Do you know that!

[C_C]

The fact that Botham scored a ton and took five wickets in the same match five times further underscores my assessment that Botham was nowhere CLOSE to Imran as an allrounder and inferior to Kapil.
Greatness is all about consistency. Thats what seperates the great ones from the good ones.
Botham taking five fers and scoring tons in the same test while having a far inferior record to Imran Khan means only one thing- that he was a no show for far more % of his tests than Imran was.
Imran, Kapil,Sobers, etc. ALL succeeded against the BEST teams of their era. Botham flopped out.
Ofcourse, almost everybody got humiliated by the west indies bowling unit but the whole point is, Botham was humiliated far worse than most.

As per having a dozen and half batsmen who were better than Botham from mid 70s till early 90s, here goes:

AUS: Alan Border, Steve Waugh, Mark Waugh,David Boone, Greg Chappell,Doug Walters,Ian Chappell, Dean Jones

ENG: Boycott, Gooch, Gower

IND: Gavaskar, Vishwanath, Vengsarkar, Azharuddin,Mohinder Amarnath

NZ: Marin Crowe, Glenn Turner

PAK: Majid Khan, Javed Miandad, Zaheer Abbass, Saleem Malik, Shoaib Mohammed

WI: Greenidge, Haynes, Lloyd, Kallicharan, Rowe, Richards, Richardson,Fredericks

Sri Lanka: Aravinda deSilva.

That adds up to 32 names in total from Botham's era alone.

As per Botham being a better allrounder during his peak, show me even a DOZEN matches where Botham averaged 50+ with the bat and sub 20 with the ball like Imran Khan did for over 50 matches.
THAT is true allrounder consistency and NO ALLROUNDER IN HISTORY OF CRICKET has achieved that kind of batting and bowling pinnacle at the same time.

As per Vinnoo Mankad/Keith Miller and the namby pamby issue, i've long stated that there were certain exceptions to the rule- them being Miller,Lindwall, Mankad,Gupte, Bradman,Bedser and a few others.
Most of them were far far superior to their contemporaries with enough of a cushion to be successful in this era- though not the same level of success. In Mankad's case, his career was filled with turbulence as far as batting goes.

And as for Richard screaming 'rubbish', well check the peaks of all players. If players started around their peaks(like Botham did) and retired right after their peak was over, batsmen like Sobers,Gavaskar,Lara, Richards, Steve Waugh, etc. would all be sporting 65-70 averages as their peak years were and bowlers like Imran,Marshall,Warne,Murali,Holding,Lillee, McGrath,etc. would all be sporting under 20 bowling averages.
That is what their peak performance were and that is what the peak performances of many players were- batting average of usually 60-70, bowling ave in the mid-high teens.

As per which segment to consider for a cricketer, if the performance is good(like Gooch or Lillee), i dont discard either. if the performances are bad, i don't mind discarding the first couple of years and the last couple of years from their careers, in the name of fairplay- some were blooded simply too soon and took time to adjust and some overstayed their welcome and their minds didnt know when their bodies quit.But when your crappy performance lasts for almost half of your career spanning around 10 years, it HAS to count against you. by discarding the last few years or the first few years of a player's career(provided they were ****ty during that phase), one is determining how good they were when they were fully developed as a player- that includes their highs and lows. Merely truncating one's career after the first five-six years is going by one's absolute peak and is unfair on the other players, as the timeframe examined for those players span their good times and their bad times.

One test for how good you are is how you do against the best of the best. If you fail againts them worse than the 'greats', you are not a great. If your success against them is as good as the 'greats', you are welcome to join the ranks in my book. Which is precisely why Jacques Kallis isn't half the batsman lara or Tendulkar are, which is why Miandad is not as good as Border was and which is why Botham is not as good an allrounder, bowler or batsman as Imran,Kapil and Hadlee were.

As far as i am concerned, its consistency that seperates the cream from the milk.
Imran was more consistent than Botham, he had a FAR higher allrounder's peak, far higher bowling peak and far higher batting peak.
The only thing Botham did at his best that was better than Imran at his best was fielding.
Thats it.
Rest all Imran annihilates Botham.


