Sure, but in my view that renders the stat fundamentally meaningless. Not to say that India haven't been the consistently best team in said period, just that that particular measure is so laughably far from robust that it's easier just to ignore it and look at other things.
Personally I think a WC win and two SF runs and consistent performance outside of those (looking at you, post-2015 Australia) means that it's a perfectly supportable assertion. Just pushing back at the desire to quantify things in ways that shouldn't be quantified.
Yeah of course but "our second XI is better than your second XI" has never felt like a compelling point to me.
I remember being astounded as a kid following a rugby league season when I realised the team running second last in first grade was running first in reserve grade. If every club in the comp had the sort of rotation and trial policies ODI teams have had this decade, then this team probably would've done really well, but it it obviously wouldn't suddenly mean their full strength team was good.
Don't get me wrong, India have absolutely been the best ODI team for the past eight years or so and I don't think them losing a semi-final they would've won four times out of five suddenly means their best players are no good, but win:loss ratio isn't really a great way of showing that IMO. Not only because of what Spark said but because of the different makeup of home/away games and different percentages of games against different opposition. It's a lazy stat to show something that happens to be true, and at the end of the day people arguing a good case poorly annoys me a lot more than people arguing a bad case.
I agree with both your broad points but I don't think it ever got as bad as teams fielding their second XIs, especially in ODIs. T20Is were more like what you were describing. Teams mostly played most of their best players in ODIs with the experimentation being around rotation than a complete mash up of the side. So I guess you can conclude reasonably that in an era where teams kept rotating their best players, India still had the best side overall. I agree it does not mean much especially given we have world cups every 4 years and teams are always building towards that, but it is still something.
Also agree India have been the 90s RSA when it comes to ODIs, been the best ODI side in terms of overall results, looks a team that will win the cup, but blows it away in key KO games. Hopefully that changes real soon, feel it will too with Virat being the captain. Guy has made a career out of correcting mistakes and blemishes in his records, will be surprised if that does not happen with his LO captaincy too, and yes, I am including IPL here.
Ee saala revenge namadhe...
Dhoni is definitely not better than Bevan as an ODI batsman. Bevan accomplished as much as Dhoni statistically in a far more difficult batting era against far superior bowling attacks.
Dhoni was not any better than Gilchrist as ODI keeper. Are you forgetting he kept to quality spinners for literally his entire time as keeper? Dhoni is more unproven keeping to quicks than Gilly is keeping to spinners.
The thing is, you need to fit a keeper into an ATG side. Your choices are basically Gilchrist or Dhoni, though in recent times you might consider Buttler as an outside chance.
Playing Gilchrist gives you an aggressive opener who is going to either win you a game, set up the game or get out of the way for the middle order. Gilchrist was the best aggressive opener of his era - the era where the formula for winning was to have both an aggressive opener and a high averaging anchor (Tendulkar was the exception to the rule since he combined both).
Playing Dhoni gives you a great middle order safety net who could chase virtually any total down.
Pitching Buttler gives you the fastest scorer in history who is less reliable than Dhoni and a worse keeper than the other two.
Who you pick depends as much on what you need as anything else. An argument can be made for any of the three.
If you pick Dhoni, you can pick Jayasuriya to partner him which gives you a serious bowling option or you can pick a specialist batsman.
The argument here is that you would pick Rohit. But I don't think he'd fit the balance of the side at all. He would chew up way too many balls that the superior batsmen could use. I would argue that you're better off picking Roy who can bat more aggressively.
In fact, given the lack of bowling options amongst the best middle order batsmen, I'd argue you're best of with an all rounder - Jayasuriya or at a pinch Watson. But not Rohit.
I think it is close enough between Bevan and Dhoni that you can argue either way. I think Dhoni is easily better as a batsman alone than Bevan in ODIs but they are both ATGs and in my top 5 all time ODI batsmen, so its fine if you think otherwise. Don't want to run into a stats battle over this - but I will put it this way, I am
not opening with Rohit and Sachin. I get Lara and Sachin to open, they are amongst the greatest batsmen of all time, across formats, they can play different tempos, styles, conditions, types of bowlers etc. And they will have the right-left combo going. Both have awesome records as openers as well, to boot. And given Lara + Dhoni is miles better than Gilchrist + Bevan, I think picking Dhoni is easy for me. Also because he will be the best captain in the side and coz he is more proven against pace as a keeper than Gilly is against spinners, and he is a better keeper to spinners than anyone to have ever played the LO game. He creates chances out of nowhere. He was basically India's 6th bowler and the only reason Yuvi remained a viable 5th bowler for India across an entire WC. Also, he is the DRS King.
And, plus, I don't think Bevan ever did this:
No, I will never stop posting this.
EDIT: Holy **** I didn't realise how hard Ashwin tried to lose that game. Wtf was he thinking trying to ramp that first ball of the last over?
Ethical mind works in its own calculations, Sparky..
That's a bit unfair to both Ashwin, who at the time was still a very solid ODI bowler, and Zaheer Khan
He only played few games that WC but yeah was very good when he did play.
Flintof good by Pommie standards but meh otherwise and Klusener has a couple of awrslme years but otherwise unexceptional. Kapil a top shout imo but I always really liked him so probably biased
The 7 and 8 slots will forever be up for debate in an AT ODI XI, there are just so many different options you can go with, no one can conclusively prove one is better than the other IMO.
If you absolutely muuuuust do that kind of average era adjustment then you should do it properly and formulate it in terms of above-replacement level, i.e. how much better a certain player was than a generic "median" standard international of the same type in the same era. Not just percentage comparisons.
Yep, the analysis is flawed mathematically, statistically and cricketingly
