Ponting or Murali: Who is the greater test cricketer?

[zaremba]

I have always been a complete failure when it comes to comparing bowlers with batsmen or bowling all rounders with batting all rounders.

Love this post

 

[Uppercut]

Not in terms of getting the greater chances.

A batsman can only have one slip and that's it. If Murali bowls a bad spell, he gets another 3 or 4 spells.

Yeah, this is the point we were making. The very structure of the game allows individual bowlers much more of a say in the outcome. So if you're measuring how good a player is purely by the positive impact they have on a side, the great bowlers will generally come out on top.

Alternatively you could compare how they stand amongst their contemporaries. You could use all kinds of things, really, it's quite arbitrary. But I can't think of any that would place Murali behind Ponting. Not imo anyway.

 

[Top_Cat]

Sachin contributing with the bowling and Ponting as a great fielder is also a product of the respective environments they found themselves in... if Sachin played for Australia, they would have no use for his part-time fare as they have always had excellent bowling depth. On the other hand, if you put Ponting in the Indian team - as good as he is in the field - he would not have single-handedly lifted the Indian fielding standards all that much... Sachin's ability as a 5th bowler is much more valuable to us.

Ponting's actually quite a good bowler, tbh. A yard or two quicker than Sachin, hits the splice and swings it miles. Can even bowl spin but probably not as well as Sachin. That said, as you alluded to, he's never had the need to really develop it so who knows how he'd have gone in a team where he had to bowl regular overs?

 

[Uppercut]

You could say the same about aspects of their batting though. By that reckoning you would have to discount Sachin's ability to play spin because Ponting might well have been equally good had he grown up in India. I know you're only responding to an equally invalid point about Ponting's fielding, but the bottom line is that you can only ever look at what a player did rather than what what you theorise that he might have done had X, Y and Z been different.

 

[Top_Cat]

As a statistician, I cannot agree with the above. You can theorise all you want but your confidence intervals just get worse.

 

[Uppercut]

You pretty much just said what was in my head before I translated into non-nerd.

 

[Top_Cat]

Don't be mean.

 

[vcs]

All this is quite a deviation from the thread topic, but it seems to be fairly standard here.

 

[Top_Cat]

Great, ANOVA comedian.

 

[Migara]

Can we get to the correct mode?

 

[weldone]

This comparison doesn't seem normal at all. What's our expectation from such a thread?

Both are players in the right tail of the curve, by the way, and, both in fact can be treated as outliers. But one outlier is much further from mean than the other for sure.

By the way, this wasn't a discrete attack on you, Ikki.

 

[Ikki]

I know, I didn't take it as a deviation as attacking me.

 

[klpathi]

ponting or murali

NO doubt about that. Murali was the greater than ponting till this decade.