Just how yellow is Indian cricket journalism?

[ankitj]

Hobbs drops from his centre by about 10 basis points. Tendulkar drops from his mean by 16.62 basis points and Bradman a staggering and astounding 56.67 basis points.

Please stop

 

[ankitj]

it also says that a batsman like this is useless against good attacks and challenging conditions.

ok.

 

[trundler]

A lot of angst and misplaced jealousy must be required for calling a a guy 3x as good as his contemporaries not only overrated but 'useless against good bowling in tough conditions'.

 

[srbhkshk]

Will give points for the consistency between the username and the post.

 

[Starfighter]

That's a lot of mumbo-jumbo and massive misuse of statistical reasoning to end with a conclusion completely divorced from reality.

 

[OverratedSanity]

People who announce themselves as contrarians are usually bell-ends

 

[Burgey]

The reader has to stay and work for this as it's a fascinating insight. Bradman may have remained an enigma if a player like Sehwag had not come along. Against England Bradman averaged 89.78 and Sehwag against Pakistan averages 91.14. Against West Indies Bradman averaged 74.50 and against Sri Lanka Sehwag averages 72.88. All four can be considered as oppositions as though West Indies lost the series 4-1 they at least managed to win a Test. The combined average for Bradman is 82.14 and that for Sehwag is 82.01. When an unconventional and destructive player has the measure of an attack he can hammer it all day. Sehwag's strike rate in his marathon innings is way superior to Bradman although it should have been the other way round as the overs bowled per hour were much higher in Bradman's time and gave less time to the bowlers for planning.

Also fielding and field settings have improved many times as coaches and team management watch the opposition line-up thoroughly to protect their strong areas and attack weak ones to plot individual dismissals in the post net gatherings. Even Sehwag has not been described as a fundamentally incorrect batsman by modern writers like Bradman was by Fender and others.

You cannot count South Africa and India as credible oppositions during Bradman’s time as out of the nine matches they played against Australia 7 were massive innings defeats, one was by 10 wickets and the last by close to 250 runs. Bradman came out to bat just 11 times and scored 8 hundreds (some massive ones), was not out twice with one clear chance to make it 9 in 9 when he tore a muscle and retired hurt on 50-plus. These runs are the equivalent of the best Test team playing against a weak Under-19 side. These are not contests.

Poor Tendulkar averages just 42.28 against Pakistan (less than half of what Sehwag does) and 60.45 against Sri Lanka but you can ask their bowlers and they’ll tell you the real deal. “Sehwag is not even a patch on Tendulkar,” Saqlain Mushtaq said after the former got 309 and the latter 194 not out in Multan. Sehwag is exposed in the modern era with different conditions and a variety of attacks while Bradman just played against one decent side—and against a good attack only once at home. The bowlers then had very little time to think and plan as the overs per hour were significantly higher.

Now the surprise, the Black Swan. “The main point of the Gaussian (Average) is that most observations hover around the mediocre, the average; the odds of a deviation decline faster and faster (exponentially) as you move away from the average. If you must have only one single piece of information, this is the one: the dramatic increase in the speed of decline in the odds as you move away from the center, or the average.” This centre, this average, this mean is 99.94 for Bradman, 56.94 for Jack Hobbs and 53.78 for Tendulkar.

Bradman represented Australia in 12 Test defeats out of a total sample of 52 Tests which makes up 28.57% of his career. Jack Hobbs nicknamed ‘The Master’ in Bradman’s time has 22 losses in 61 Tests, roughly 36% of his career. And then the ‘Little Master’ from Bandra with his broad shoulders displaying 56 Test defeats that make up an exact 28% of his Test career on the losing side enters the field. Anyone with a reasonable understanding of Test cricket would agree that it is the bowlers that win you the matches as you need 20 wickets (discounting the rare occasion where the team declaring loses) to win a Test. The perfect balance is to have four completely fit wicket-taking bowlers and a good allrounder. The batsmen set it up and give the bowlers a good cushion to take wickets. Let's check the performance of the three batsmen we just spoke about in matches lost.
Jack Hobbs: 22 matches, 1,889 runs, Highest Score 154, Batting Average 46.07, 6 hundreds and nine fifties
Sachin Tendulkar: 56 matches, 4,088 runs, Highest Score 177, Batting Average 37.16, 11 hundreds, 18 fifties and 19 wickets
Donald Bradman: 12 matches, 952 runs, Highest Score 131, Batting Average 43.27, 2 hundreds, six half centuries and a wicket.

Did you spot the jewel in there and experienced a moment of epiphany. Hobbs drops from his centre by about 10 basis points. Tendulkar drops from his mean by 16.62 basis points and Bradman a staggering and astounding 56.67 basis points. This is the perfect demonstration of the dramatic increase in the speed of decline in the odds as you move away from the center, or the average—which we just spoke about. The first thing that you can infer from it is that 99.94 is not Bradman's actual average, it is an inflated figure. What explains it, the unorthodoxy that allows a certain kind of batsmen who can score very quickly and consistently if the attack is below par. It also says that a batsman like this is useless against good attacks and challenging conditions.

In simple language the mathematical indication means that whenever and wherever Bradman was up against a good attack he was cut to much more than half his size and his odds of scoring were declining dramatically and exponentially. He’s the only one in the group who is still in an unstable state as the defeats are just 12. Going by the linear logic of average it can be said that if Bradman had say 24 Tests on the losing side his average would have fallen to less than 20 as he is in a complete free-fall. Hobbs is just superb and Tendulkar is great considering that the number of defeats, great attacks, that he has been a part of are higher than Bradman's entire career.

