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Originally Posted by albo97056
Still think hes overated. Fair enough some of the pitches were a little more bowler friendly - and their were some better attacks, but comparing him to some of the others of the day - thorpe , stewart etc who get far less credit than atherton and they average a good 10% more as far as i recall.
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Where do you get that idea? Most people credit Thorpe as England's best batsman of the past 14 years and Pietersen has a hell of a lot to do yet to surpass him (only Bell of the rest of the current crop also has a chance IMO), while virtually anyone will tell you that Stewart 1996-2002\03 was easily the best wicketkeeper-batsman England have ever had.
Atherton was, however, one hell of a good opening batsman for the vast majority of his career - only when half-fit (or less) and at the end when he went downhill (like so many) did he ever look less than that. And given the bowling and pitches he often faced in his day, that's quite some achievement. And anyone who rates Trescothick and Strauss ahead of him just because their overall averages are 3 or 4 runs higher and were lucky enough to play in a team that won quite a lot doesn't really know what they're on about.
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Did atherton play zimbabwe? shouldnt you factor out those games aswell?
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I did - Zimbabwe (who were quite Test class in those days) were one of the series where he played half-fit (if even that), so I knocked them out. I included them in 2000, though, because he was fit then.
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Noone could convince me that that load of losers and defeatists are better than the side of the last few years - at their peak.
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Which losers and defeatists, Butcher, Atherton, Hussain, Stewart, Thorpe, Ramprakash, Cork, Caddick, Fraser and Gough?
I'd love you to go up to any of them and tell them that they were defeatists. That's an utter insult to their integrity.
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As far as the one off tests go, if a side is good enough to defeat us in one - fair enough i mean if you fcator out those games what sort of difference does it make really? might we have nudged ahead of zim? GREAT
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It would indeed have been great, because then we wouldn't have this "England were the worst side in The World" nonsense that we've had pretty much ever since then. Even the Championship's creator, Matthew Engel, said "even we wouldn't go so far as to claim this meant England were anything other than the worst-performing of the 9 Test nations".