Spark
Global Moderator
All this tells me is that cricket writers liked to write manifestly ludicrous things in the service of artistic license at times.“No matter how many runs Bradman makes, Vic Trumper’s name comes up time and again, and his great deeds are discussed. He took a hold on the hearts and minds of the people in England as no other batsman has done.” - CB Fry
For the most part, admiration for Vic Trumper was because of Vic Trumper himself rather than due to any great antipathy toward Bradman, although there were obviously a few vocal detractors.
Did you watch those games between 2012 and 2019, and in particular that series in 2014/15 where Kohli scored the largest bulk of those runs? Kohli did quite well on them but those were mostly the flattest pitches known to man. Kohli's one big series in Australia -- and it really was just one big series, where everyone was scoring runs, not least Smith -- doesn't stand out anywhere near as much as Smith's ridiculous levels of performance in India in 2017 or England in 2019 in far, far more difficult conditions for batting. Hell even the his tour of SA in 2014 right at the start of his explosion as a batting great is more impressive than anything that happened during the 2014/15 Indian tour of Australia, which was a runfest all around with few equals.From 2012 to 2019 Kohli scored 1352 runs over 13 Test matches at an average of 54.08; and all at a strike rate of 53.14
Could Steve Smith have done any better? Probably, possibly. (Joe Root and Kane Williamson certainly didn’t). But we’ll never know.
This sort of "aesthetics trumps performance" logic, taken seriously, takes you the conclusion that James Vince > Alastair Cook because the former looks better, or that Graeme Smith was an average batsman because he batted in an ugly way. No. If Smith performs better in almost every conceivable way than a direct contemporary than he is better, end of story, regardless of how he looks (and especially because there is an extraordinary amount of skill in being able to make runs in the manner that Smith does).
It diminishes the sport and Tests specifically to reduce it to this sort of Mark Nicholas-ism. A large part of the appeal is not in mere technical fidelity to the MCC coaching manual but watching players develop their own techniques that nevertheless are effective, and also gives players a pass for poor batsmanship and poor application just because they "look good" technically; Kohli is especially guilty of this, having spent most of the last two or three years lazily wafting at wide balls outside off stump and nicking off cheaply but looking great while doing so. This sort of thinking absolutely infests modern selection philosophy at all levels of cricket too, it needs to go.