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Pitting Don Bradman Against Leaders of Related Sports: An Investigation – Part 1

Victor Ian

Victor Ian

International Coach
Migara said:
But haven't used the stats of 555 straight wins of Khan for some reason.
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I was surprised to see Khan no be so dominant too, but understand the limitations. Perhaps someone very familiar with squash could tweak it better but I'm happy with Kettle's work here.
 
TheJediBrah

TheJediBrah

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Not convinced squash is popular enough, with a big enough pool of potential contenders, for a dominant individual to be as surprising or impressive.
 
BoyBrumby

BoyBrumby

Englishman
It's an interesting effort, but I think it does show perhaps that football codes don't really lend themselves to such statistical analysis of a player's worth in the same way as cricket does.

God bless Simon Hodgkinson, a man whose boot fully merited "prodigious" as its apposite adjective, but I suspect the mass consensus amongst cricket followers in viewing Sir Donald as their sport's finest practitioner would be matched by followers of union in unanimous agreement that Hodgkinson wasn't the Shakespeare of the senior oval ball code.
 
Burgey

Burgey

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BoyBrumby said:
It's an interesting effort, but I think it does show perhaps that football codes don't really lend themselves to such statistical analysis of a player's worth in the same way as cricket does.

God bless Simon Hodgkinson, a man whose boot fully merited "prodigious" as its apposite adjective, but I suspect the mass consensus amongst cricket followers in viewing Sir Donald as their sport's finest practitioner would be matched by followers of union in unanimous agreement that Hodgkinson wasn't the Shakespeare of the senior oval ball code.
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Yeah, and tbf the author acknowledges as much with football and stats regarding assists, passes etc. not being around til recently. Certainly I was yesterday years old when I discovered Jassem Al-Huwaid > Franz Beckenbauer.

Likewise Rah Rah with Hodgkinson > McCaw.
 
Shady Slim

Shady Slim

International Coach
absolute gold these articles fredders and mags and thanks for posting them - confirming lots of my priors and backing my opinions so the authors must have done something right
 
Chrish

Chrish

International Debutant
Tom Brady is a living legend. Having said that it's not possible to compare across the sports. The more competitive the sport, the harder it is to dominate IMO. Take Soccer for example. You have got 4-5 countries that play it at extremely high level. There is a reason why you won't find anomaly like 80s WI or 2000s OZ in Soccer. It's far more of a global sport and talent pool available to compete at the top is significantly higher.
 
TheJediBrah

TheJediBrah

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_00_deathscar said:
Doesn't that hold true to cricket too in like the 1920s or so?
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No, not even close. Back then cricket was mainstream in Aus and Eng, was front page news regularly with the general public participating at local levels at relatively high levels. Squash has never even come close to being as popular.

Fair point about the number of countries involved though, and as Burgey says it's still very limited now. But it is a major sport in the countries that do play it now, and did back then.
 
Starfighter

Starfighter

Cricket Web: All-Time Legend
TheJediBrah said:
No, not even close. Back then cricket was mainstream in Aus and Eng, was front page news regularly with the general public participating at local levels at relatively high levels.
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I've pointed this out before in a similar discussion, but I would be very unsurprised if the actual numbers of people playing cricket in England in the 1920s, at least in the North where things were a bit more organised, was significantly greater than it is now.
 
0

_00_deathscar

International Regular
TheJediBrah said:
No, not even close. Back then cricket was mainstream in Aus and Eng, was front page news regularly with the general public participating at local levels at relatively high levels. Squash has never even come close to being as popular.

Fair point about the number of countries involved though, and as Burgey says it's still very limited now. But it is a major sport in the countries that do play it now, and did back then.
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It goes beyond that IMO - it's also the 'type' of players it attracted early on, vs actual top level athletes (Bradman clearly was one - but there's an argument that most of his competitors weren't necessarily the creme de la creme of sport, they just happened to be there playing it) - think aristocrats/royals playing in top level/international teams just because 'they could'.

Yes, yes, Rohit Sharma vada pav jokes. But the general trend over time is that the 'average' level goes up by quite a distance.
 
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