And as far as Imran and Atherton goes, i didn't think i would see the day when an englishman doesnt understand english but lemme try again- i said that Atherton pre back injury was excellent. Post back injury, he was poor. That is a fact. And i merely said that Atherton post back injury was a nothing batsman that many many can outperform-even Imran Khan.

Oh as per Richard's usual 'if everything fails, accuse him of racism' diatribe, i would like to challenge that lunatic to show a single racist comment i've ever made and perhaps he is guilty of the same thing he accuses me of - overhyping rather ordinary english players despite factual realities comprehensively proving himself wrong. Perhaps Richard should try visitng ICF or caribbeancricket.com where i've argued for a long time that Greg Chappell deserves mention in the same bracket as Lara-Tendulkar( even though IMO he is inferior to tendulkar, he still is in the same category), Kumble is not as good a bowler as Warne is, Prasanna wasn't as good a spinner as Gibbs or Laker were,etc etc. So much for racism.
Not to mention, it is kind of ironic and amusing for a person originally from India to be accused of favouritism and racism when arguing the cause of a Pakistani icon.
Its almost akin to accusing an israelite of favouritism and racism when arguing the cause of a palestinian.

As per Marc's little tongue-in-cheek comment, i would like to challenge anyone to produce statistics that show Botham to be superior to Imran as a batsman, bowler and allrounder both at their peaks and overall career phase.

 

[Top_Cat]

As per Marc's little tongue-in-cheek comment, i would like to challenge anyone to produce statistics that show Botham to be superior to Imran as a batsman, bowler and allrounder both at their peaks and overall career phase.

That's just so easy as to be ridiculous;

No more needs to be said. Give up now. All of you.

 

[SJS]

That's just so easy as to be ridiculous;

No more needs to be said. Give up now. All of you.

Agreed Boss


PS : Just a small aside
Here is a quiz ?
Please resolve these two propositions simultaneously without disproving either.
a) Greatness is measured by consistency
b) McCabe's batting was great during the bodyline series.

Here is the data for you to proceed on

McCabe's batting stats for the body line series.


187* &
32
32 &
0
8 &
7
20 &
22
73 &
4


385 runs in 9 completed innings at 42.8 each
260 of these in 2 innings(one of them unbeaten)
In between these two, 121 runs in 7 innings at 17.3 each.
4 of these innings under ten.
Another 4 between 20 and 32.

Well, well, well....get to work guys.

 

[SJS]

Why do some people get away with tripe and others cant get away when they talk "sense" ??

Simple. You can get away with TRIPE if it makes sense to others
AND
you cant get away with ANYTHING if it makes sense only to you

 

[FaaipDeOiad]

The fact that Botham scored a ton and took five wickets in the same match five times further underscores my assessment that Botham was nowhere CLOSE to Imran as an allrounder and inferior to Kapil.

Of course.

 

[Top_Cat]

SJS: My comment was tongue-in-cheek. Although not the biggest fan of this current (mass)debate, I wasn't trying to tell you to stop or anything. My comment "No more needs to be said. Give up now. All of you." was only because no-one and I mean NO-ONE can beat the Chewbacca Defence.

(If you're not a South Park watcher, then you won't know what I'm talking about).

 

[C_C]

Of course.

Yup.
Greatness is performing day in and day out at a high level. The mere fact that botham's career record is very similar to Kapil's and inferior to Imrans along with the fact that he had significantly more instances of 5-fers and a ton in the same match underscores my point about Botham being considerably more inconsistent than either two.

 

[SJS]

SJS: My comment was tongue-in-cheek. Although not the biggest fan of this current (mass)debate, I wasn't trying to tell you to stop or anything. My comment "No more needs to be said. Give up now. All of you." was only because no-one and I mean NO-ONE can beat the Chewbacca Defence.

(If you're not a South Park watcher, then you won't know what I'm talking about).

Oh yes TC. I realised that.

I wasnt one bit thinking that you were telling me something.

My post was aimed in a different direction all together. I am sure it hit home too.

Sorry for not being clearer.

Regards

 

[Top_Cat]

Oh yes TC. I realised that.

