1. Cricket hasn’t changed that much. At least statistically. The mean batting and bowling averages have pretty much been the same in the last 100 years.
2. There is also a psychological aspect. It is impossible to ignore Don Bradman. So obviously cricket fans would love to know more about the cricket in the first fifty years of last decade.
3. Generally speaking, most ATG teams have pre-1950 cricketers in two positions : The openers and Don Bradman.
It is literally impossible to ignore the likes of Hobbs, Sutcliffe and Hutton in an ATG team. In the future if we have an opener averaging 50+ and brilliant in all conditions, maybe we would pick them and those three would be slowly forgotten. Unfortunately since Hutton retired, there has been only one opening batsman in the same caliber as those three.
Maybe that does point to the change? That there are a lot more openers now who are more attacking in nature (Sehwag, Hayden, Warner etc). The role has somewhat shifted. There aren’t timeless tests anymore.
Apart from the 2000s when averages were ridiculous, have they really shifted that much? There were more players averaging 55+ in the earlier eras than in the 90s for example.
So what happened? Did players get worse? That doesn’t seem likely - just seems like a mix of more of a role shift and also that the sport has somewhat standardised.
It just seems strange to pick someone who has slightly better numbers (not 99 good) and having never watched them hit a ball.
Re: all conditions - that ones easy. There are far more conditions now than there were back in the 20s. So you’re asking a player to be good at about 6-8 different conditions (he probably excels in 2-3) vs back then when most teams only toured 2-3 nations at best.
Athletically and as a sport as a whole, cricket has come on - just simple in numerical terms. Earlier you had England and Australia. Then West Indies, India, Pakistan but the latter two were still largely not accessible to everyone within their countries.
Hence my point that Bradman was an absolute statistical anomaly. Everyone else wasn’t so far ahead of the very best of the last 20-30 years, and in the case of openers certainly not that far ahead of someone like Gavaskar - considering practically no one on this forum watched many of the real oldies, what basis do we have for picking them?
I’d say cricket has definitely changed more than football. For starters as mentioned above, just simply in numerical terms, cricket went from being a sport for the elite to a sport for everyone. Football was never a sport of the elite, it was always open to everyone.
Generally speaking in football, from the 50s you’d consider Pele and Di Stefano and Puskas (and maybe Lev Yashin as keeper), but I can’t think of anyone you’d really pick pre TV era or at least pre video era.