Fielding support
Longevity
Overall team strength
Peer rating
... Etc etc
McGrath played with Warne, Gillespie..etc
Akram played with Imran, Quadir, Waquar, Akthar.. Etc
Whats your point?
Hadlee and Murali aren't GOAT candidates?
5 wickets per innings
Marshall 6.9
Akram 7.2
mcgrath 8.4
( Akram played much longer )
Mcgrath and Marshall played around 13 years, for a fair comparison
Akram's first 13 year stats
77 tests 134 innings 334 wickets
22.34 avg, 2.58 ER, 51.9 SR
21 x 5 , 4 x 10
As you can see, Akram took more wickets per innings, more 5 wickets per innings, more 10 wickets per match.
Avg slightly higher, ER behind Mcgrath.. Better than Marshall, SR on par with Mcgrath..Fairly behind Marshall..
With a stronger team and better fielding support Akram could have been the best in every category except SR perhaps.
Had Akram played 124 tests and 243 innings in that 13 year period, Akram's wicket tally would have been 600+ ? (plus wickets from another 4 years)
The word you keep using but ignoring, is could. The amount of conjecture is ridiculous and hence the entire premise is flawed.
The reason why you cannot just use the first 13 years of his career to compare to MacGrath'w and Marshall's entire career, is because you include their decline years, while excluding his. Additionally you keep including poor fielding teams and longevity as if that isn't already baked into everyone's opinions of his career.
You keep acting as if everyone is saying he wasn't great, he was. Your insistence though is that he was undisputably the best, and he quite simply wasn't, not by some distance, and no amount of cherry picking would make it so.
Another thing to consider though is that it may be possible that McGrath's team may not have made him great, but it may have been the other way around. Also, Ambrose didn't play on a very strong team either, yet he did his best to keep up afloat, and Ambrose also isn't as good as McGrath. Hadlee didn't have much support either and his numbers were also better. So the team strength argument isn't the strongest in my opinion.
With regards to longevity and decline, Viv played well past his expiry date and most would say Sachin did as well. They are still seen as top 5 batsmen of all time along with Bradman, Sobers and Hobbs, because everyone factored in their prime and added on to it Sachin's longevity too boot. The prime is already baked in.
What you want to accomplish is revisionist history, which is different to taking in all of the various factors. Using your theories, I could just as easily argue that if Sobers didn't have to bowl almost as many overs as Wasim per match and was allowed to focus on his batting, that his average could have been 10 runs higher. But that would be bs, because there was no way of knowing what he would have done. What I can say is that it was amazing what he managed to accomplish with that bat while having such a heavy work load with the ball and we can only.imahine what he could could have done if he didn't have that added burden.
Yes Wasim had dropped catches and that would have affected his numbers, but the rest of it was part of the game and by his own design, re longevity and that adds to his legacy as well. Every player had down years to their careers or slow starts coming in, there's almost always an adjustment period.
So while a lot of posters here disagree with my take on the matter, almost all of them disagree with yours as well, and end up somewhere in that 6 to 10 range in the middle.
