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Evaluating the top all rounders of all time

bryce

International Regular
the thing it doesn't take into account is the x-factor or ability to single-handedly win a match which is what made botham so great.
 

Swervy

International Captain
bryce said:
the thing it doesn't take into account is the x-factor or ability to single-handedly win a match which is what made botham so great.
yeah..the great allrounders were /are more than the sum of the parts
 

tooextracool

International Coach
Swervy said:
flintoff was picked far too early for the england team, one of the reasons why his averages are poor are because of this fact..this is one of the reasons why using statistics can be very misleading when looking at a whole career,a look at how someone performs when they are at their peak is a better indication of the talents a player has
depending of course for how long the peak lasted, if someone had a peak for about 1 or 2 years in a career that spanned 10(and was distinctly average in the other 8), id be rather reluctant no matter how good he was in his prime to consider him to be a very good bowler.
 

Legglancer

State Regular
Swervy said:
its not selectivly picking out a players best performances, its taking a players most productive chunk of his career to give an indication of their effectiveness when they were peaking, to eliminate things such as being brought into a team too early or due to inadequecies in a countries depth, playing test cricket long after the players powers had started to wane
Then Probably their will be many players who will have to be added as the parameteres will have to be changed. There could be quite a few players who performed in herculian propotions for a short while only to crash and burn or stop playing due to various circumstances..... Or are looking to pick players from the same pool ?
 

biased indian

International Coach
Scaly piscine said:
So if the England selectors decided to pick a cricket web XI to represent England whose fault is it gonna be when the team only beats Zimbabwe by 50 runs? Just to help your process of elimination - players that were picked played to expectations so it can't be their fault and there were better players around they could have picked...
u are now saying some thing else, what u said was that flintoffs fitness was not good it was not ECB problem surely it was flintoffs problem :p

And is there any other plyer from England who suffered from ECB wrongly picking them when they were not ready from international cricket. :p

and hope that ECB dont remove them frm team when they are finally ready after a long peirod of preparaiton
 

SJS

Hall of Fame Member
Ok Guys. Here is a flaw in my evaluation method. (there must be others but this is a glaring one for me.

It doesnt take into account the quantity and only looks at the qualitative aspect of statistics. Thus a player with a particular batting average with 1000 runs in his career is at par with another with a similar average but over 10000 runs. Same is true for the bowlers, bowlers with 100 wickets being treated at par with those with 500 as long as their performance (wkts/test) was the same.

I have, therefore, taken this additional factor into account for both bowling and batting stats. Its pretty simple. I have equated 1000 runs with 100 test wickets as far as parity between bowling and batting points is concerned. These are added to the existing points of each player.

It gives a very good basis (so far till refinred again :) ) for comparing not just the top all rounders but also the top bowlers and the top batsmen of all time.

For the all rounders , I have incorporated Neil's criteria of multiplying the batting and bowling points since it makes much more sense to arrive at an all round capability.

The lists which follow make very interesting reading. :happy:
 

SJS

Hall of Fame Member
TOP FIFTY BOWLERS

Rank Name of Bowler Bowling points
1 Barnes, Sydney F 15.96
2 Muralitharan 15.82
3 Lohmann, George 13.81
4 Richardson, Tom 13.79
5 Grimmett, Clarrie 13.70
6 Hadlee, Richard 13.40
7 Warne, Shane 13.39
8 Turner, Charles 13.15
9 Lillee, Dennis 13.02
10 Kumble, Anil 12.57
11 McGrath, Glenn 12.46
12 Saunders, John 12.38
13 Marshall, Malcolm 12.25
14 O'Reilly, William 12.16
15 Freeman, Alfred 11.99
16 Donald, Allan A 11.83
17 Blythe, Colin 11.72
18 Walsh, Courtney 11.72
19 Trueman, Fred 11.67
20 Spofforth, Fred 11.59
21 Ironmonger, H 11.59
22 Waqar Younis 11.49
23 Ambrose, Curtly 11.38
24 Bedser, Alex 11.29
25 Peel, Robert 11.28
26 Wasim Akram 11.12
27 Garner, Joel 11.10
28 Imran Khan 11.05
29 MacGill, Stuart 10.99
30 Pollock, Shaun 10.95
31 Tayfield, Hugh 10.78
32 Mailey, Arthur 10.56
33 Croft, Colin 10.56
34 McDermott, Craig J 10.55
35 De Villiers, Fannie 10.48
36 Botham, Ian T 10.44
37 Higgs, Kenneth 10.41
38 Chandrasekhar 10.38
39 Holding, Michael 10.38
40 Roberts, Andy 10.37
41 Saqlain Mushtaq 10.30
42 Gibbs, Lance 10.27
43 McKenzie, Graham 10.25
44 Trumble, Hugh 10.19
45 Whitty, William 10.18
46 Palmer, George E 10.16
47 Davidson, Alan K 10.12
48 Bedi, Bishen S 10.11
49 Laker, James C 10.10
50 Pascoe, Leonard S 10.03
 