I wasnt one bit thinking that you were telling me something.

My post was aimed in a different direction all together. I am sure it hit home too.

Sorry for not being clearer.

Regards

Meh, people are paranoid about censorship around here and I didn't want to appear like I was trying to do that to you. Well, looks like I'm wearing the paranoid jersey now, doesn't it?

C_C: I think I might know where the greater appeal of Both here in Aus an in Eng stems from; first his success in Ashes battles but also that Both was a talented athlete but had a lot of, errrr, 'backside' about him. He wasn't very athletic looking, his awful deliveries got him as many wickets as his snorters and he was basically a slogger with a technique but he was still pretty successful. People saw this chubby, flukey behemoth who destroyed the convicts and thought "Yes he's successful but he's ONE OF US!". The 'common-man appeal' for want of better terms. Other than 'Beefy', his second most popular nickname was Golden ********.

With Imran, well, you couldn't be more further removed; a tall, thin, beautifully muscled Adonis who hit the ball miles with a very correct technique and could bowl like the wind with a wonderfully athletic bowling action. Aside from being ridiculously naturally gifted, Imran never really got to show off his best in Australia so he remains a somewhat unknown quantity.

 

[FaaipDeOiad]

Yup.
Greatness is performing day in and day out at a high level. The mere fact that botham's career record is very similar to Kapil's and inferior to Imrans along with the fact that he had significantly more instances of 5-fers and a ton in the same match underscores my point about Botham being considerably more inconsistent than either two.

Yes, he was more inconstent, everybody acknowledges that. He was also significantly better, when he played well, and he was a match-winner with both bat and ball, which Imran was not as he was never a match-winner with the bat.

 

[C_C]

Very poignant response, T_C...as usual, a top post.

Faaip- i consider you considerably more nuanced in cricket to be toting the 'matchwinner' ideology. Simply speaking, there is no such thing as a matchwinner, unless you get out there and take 10 wickets along with scoring a ton- Both Botham and Imran have done this and Kapil came very close- i think his 'best match performance' is 10 wickets + 80 runs or 100 runs + 8 wickets(whichever way you wanna look at it).
You win a match all by yourself once in a blue moon and that too only if you pitch in an allround performance par extraordinaire.
For nomatter how well you bat, the bowling has to be competent enough to win and vice versa.
As such, the best you can do is consistently contribute towards your team's cause and that is what Imran and Kapil did considerably better than Beefy.

Sure, scoring a ton and taking a 10-fer captures the imagination but in reality, you've served your team better if for instance, you spread out that 10-fer and ton over two matches instead of clumping them in just one.

The very fact that Imran spent most of his career averaging 50+ with the bat and Botham at his best spent part of his career shy of 40 average with the bat underscores my idea of consistent performance by Imran and thus his claim to greatness.

There are several players who've played a gem of an innings or bowled brilliantly in a given match- Narendra Hirwani, Patrick Patterson,Lawrence Rowe, VVS Laxman,Azhar Mahmood, Devon Malcolm,Graham McKenzie, etc etc.

They've played innings that are rated higher than several 'alltime great' batsmen's best innings- Tendulkar, Dravid, Ponting, Viv Richards, Gavaskar, Kumble, Warne, Murali, Marshall,McGrath, Lillee,Holding,Imran,etc etc.

Yet they are nowhere CLOSE to being as good as the players from the latter list.
Simply put, how good you are as a player is decieded by how good you've been throughout your career- your peaks balanced out by your nadirs to give a balanced view. A few instances of blazing brilliance is irrelevant- for it is much better for the team to have a consistent player with lower highs but higher lows as opposed to a player who indulges in a few instances of blazing brilliance and vast portions of utter mediocrity.

 

[Top_Cat]

Possibly important point; for Imran's last 50 Tests he just simply got better which contrasts quite starkly with Both. Imran averaged 50+ (as opposed to 37 overall) with the bat and 20 (as opposed to 22 overall) with the ball in his last 50 Tests (88 overall).

Just want to point out that I'm a Both fan. I admire Imran's performances and him as a player in general but I really liked Both's fire.