The evidence is all around in the modern era if you have an eye for it. Consider the first Test of the 2006 Test series against Pakistan in Lahore. Pakistan declared at 679 for 7, scoring at a run rate of 4.73. India came out to bat with that pressure of runs on a day of intermittent light showers that meant batsmen had to keep coming to the crease, retreating to the dressing room and then come again. India were scoring at 5.3 runs per over when the match ended after 77.2 overs. Sehwag made 254 in 247 balls and was the only Indian batsmen to be dismissed, three balls before the match ended. Dravid was 128 not out in 233 balls. Sehwag scored at a strike rate of 102.83 with 47 fours and a six and Dravid hit 19 fours at a strike rate of 54.93. Can you conclude that Sehwag was a better batsman than Dravid. Pause, and think about it hard. Dravid is an all time great and Sehwag a unique player who can do brilliant in a very defined set of circumstances. Hobbs, Hobbs and Hobbs was the greatest then and would surely be an all time great. You can't judge on average as it is a wrong way. Understand the model's errors before you understand the model.

Ok

 

[Daemon]

Great post, can’t argue with the logic.

 

[GoodAreasShane]

Ehhhh let's not feed the troll

 

[Daemon]

Quite poor from CW. Resorting to one line retorts (see Burgey in the political threads) instead of arguing his well crafted points. Deep down everybody knows he’s right.

 

[stephen]

Quite poor from CW. Resorting to one line retorts (see Burgey in the political threads) instead of arguing his well crafted points. Deep down everybody knows he’s right.

Oh definitely. Sehwag is definitely a much better batsman than Bradman. And Donald Trump is an excellent choice for president.

 

[Burgey]

How bad has Daemon been lately? Basically gone from a brief period of Gandhi-lite and now reverted to a sort of Calvin Coolidge nothingness. Hapless display.

 

[Spark]

That is quite literally a copy-paste of the most recent article from the same bell-end mentioned at the top of the page, complete with bizarre gibberish about Gaussian distributions.

If you're gonna troll, at least have the decency to come up with your own stuff.

 

[GIMH]

That is quite literally a copy-paste of the most recent article from the same bell-end mentioned at the top of the page, complete with bizarre gibberish about Gaussian distributions.

If you're gonna troll, at least have the decency to come up with your own stuff.

 

[Burgey]

That is quite literally a copy-paste of the most recent article from the same bell-end mentioned at the top of the page, complete with bizarre gibberish about Gaussian distributions.

If you're gonna troll, at least have the decency to come up with your own stuff.

Been coming up with my own material for years, and let me tell you it doesn't help in these PC Gone Mad times in which we post.

 

[BSM]

The only real metric needed to ascribe Bradman as the best ever is the sheer domination his stats reflect on his contemporaries and subsequently the rest of the batsmen in the games history. It's a true, albeit redundant point, that the exact same Bradman would not have fared well at all in todays test cricket. In fact, it is pretty much truth that most, if not all, sportsmen of nearly a century a go were just worse and less streamlined than their modern day equivalents. This isn't to say that if the same person was born today that they wouldn't also rise in line with this increased skill level of the professional game, just that the difference is plain to see. But domination doesn't change and Bradman dominated his peers better than any other batter has done at any other time in the game.
99.94 vs the next best contemporaneously being around 60. No one has come close to being that much above his peers and until they do there is no debate about who is the best, because any other metric, such as suitability to modern cricket, is fundamentally flawed. It could be argued that average margins naturally close as the sport becomes more professional, but I think an average in the high 60s and even low 70s would have to be attained in the context of the best of the rest averages being the same as they are now (low to mid fifties). Rough estimations of course, but this measurement of domination is the only way to compare players of different eras in my opinion, if you absolutely have to. And Bradman is unmatched in this regard (though Smith's average is getting very high and unmatched at this point as well.)

 

[Burgey]

It's hard to contemplate, but imagine if TPC gets his average up nudging towards 70. It's already insane as it is and I'm sure it's too much to hope for, but that would surely be as close as any of us will come (JBMAC aside) to seeing a player who dominates in the same sort of realm as Bradman. i suspect the demands of the various formats and just the fact he's mortal will stop it happening, but it's nice to dream of these things. He'd probably need to play a bit more selfishly than he did in England for it to happen though, as well as maintain the consistency of output.

 

[SillyCowCorner1]

It's hard to contemplate, but imagine if TPC gets his average up nudging towards 70. It's already insane as it is and I'm sure it's too much to hope for, but that would surely be as close as any of us will come (JBMAC aside) to seeing a player who dominates in the same sort of realm as Bradman. i suspect the demands of the various formats and just the fact he's mortal will stop it happening, but it's nice to dream of these things. He'd probably need to play a bit more selfishly than he did in England for it to happen though, as well as maintain the consistency of output.

He will probably finish his career in the mid-80s. A few triple centuries and a quadruple century for good measure sprinkled in there.

 

[Contrarian]

Not really. You need to understand average first before you can decide a player's domination based on that. I can pretty much prove that Bradman was not even the best Australian batsman of his time leave aside being the world's best. He would never make it to an all time World XI, which Hobbs will.

 

[Contrarian]

Never said that. Just said that average is not the right measure and gave a complete explanation for it. Why is Hobbs pretty much the same in wins and defeats, and why is Bradman such so awful in matches lost? Under the model's error before you understand the model. Average is not ubiquitous in life, only in the minds of statisticians.