SJS

Hall of Fame Member
TOP FIFTY BATSMEN

Rank Name of Batsman Batting Points

1 Bradman, Donald G 22.32
2 Tendulkar, Sachin R 14.63
3 Sobers, Garfield St A 14.23
4 Hammond, Walter R 14.11
5 Barrington, Kenneth F 14.00
6 Lara, Brian C 13.93
7 Dravid, Rahul S 13.90
8 Waugh, Stephen R 13.85
9 Border, Allan R 13.84
10 Sutcliffe, Herbert 13.66
11 Hutton, Leonard 13.66
12 Gavaskar, Sunil M 13.60
13 Javed Miandad 13.46
14 Dempster, Charles S 13.39
15 Hayden, Matthew L 13.32
16 Weekes, Everton De C 13.21
17 Hobbs, John B 13.19
18 Chappell, Gregory S 13.14
19 Barnes, Sidney G 12.97
20 Pollock, Robert G 12.95
21 Ponting, Ricky T 12.90
22 Headley, George A 12.90
23 Richards, Isaac V A 12.89
24 Kallis, Jacques H 12.74
25 Walcott, Clyde L 12.60
26 Paynter, Edward 12.36
27 Boycott, Geoffrey 12.25
28 Smith, Graeme C 12.25
29 Inzamam-Ul-Haq 12.23
30 Duleepsinhji, Kumar S 12.04
31 Compton, Denis C S 11.95
32 Flower, Andrew 11.91
33 Lloyd, Clive H 11.84
34 Nourse, Arthur D 11.75
35 Harvey, Robert N 11.73
36 Gilchrist, Adam C 11.72
37 Russell, Charles A G 11.68
38 Gower, David I 11.59
39 Kanhai, Rohan B 11.58
40 Kirsten, Gary 11.48
41 Gooch, Graham A 11.48
42 Greenidge, Cuthbert Gordon 11.46
43 Walters, Kevin D 11.44
44 Jayawardene, D P Mahela 11.40
45 Cowdrey, Michael C 11.36
46 Tyldesley, George E 11.33
47 Davis, Charles A 11.28
48 Gibbs, Herschelle H 11.25
49 Yousuf Youhana 11.21
50 Taylor, Mark A 11.21
 

SJS

Hall of Fame Member
TOP FIFTY ALL ROUNDERS

Rank Name of Allrounder Total Bowling points Total Batting Points TOTAL POINTS (multiple)

1 Sobers, Garfield St A 6.87 14.23 97.83
2 Imran Khan 11.05 8.81 97.33
3 Botham, Ian T 10.44 8.44 88.14
4 Hadlee, Richard J 13.40 6.48 86.75
5 Pollock, Shaun M 10.95 7.49 82.04
6 Kapil Dev 9.85 7.96 78.40
7 Kallis, Jacques H 5.46 12.74 69.62
8 Cairns, Christopher L 8.84 7.81 69.06
9 Faulkner, George A 7.43 8.74 65.00
10 Miller, Keith R 7.62 8.38 63.91
11 Gregory, John M 8.00 7.78 62.24
12 Mankad, Mulvantrai H 8.81 7.00 61.67
13 Wasim Akram 11.12 5.49 61.09
14 Greig, Anthony W 6.05 9.29 56.15
15 Benaud, Richard 9.92 5.63 55.81
16 Goddard, Trevor L 7.12 7.73 55.06
17 Tate, Maurice W 9.38 5.50 51.56
18 Noble, Montague A 6.86 6.72 46.06
19 Streak, Heath H 8.54 5.32 45.39
20 Lindwall, Raymond R 9.37 4.73 44.32
21 Oram, Jacob D P 5.21 8.20 42.76
22 Robins, Robert W V 7.50 5.53 41.45
23 Prabhakar, Manoj M 5.81 7.06 41.03
24 McCool, Colin L 5.64 7.22 40.69
25 Giffen, George 7.66 5.08 38.97
26 Gilmour, Gary J 7.92 4.76 37.71
27 Strang, Paul A 6.59 5.69 37.52
28 Flintoff, Andrew 5.15 7.27 37.41
29 Allen, George O B 7.34 5.09 37.37
30 Taylor, Bruce R 8.51 4.38 37.29
31 Rhodes, Wilfred 5.44 6.81 37.10
32 Bailey, Trevor E 5.42 6.71 36.40
33 Kelleway, Charles E 4.55 7.96 36.18
34 Steel, Allan G 4.88 7.26 35.40
35 Mohammad Rafique 8.36 4.07 34.04
36 Lewis, Clairmonte C 6.72 4.97 33.43
37 Durani, Salim A 5.93 5.41 32.08
38 Atkinson, Dennis St E 4.80 6.67 31.99
39 Vettori, Daniel L 7.09 4.50 31.90
40 Intikhab Alam 6.42 4.95 31.79
41 Phadkar, Dattaray G 4.61 6.88 31.73
42 Knight, Barry R 5.54 5.51 30.49
43 Julien, Bernard D 4.71 6.47 30.48
44 Gomez, Gerald E 4.59 6.48 29.71
45 Archer, Ronald G 5.63 5.16 29.00
46 Nadkarni, Raghunath G 5.09 5.61 28.59
47 Sinclair, James H 5.71 5.00 28.58
48 Barnes, William 5.44 4.92 26.76
49 Illingworth, Raymond 5.01 5.26 26.37
50 Bracewell, John G 5.90 4.42 26.10
 

