Hobbs is impressive on paper but I can't verify the quality.
I trust the statements about him a bit, plus I've seen footage of people like Hutton, Sutcliffe and Hammond, and I find their Cricket completely respectable, infact put on a black and white filter on Viv and Gavaskar and I'd be unable to tell a difference, again, if people who we know were good didn't question his quality, I don't think I can.
No I think the bowler gap is more IMO.
I'd disagree.
More intense cricket based on higher stakes events, more desire to win as a norm, better fitness standards, more strategy applied to counter techniques.
fitness I agree, that's why I give modern bats the benefit of the doubt over golden era ones against pace. strategising, desire to win and so forth was a thing as early as back then, infact I'd argue some of the tactics deployed by pacers like Miller, Lindwall and before would be called inhumane and unacceptable in modern culture. I don't think fitness effects batting that much, you yourself are implying Inzamam Ul Haq might be a greater batter than Virat Kohli and their fitnesses are in a different league.
Was there a substantial gap from the 1880s to 1930s or was it the same?
probably? golden age is pivotal because that's where Cricket really got international, ashes started and so forth, swong bowling was introduced properly, seamers were always there from my knowledge and with all that, I reckon there was a change.
Yeah the problem is we have video evidence from the 70s so we don't have to rely on old timers talking about eras they didn't even play in, which even I see as unreliable.
Yeah, but we see someone like say John Edrich from 1958 (his FC career start), averaging 50+ against Lillee and Thommo in mid 70s, is Edrich now better than Hammond because at near 40 he handled Lillee and Thompson very well? No, that's absurd, like I get scrutiny on 1910s or 1900s but lumping 30s into that group is quite absurd in my opinion.
We can see the games, watch enough spells from pacers to know that they were quality, see the types of shots Viv played, see Chappells technique, etc. We can see that pace standards for example dropped in the 2000s rather than just progressively getting better and batting standards worsened thanks to T20. It's all right in front of us thanks to watching it.
that's kind of a problem isn't it? if someone is deadset on arguing Gavaskar was a farmer and can't even be compared to modern bats, he can easily look at the footage and say it's low quality because X Y Z reasons, poor fielding standards or whatever, use the controversy regarding speeds of 70s and 80s pacers to say most of them were trundlers and yada yada yada, it's very easy to discredit something, and I'm afraid something like this would happen to someone like Sachin in future too.
Which is why scrutinizing Tendulkar's career in the limelight I have much more confidence in declaring him the best since Bradman.
You have a level of confidence in cricket being standardized in the 30s that I don't have for the late 19th century for the same reasons. It wasn't as professional as we know it now as mass sport wasn't not even formalised in Western society as we see it today.
What was really far less professional than modern test Cricket though, especially in the Australian-English circles? first class was there, Ashes rivalry was there, the crowds were there etc.
