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Best match winners - batsmen and bowlers

Ikki

Hall of Fame Member
Richard just means it in a strictly logical sense, in which case he's completely right. In practice, obviously you need both batting and bowling of some sort to win a game, but runs don't make results, wickets do.

You could, if you so wished, conclude that there are no match-winners because no one player can win a match on their own.
Even in that respect he's wrong though. You don't need to bowl a team out twice to win. Say Team A declares in their 2nd innings and Team B makes a successful chase? That's precisely the batsmen winning the match.
 

NUFAN

Y no Afghanistan flag
Well that just dampened richard's theory. Then again, it doesn't matter because the bowlers always set up the win or complete the win, therefore they win matches.

Even tho WI chased down 417 against AUS.

And SA made over 450 in an ODI to beat AUS always..
No they didn't.
 

Uppercut

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Even in that respect he's wrong though. You don't need to bowl a team out twice to win. Say Team A declares in their 2nd innings and Team B makes a successful chase? That's precisely the batsmen winning the match.
Gah, well, he's broadly right. Losing after declaring is exceptionally rare. It's a bit like someone saying "you need to score goals to win football matches" and you responding with, "no! someone in the other team could score an own-goal!" It's just pedantic.
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
Hydrogen is more important to water than oxygen.
Well, no, but deduct the oxygen from a water molecule and you still have a hydrogen molecule; deduct the hydrogen and you have a useless oxygen atom which can do nothing whatsoever until it finds another oxygen atom to bond with.

Well, or you might actually have some ions which would be even less use.

(And this is abuse of basic chemistry - neither of these outcomes is actually possible, because single atoms from anything other than an inert gas and ions from anything don't stay as such for any measurable length of time. The chemistry analogy really doesn't fit at all. And probably cue Corey coming in and saying that even what I've just posted is an over-simplification.)
 
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Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
How did WI chase 417 against AUS ? the bowlers set up such a nice total ? nope!

The batsmen won that game.
There's an interesting piece in the Wisden report on that game, which states that the importance of Mervyn Dillon's second-innings 4-114 (figures which would mostly be wholly unremarkable) should not be under-emphasised. Dillon, and the WI bowlers, gave WI a (small) chance to win that game, which the batsmen then took. If Australia had piled-up a 600+ run-chase, which they would have been expected to do before caving-in and setting "only" 420, then WI would not have won that game and would in fact almost certainly have lost it.

Also of course Jermaine Lawson took 7-for in the first-innings and without that they'd not have had a prayer.
Richard I don't like how small you're trying to make the batsmen job appear in relations to winning games.
Eh? I'm doing nothing of the sort. I'm saying that batsmen cannot cause a result (which is one team winning and one losing), only bowlers can do that. The bowlers cause a result; the batsmen and bowlers decide what that result will be.
A batsman who can stay out in the middle and win games for his team is a match winner.
No batsman staying in the middle has ever caused results. Quite the opposite in fact. The more batsmen that stay in the middle for more time, the less chance of anyone winning (or losing).
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
You could, if you so wished, conclude that there are no match-winners because no one player can win a match on their own.
I prefer that too - I don't really much like the term "match-winner" that much, which is as often as not if not more so used to attempt to increase the worth of a player whose output someone wishes to overstate.

A player can merely contribute to winning the match; a spell or innings can merely influence the outcome of the match, not take complete control of it. You can come-up with a list of innings', or match spells, which had far more influence than "normal" over the destination of a match, but you really can't say that any one player is "more of a match-winner" than another in my book; the best batsmen and the best bowlers are those who give their team the best chance of winning most matches, but as pointed-out if the rest of the side is crap then however good you are your chances of influencing the result in favour of your team are vastly diminished.
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
Just can't get my head round that tbh
"That" being what precisely? I said a fair few different things in that post.

(Or was it the chemistry one? In which case I'm not surprised as there's plenty of chemical concepts that I still struggle to get my head around and I studied it at A-level!)
 

GIMH

Norwood's on Fire
Haha, no, the concept that no batsman staying out in the middle has ever caused a result.

I guess I just see it differently, which is fine
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
Mark Butcher plainly won the 4th test in the 2001 Ashes for England, didn't he?
Ind33d he did - but he was grossly assisted by the rain and the fact that Australia could realistically aim for a five-nil so therefore there was no point worrying about losing if to prioritise a draw damaged chances of victory.

Had lost time been able to be made-up, or had the series been poised at two-one rather than three-nil, there's no way England would have won that Test from the position they found themselves mid-fourth-day, not a hope.
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
Haha, no, the concept that no batsman staying out in the middle has ever caused a result.

I guess I just see it differently, which is fine
The longer batsmen stay in the middle, the less chance of a result. Almost invariably, one side has to be bowled-out twice for a result to ensue. So the longer both sides' batsmen bat for, the less likely a result.

That doesn't, obviously, mean that staying in the middle for as long as you can is a bad thing, because as pointed-out countless times "you can't score runs from the pavilion". But it does emphasise how a result will only ensue when bowlers get batsmen out (or batsmen get themselves out to bowlers).
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
And SA made over 450 in an ODI to beat AUS always..
And SA made over 450 in an ODI to beat AUS always..
Who mentioned ODIs? In ODIs batsmen win matches - there's only 50 overs and it's fairly unusual for sides to be bowled-out - all that matters is scoring more runs in 50 overs than your oppo. ODIs don't get drawn.

In Tests however you almost always have to have one side lose 20 wickets for a match to have a result.
 

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