SJS

Hall of Fame Member
Top 50 Bowlers among All rounders

Name........Bowling Rank......ARounder rank

Hadlee..........6..........4
Akram.........26.........13
Imran..........28..........2
Pollock........30..........5
Botham.......36..........3

Top 50 Batsmen among All rounders

Name........Batting Rank......ARounder rank

Sobers.........3...........1
Kallis...........24..........7
 

shankar

International Debutant
Adding or multiplying the batting and bowling points doesn't make sense since we can't really equate or compare batting and bowling performances. But instead if we divide all the batting and bowling points by the highest values in each dept(Batting-11.56 Sobers, Bowling-10.52 Hadlee), it now represents how good each player was in batting/bowling compared with the best in that dept. They can now be be added. This also removes the bias towards batting or bowling.

I did this(for the old points system) and surprisingly apart from a few the overall order remained same.

Rank Name Old Total New Total
1 Sobers Garfield St A 16.87 1.50
2 Imran Khan 16.18 1.47
3 Hadlee Richard J 15.95 1.47
4 Pollock Shaun M 15.14 1.38
5 Faulkner George A 15.05 1.36
6 Gregory John M 14.83 1.35
7 Kallis Jacques H 15.11 1.34
8 Botham Ian T 14.60 1.33
9 Cairns Christopher L 14.09 1.28
10 Mankad Mulvantrai H 14.03 1.28
11 Miller Keith R 13.89 1.26
12 Tate Maurice W 13.45 1.23
13 Benaud Richard 13.16 1.21
14 Kapil Dev 13.17 1.20
15 Goddard Trevor L 13.19 1.19
16 Wasim Akram 12.89 1.19
17 Greig Anthony W 13.20 1.19
18 Lindwall Raymond R 12.08 1.11
19 Noble Montague A 12.10 1.10
20 Taylor Bruce R 11.85 1.09
21 Streak Heath H 11.90 1.09
22 Giffen George 11.65 1.07
23 Allen George O B 11.64 1.07
24 Prabhakar Manoj M 11.70 1.06
25 Strang Paul A 11.54 1.05
26 Kelleway Charles E 11.68 1.05
27 Flintoff Andrew 11.17 1.01
28 Lewis Clairmonte C 10.70 0.98
29 Atkinson Dennis St E 10.85 0.98
30 Rhodes Wilfred 10.64 0.96
31 Phadkar Dattaray G 10.67 0.96
32 Julien Bernard D 10.57 0.95
33 Durani Salim A 10.44 0.95
34 Bailey Trevor E 10.49 0.95
35 Knight Barry R 10.31 0.94
36 Vettori Daniel L 10.08 0.92
37 Gomez Gerald E 10.26 0.92
38 Intikhab Alam 10.05 0.92
39 Sinclair James H 9.94 0.91
40 Barnes William 9.78 0.89
41 Nadkarni Raghunath G 9.65 0.87
42 Braund Leonard C 9.48 0.86
43 Bracewell John G 9.31 0.85
44 Ulyett George 9.07 0.82
45 Holford David A J 8.98 0.81
46 Illingworth Raymond 8.85 0.80
 

shankar

International Debutant
Doing the same for SJS' new points system, the order changes significantly:
Max for Batting: 14.23 Sobers
Bowling: 13.4 Hadlee

