, not a specific you in this instance) say it's a bad batting era/ conditions favoured bowlers? And if a combination of both, where do you draw the line between them and try to standardize the stats?
So, for example, you'd hear Slats on the radio when he was doing it, and he'd be grumbling saying he played in an era where most sides had good bowlers and scoring runs was tough etc etc. And personally I think he's right - the 90s was a tough era with really good bowlers cf the 2000s. But in the 2000s you also had an era where there were a lot of flat decks, not least because of a huge drought in the southern hemisphere for more than half the decade. So to what extent is the 2000s marked down for batting and up for bowling owing to conditions? And to what extent because of the lack of great bowlers compared with the decade before?