 

[Top_Cat]

C_C: I think what FaaipDeOiad is trying to say is that in Both, England had a player who might be quiet and even quite ordinary for several matches in a row but then he'd play an innings which would blow a match apart and sometimes, even if he did nothing for the rest of the series, would mentally affect the opposition so much, they'd lose the series as Australia did in '81. With just a couple of good performances, Botham probably most heavily influenced what should have been a 3-0 win to Australia to turn it into a 3-1 win for England. Imran probabaly 'contributed' to more of Pakistan's positive performances but in Both, you had a bloke who could play, say, one innings a series which so damages the oppositions' psyche, they forget about the fact that Both has a quiet series for the rest and loses it. Gilchrist does similar things.

So I think what we have here is a 'what people value most' contest; C_C values consistently 'very good-to-brilliant' performances (such as in Imran's case) vs others who value Both's 'very ordinary-to-freakish' performances. It's similar to the difference between liking Dravid's consistency or Lara's 'occasionally frequent' touches of genius. Or Gilchrist's occasional brilliance against Michael Bevan's brilliant consistency. It just depends on what one values in a cricketer I guess.

As far as the subjects at hand, Imran seems to tip Both in the 'natural talent' stakes but gee, even if short of physical ability, sheer confidence in himself would count a lot for Both when picking a World XI. I like them both (pardon the pun) for many different reasons and as far as who's the 'best', I just can't really bring myself to say.

Owwwww, that fence post sure is sharp.............

 

[FaaipDeOiad]

Being a match-winner is certainly not everything in determining the worth of a player, but it isn't nothing either. As I'm sure you realise, the circumstances in which runs or wickets are picked up is entirely relevant to determining their worth. The reason Lara is such an astonishingly brilliant player can't be captured in his average of 54 or whatever.

Think of it this way. I know that you personally do not rate Hayden as a great player, despite his average of 55 or so, because you consider that he has made primarily "easy" runs, while someone like say Lara has made "hard" runs. I don't entirely agree, but I certainly do think Lara is a MUCH better player than Hayden, despite having a lower average, because he has played far more innings of astonishing brilliance against high quality opposition of all kinds and in all conditions. This is, as far as I'm concerned, the exact same issue as the Imran/Botham one. Imran at his peak scored plenty of runs, as Hayden did, and overall has a higher average than Botham. However, Imran, for the most part, made the "easy runs", and played less important innings. He had 6 centuries to Botham's 14, and 5 of his centuries came in draws, half of them against India (who certainly did not have a good attack at that time with people like Ravi Shastri playing as front-line spinners), and several of them on ridiculously flat wickets where Pakistan belted 600 and 700+ scores. Botham scored many of his hundreds in the MOST difficult situations imaginable.

His performance at Headingly in 1981 is not as simply as having scored a century and taken 7 wickets, he took 6 wickets to single-handedly keep England in touch in dismissing Australia for 401, top scored with more than double the next highest score in the first innings, then came in with England STILL 122 runs behind with 5 wickets in hand after following on, and played one of the most brilliant and memorable hundreds ever seen to give England a bit enough lead for Bob Willis to destroy Australia the second time around. This was not a one-test-wonder situation which he never repeated. In fact, in the very next test match with the series level at 1-1, Australia was chasing just 151 in the fourth innings. When Border fell for 40, the score was 5-105 with the perfectly competent Rod Marsh coming to the crease, when Botham stood up and took an incredible 5/11 off 14 overs to knock the Australians over for 121 and winning England the test. Then there is his effort a year earlier, where he came in having taken 6 in the first innings on a difficult wicket with England 4 down and 200 runs behind, and smashed a century and followed it up with 7 more wickets. These are the sort of performances that build a reputation, and it has nothing to do with "hype" or anglo-Australian bias, but to do with the fact that these are incredible performances, and the sort of thing Imran never matched with the bat, just as Hayden has never matched Lara with the bat despite having an equal or superior average.

 

[vic_orthdox]

The Romanticist vs The Scientist.

 

[Sanz]

Lara is a MUCH better player than Hayden, despite having a lower average.

Err. Lara does have a better average than Hayden.

