Is Bumrah the best cricketer India has ever produced?

[shortpitched713]

This might hold up if you could remove a bowler from the innings, not to return, if you hit him for 6 or something.
Oddly, 4 to 6 bowlers bowl the same number of balls that batsmen face.
You could say bowlers have it easy because they can just play with their top order. Imagine if all 11 had to bowl!

The comparison is 1 batsman vs 1 bowler.

The contribution with their primary skill towards the relatively balanced sides of the game (slightly more value towards batting because there is also fielding to consider on the other side) is going to be in favor of the full time bowler over the Specialist batsman.

Is this a devils advocate position you are taking or do you really think an individual batsman can consistently add as much value with the bat as an ace bowler like McGrath or Warne can with the ball?

 

[Xix2565]

I think I'm just reiterating Victor Ian, but 20 wickets a game to win is a cliche I never quite understood. Sure, ok, technically it is true - well, not if you run into a team like England happy to declare prematurely and let you chase down a score - but 20 wkts in a game won't do you any good if your batsmen can't outscore the opposition by >= 1. You can take fewer wickets and still win but you can never score fewer runs to win a game of cricket.

Also, I'm not sure I agree with the statement that bowlers are inherently more valuable to a team. The nature of the game implies a bowler can fail repeatedly over the course of a spell in terms of executing his skills and still only require the one decent delivery to get rid of the batsman. Whereas odds are a batsman has to be extraordinarily lucky and/or named Travis Head to survive making repeated bad decisions, hence making a technically solid batsman who minimizes errors an extremely valuable asset in his own right, as much if not more so than a bowler.

You're ignoring that bowlers reduce runscoring as well, both by taking wickets and otherwise with bowling well enough to make scoring off them difficult more often. They play a big role in reducing the opposition's runs. Current England is no different to any other winning side in terms of taking 20 wickets and winning. That's exactly how they've won a lot of their recent games under Bazball, and why when their bowling was off here and there during 2021 they sucked.