Best Test Opener ?

[Richard]

So Richard, tell me - how good was Viv Richard's technique or Javed Miandad's technique ?

Technique is utterly irrelevant.
What matters is what your balance is when you make contact. If you watch closely, you'd see that Sehwag has excellent balance at the point of contact - head is still and weight distribution is stable.
Which is why you often see batsmen with dodgy techniques doing quite well ( Viv was the prime example, Gilly's technique isnt too flash either. Same with Sehwag and Lara's technique is flawed) and batsmen with perfect technique failing abysmally ( SS Das, Darren Ganga, Carl Hooper, etc.)
Sehwag has done rather well against the full strength Aussie attack and in that series, Bangalore was neutral ( wasnt a spin-paradise) and Nagpur was more seam-friendly than most wickets outside the subcontinent by recent trends...
And yes, i would rate Sehwag ahead of Anwar,Slater, Kirstien, etc.

No, technique is not utterly irrelevant. You can succeed with flaws in your technique, of course, very few have perfect techniques, but some people have flaws consistently exposed. I don't, in fact, find much wrong with Sehwag's technique, that was just the words used in that interview. I do, however, find plenty wrong with his shot-selection, and I find it near inconceivable that he'd succeed in the times of better bowling and catching. We will never know, the facts are, whether he was as good as Kirsten, Anwar, Atherton, Slater etc.

 

[Richard]

Wow this thread has moved along from my arguments so I'll quickly state why Langer, for me, isn't a contender.

I can understand why people think Langer should be in there, because he looked so good in the Ashes. Many Aussie batsmen looked uncertain and went out. Langer looked resolved, but went out. Either way he went out and never pushed on, except at The Oval.
Langer's average is also closer to 45. Since his return around 1999 he's been great, no doubt. But his rate of centuries, though impressive, is below. I mean I think he's a fantastic opener, it's just that in many areas I think he's a small cut below everyone, be it average, centery rate etc.

Langer has more Test-centuries than most Australian batsmen.
If there's a flaw in Langer's game it's certainly not not-going-on-when-set, quite the contrary, it's the fact that he has too many spells without doing much. His Ashes series, of course, was quite the opposite.

 

[Richard]

What higher catching standards?

The higher catching standards of the 1990s than the 2000s.

 

[Richard]

Lara's technique is massively flawed, he just makes up for it with eye.

Makes up for it with his shot-selection, more like.
No-one can make-up with anything with an exceptional eye - once you get to some levels, eye is equal.