Hoggy England's Best Ever?

[Arthur Crabtree]

And TB apart, the draws there are are rain ruined. Like the Oval and Old Trafford in the last home Ashes.

[sussexpob]

Not sure the story of pre 1994 England has much relevance here towards the debate, and are a little bit of a red herring.

England clearly had an attack they wanted to pick in the mid to late 90's, that being Fraser, Gough, Caddick and Cork, but Fraser was always injured, Gough was always injured, Caddick could never repeat his Somerset magic on the big stage and Cork's body and attitude was never 100% right and he lost his pace and swing not long after debut (in 2000 vs the Windies, he was bowling at times not a shade much over 70mph!!!)

There isn't many examples of other bowlers that they picked from left field. The atrocious selection policy of this period was more guilty of abusing bits and piece cricketers to find all rounders, or picking very poor spinners trying desperately to find a Shane Warne. I would hazard a guess that a lot of players were picked for small amounts of time so the main core attack could get fit or find form, hence the in and out nature of the team.

Alan Mullaly - Couldn't be kept in the team with an average higher than 30. In those days having an average over 30 was very poor.
Headley - Injury robbed us of his career, so we will never know. The fact is, he got in the team and stayed there until injury destroyed him.
Hollioake Brothers - Adam was never a bowler and was picked really as a batting allrounder who could turn his arm.... Ben died in his early 20's and had real potential.
Mike Smith - Was a standout bowler in CC, maybe deserved more than a test.
Min Patel - Terrible pick
Peter Martin - Another example of how a person averaging the wrong side of 30 was simply not good enough to keep in a team in the 1990's. In modern standards, he didn't do that bad!

[sussexpob]

Rather then looking at England's selection policy, it would be better to check exactly how they compared to players at the time.

Anderson is ranked 2nd in the world, and has for years been ranked in the top 10. Not sure you could say the same of Gough, who would have struggled to maintain a position I the new ball attacks of a lot of teams of his day.

A good indication of how test match bowling has changed. Shaun Pollock maintained in his overlapping career span with Gough an average of 20..... in the 6 years he overlaps with Anderson, he averages 28 (one run away from Anderson). That's an 8 run difference per wicket.

[Arthur Crabtree]

I wonder if bowling conditions in different era aren't exaggerated. Three runs per wicket separate every decade since the 1960s.

http://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine ... pe=batting

And such a small difference could easily be explained by the relative quality of of batting and bowling in those eras. Plenty of other examples go against the careers of Pollock (who lost his pace in the second half of his career) and Anderson. Looking at the decade stats, if anything we should be downgrading 1950s bowlers (though this stat could be explained by a higher concentration of weaker countries).

If you look at stats from England and Wales, the teens haven't been an era of huge batting scores compared with any time since the fifties. Remember that these one or two runs per wicket difference are shared out between four or five bowlers. The teens have been a slightly better time to bowl than the nineties and noughties.

http://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine ... pe=batting

Providing we ignore the pre WWI era, I'm not sure we have to bother too much about eras.

[rich1uk]

the other big disadvantage Anderson has when looking at his numbers is he never got to bowl against England batsmen

[sussexpob]

I wonder if bowling conditions in different era aren't exaggerated. Three runs per wicket separate every decade since the 1960s

Maybe the case is overstated, but I think if you really wanted to analyse things, you might find that there are other factors at play that effect both averages.

The first is the role of spin, which improved in the late 90's to 2000's generally over other decades, so I would guess that pace bowling figures would remain 1-2 runs higher still when spin is factored out. The second is the extremities of averages, I would very much guess, are higher in the 1990s. A good example would be teams like India or Sri Lanka that in the 1990's trundled through a load of absolute rubbish seamers, but in the 2000's as pitches dried and slowed they found spinners to replace these with.

I mean, I remember Sri Lanka fielding Pushmakamara, Dharmasena, Kalpage and Wickramasigne in the same team, id be surprised if any of those had averages under 40

After Kapil Dev, did India have a seamer that really was worth a place in the team.... maybe Srinath, but I think his record outside Asia was pretty poor

[greyblazer]

I can confidently say the tracks in the 1990s were more helpful for the pacers. I mean even SL had a couple of decent tracks for the pacers. The SSC always used to do a bit before it became a batting paradise. During the first hour, you invariably saw a couple of wickets falling at the SSC.

The tracks in Mohali and Karachi too used to help the pacers a bit. McGrath took a five-for in 1998 in Karachi and that deck provided fast bowlers decent carry. Of course, having watched the Pak v SL game in Karachi in 2009, I can safely say it was one of the flattest decks I have seen and I don't think I'm exaggerating as it was that flat. Scoring a double ton felt like 40 or 50. The pacers used to take advantage of variable bounce in WI then.