 

[honestbharani]

Interesting to note, though, that amongst most commentators, they generally put Hadlee as the best of the four allrounders as a bowler and Imran as the best of the four as batters.. Kapil and Botham were both volleying between being sensation and being rather poor, at times.... Sure, Botham's peaks may have been higher than Imran's but overall, Imran wins out.... But then again, there is this argument about all the easy runs made by Imran. I have never seen either of them in their prime, so I guess I will just stay out of this. Juz wanted to point out what most cricket guys in India think about that quartet of all rounders.

 

[FaaipDeOiad]

Err. Lara does have a better average than Hayden.

Ahh. Well until fairly recently he didn't. Use Hayden and Steve Waugh if you prefer.

 

[marc71178]

Other than 'Beefy', his second most popular nickname was Golden ********.

He was also known as tinar*e for a while after one tour when one of the locals chased Mr "Iron Bottom" for an autograph!

 

[Swervy]

The very fact that Imran spent most of his career averaging 50+ with the bat and Botham at his best spent part of his career shy of 40 average with the bat underscores my idea of consistent performance by Imran and thus his claim to greatness.

.

Gower averaged less than Imran in the 80's with the bat..so did Haynes,Boon,Boycott, Steve Waugh,and Martin Crowe averaged about 0.1 more than Imran....but only a fool would compare Imran with the bat with Gower or Crowe....so much for averages

But as we are using averages here:
Imrans batting averages were actually lower than Bothams finishing average for the first 75 of his 88 tests...thanks to a final spurt when Imran nigh on stopped bowling did his average overtake Bothams (the point of being an allround though is to bowl!!!!)...considering CC's feeling that Imran was by far the better batsman, then it actually was, average wise, a close run thing.
The icing on the cake for me though is that Botham, when you watched him play, was quite obviously a more talented batsman with better technique, who sometimes found it a bit too boring. He was a risk taker..his atittude with the bat was mostly all or nothing..that is the way he played. It didnt pay off later in his career as much as it did early on....but if anyone who watched the '81 hundreds, or the hundred in 86/87, or his 103 vs Hadlee or whatever could honestly say Imran could have done the same, then they dont know what they are talking about.

The issue of Botham going on too long seems to be the detracting factor for some. Yes, if a player is judged on averages, then it did no favours to Botham playing on much after 1982. Can we just imagine if Botham, who had been suffering with his back for a couple of years at that point, decided to hang up his boots at the end of the Pakistan series in 82. His figures would have been:
54 tests...2996 runs at 38 an innings..11 centuries, 12 half centuries and 19 tests in which he either took 7 wickets or scored a hundred...
With ball..he would have taken 249 wickets at 23.32..19 times taking 5 in an innings and 4 times 10 in the match

Would his credentials as an allrounder then be up for question....the answer is most definatly NO....

So, he decides to play on through his back problems...he obviously isnt the bowler he once was..he is a good yard or two slower in pace than when he was at his peak, due to a combination of back and weight problems..his batting performances, whilst still capable of giving world class performances, he has to graft a bit harder for the runs, for what ever reason....does that reduce the enormity of his talent and the sheer astonishing performances of when he was in peak condition...OF COURSE IT DOESNT

Imagine if he had played for a team as strong as say WI's were, who were an out and out pace attack. Say Botham hadnt fit in with the strong teams plans because of his drop in pace and dropped him in 1982 and never picked him again..in some peoples eyes Botham would have been a better player for actually being dropped than continuing to play the game...THAT IS SHEER STUPIDITY.

England needed him, even though he obviously wasnt at full fitness....and because of that people who didnt see him play down grade his talent..he gets punished for actually have a great cricketing heart and playing through the pain barrier....and yet still be able to take 8 in an inning vs WI, score some pretty incredible hundreds and take some utterly breath taking catches.

The guy was without a doubt for me, the greatest allrounder I have ever seen. Sure, for much of his career Imran was the better bowler (although I would say he was the great bowler he was for about the same number of tests as Botham was a great bowler), but in all honesty, to see Botham bat, and then see Imran bat, it was no competition..BOtham all the way..and screw waht the averages say.