Amazing amazing work, DoG. I am sure the mods can get with James but this absolutely bloody deserves to be on the CW main page. Your rankings to me have more nuance and more thought behind it than anything crapinfo has turned out or even Wisden for that matter. I can imagine the effort it would have taken and then to come up with write ups for about 200 cricketers (including the bowling rankings here) is just top notch stuff. We can all argue till the cows come home on who the best poster in CW is qualitatively but I think you easily qualify as the most important poster here, for these efforts alone. Take a bow, champ.
Smith - His rise has been such an impossible story, its hard not to feel happy for a man of his obstinacy. The obstinacy of working with the technique he had, figuring out how best to combine his various gifts and work around his limitations, the sheer will to stay at the crease and get the runs no matter how it looks and how long it takes... He is a special breed. He can grind it out like Dravid or take the game by the scruff like Lara or maintain a good tempo all through like a Sangakkara, and there in a nutshell, he is already a combination of 3 of the greatest batsmen of all time.
I do think he will have more a fall at the back end of his career than the other current players, but that could just be coz he has the highest peak of them and hence a longer distance to fall, but it is a discussion for another time. At the moment, he very much deserves to be the 3rd greatest batsman of all time in test cricket.
Hobbs - I have not read that much about him and knew him only very vaguely before I was a regular here but his records are just astounding. And the various accounts of him by the journalists of that time also show that he more than passed the eye test. When the only guy above you is an absolute freak in the whole world of sports, you are doing pretty well for yourself.
Bradman - There are literally no words that can do justice to this man and his dominance of this sport. Maybe there were others with better technique, maybe there were others who could making batting look stupidly easy, maybe there were others who could play absolutely breathtaking and inconceivable shots, but there is no one better at scoring runs than The Don. The fact that even with a Smith's average, you will need a 36 run averaging batsman to make up for him is astonishing. I do not like to compare across sports but I am not aware of anyone else with this level of dominance in any other sport. I could well be wrong but the very fact that even for a comparison, we need to start looking outside the sport of cricket suggests he is indeed the real God of batting.
