Tendulkar vs Keith Miller

[ma1978]

Anyone acting like how Standard of the game went so much higher in 15 Years between Miller and Viv and hasn’t changed at all between Viv and Now in 3-5 decades has rocks in their head.

I disagree. During Miller's time, 75% of test cricketers were amateurs with other major professional obligations; that number was 10% in Viv's era, and close to 0 by the end of it. It was a seismic shift in professionalism.

Hell, during Miller's era, England didn't have a professional test captain until 1952.

West Indies had to be captained by a white guy.

India and Pakistan barely existed.

The huge change happened between the 1950s and 1970s.

 

[Patience and Accuracy+Gut]

I disagree. During Miller's time, 75% of test cricketers were amateurs with other major professional obligations; that number was 10% in Viv's era, and close to 0 by the end of it. It was a seismic shift in professionalism.

Hell, during Miller's era, England didn't have a professional test captain until 1952.

West Indies had to be captained by a white guy.

India and Pakistan barely existed.

The huge change happened between the 1950s and 1970s.

Didn’t Viv consider The Amateur Lillee as the best bowler he faced? Lillee wasn’t professional either until final years. None of the Aussie were professional at all till WSC came and the Aussie team had already regressed so much in 80s despite being so called professional.

How Did The 1974-75 full Amateur Aussie team gave The WI and England team a hammering? The WI team was quite good too.

 

[shortpitched713]

Missing the forest for the trees Patience, mate.

Of Test cricket is always improving, but since the early and mid 20th century, the rate of this improvement has reached somewhat diminishing returns.

Maybe AI revolution will bring us special cybernetically enhanced human cricketers, as a matter of course, which couldn't be compared to the previous bio only ones. But, generally, there has been an optimization of Test cricket as played by humans.

 

[Bolo.]

im a big fan of Colin Miller but this seems a bit gratuitous.

In all seriousness, I don’t agree; I think value in cricketers follows a normal distribution and the very top specialists are a standard deviation or more above the simply good. As such, someone like Tendulkar (or Mcgrath or Lara or Viv) are worth more than someone like Miller who was very good but not ATG at two disciplines, it’s Imran and Sobers and Hadlee who are the unicorns because they are ATG as specialist and add value elsewhere, even those three are below Bradman though.

There isn't some seismic shift in quality that comes from being called an ATG. It is a gradient. Wherever you draw the line on ATG, the best player who fails to crack a nod is much closer to the worst player who does than he is to the GOAT.

If Miller averaged 49 (or whatever number fails your ATG sniff test), would you still stick to this assessment? Longevity aside, I'd put him clearly ahead of Sobers.

 

[ma1978]

There isn't some seismic shift in quality that comes from being called an ATG. It is a gradient. Wherever you draw the line on ATG, the best player who fails to crack a nod is much closer to the worst player who does than he is to the GOAT.

If Miller averaged 49 (or whatever number fails your ATG sniff test), would you still stick to this assessment? Longevity aside, I'd put him clearly ahead of Sobers.

I wouldn’t consider himself ahead of Sobers still but if his batting was in line with the top of his era (leaving asideHutton, but Morris or Harvey), I’d consider him a top10 cricketer.