Old Rank Name New Total(out of a maximum of 2)
1 Sobers, Garfield St A 1.51
4 Hadlee, Richard J 1.46
2 Imran Khan 1.44
3 Botham, Ian T 1.37
5 Pollock, Shaun M 1.34
7 Kallis, Jacques H 1.30
6 Kapil Dev 1.29
13 Wasim Akram 1.22
8 Cairns, Christopher L 1.21
9 Faulkner, George A 1.17
10 Miller, Keith R 1.16
12 Mankad, Mulvantrai H 1.15
11 Gregory, John M 1.14
15 Benaud, Richard 1.14
14 Greig, Anthony W 1.10
17 Tate, Maurice W 1.09
16 Goddard, Trevor L 1.07
20 Lindwall, Raymond R 1.03
19 Streak, Heath H 1.01
18 Noble, Montague A 0.98
21 Oram, Jacob D P 0.97
22 Robins, Robert W V 0.95
30 Taylor, Bruce R 0.94
23 Prabhakar, Manoj M 0.93
25 Giffen, George 0.93
24 McCool, Colin L 0.93
26 Gilmour, Gary J 0.93
35 Mohammad Rafique 0.91
29 Allen, George O B 0.91
33 Kelleway, Charles E 0.90
28 Flintoff, Andrew 0.90
27 Strang, Paul A 0.89
31 Rhodes, Wilfred 0.88
32 Bailey, Trevor E 0.88
34 Steel, Allan G 0.87
36 Lewis, Clairmonte C 0.85
39 Vettori, Daniel L 0.85
41 Phadkar, Dattaray G 0.83
40 Intikhab Alam 0.83
38 Atkinson, Dennis St E 0.83
37 Durani, Salim A 0.82
43 Julien, Bernard D 0.81
42 Knight, Barry R 0.80
44 Gomez, Gerald E 0.80
45 Archer, Ronald G 0.78
47 Sinclair, James H 0.78
46 Nadkarni, Raghunath G 0.77
48 Barnes, William 0.75
50 Bracewell, John G 0.75
49 Illingworth, Raymond 0.74
 
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SJS

Hall of Fame Member
GREATEST ALL TIME TEAM

Now the next step. Using these ratings to make a team.

First the top opening batsmen in the list of Batsmen.

Opening Batsmen
Sutcliffe (13.66)
Hutton (13.66)

Gavaskar (13.60)
Hayden (13.32)
Hobbs (13.19)

Middle Order Batsmen
Bradman (22.32)
Tendulkar (14.63)
Sobers (14.23)
Hammond (14.11)

Barrington (14.00)
Lara (13.93)

Fast Bowlers
Hadlee (13.40)
Lillee (13.02)

McGrath (12.46)
Marshall (12.25)

Medium Fast
Barnes (15.96)
Tom Richardson (13.79)
Lohmann (13.81)
Turner (13.15)

Spinners
Muralitharan (15.82)
Grimmett (13.70)

Warne (13.39)
Kumble (12.57)

Sutcliffe, Hutton, Bradman, Tendulkar, Hammond, Sobers, Hadlee, WICKETKEEPER, Lillee, Murali, Barnes and Grimmett make a great XII from which an XI for any condition/any surface can be chosen.

Clearly this is purely based on statistics which has its limitations but it does make a very impressive team !
 
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LongHopCassidy

International Captain
tooextracool said:
how hayden makes it ahead of hobbs and tendulkar ahead of richards, sobers, hammond and barrington is just sad....
Have you a better system?

I personally think some all time legends are reigning in this era.
 

SJS

Hall of Fame Member
tooextracool said:
how hayden makes it ahead of hobbs and tendulkar ahead of richards, sobers, hammond and barrington is just sad....
I also thought of that. I can only say that perhaps people like Tendulkar and Hayden , who are still playing , may go down on their averages by the end of their careers which will change the figures a bit. If they continue to score as heavily as they have done so far in their careers, till the end of their careers, they , surely, are special.

One flaw in the system, however, I must point out.

While for the bowlers, by not taking the bowling averages as the main criteria, I have managed to level the pitch, so to speak, between bowlers of an earlier era when runs per wicket were much lower than later periods. But bowling offers a good alternative in wickets per test since the number of wickets bowlers can take in a test is limited and remains unchanged irrespective of era and conditions. Batting does not offer such a criteria.

Hayden and Tendulkar are products of an era when batting averages are the highest of all times in the game.

I am working on a method to level this difference but it involves loads of work :p :p

I think this is the major reason for what you point out, Its not totally invalid, your criticism, but as I said, there isnt a ready alternative as of now :D
 

Swervy

International Captain
maybe work out batting averages relative to the average runs per wicket for the period of time...so an average of 50 in a time when wickets are averaging 40(a plus 10 differential) wouldnt have the same effect as an average of 40 in a time when wickets went every 25 runs for example(a plus 15 run differential)
 

SJS

Hall of Fame Member
Swervy said:
maybe work out batting averages relative to the average runs per wicket for the period of time...so an average of 50 in a time when wickets are averaging 40(a plus 10 differential) wouldnt have the same effect as an average of 40 in a time when wickets went every 25 runs for example(a plus 15 run differential)
I have something similar in mind but instead of the averages of that era, I am thinking of the averages of those who played in those games. Thus all you need for Tendulkar and Hobbs, for example, is to get the runs scored by their team in all matches they played, subtract from it, the runs they scored themselves and then take their average as a proportion of the average of the others. It will give a factor. A factor of 1 meaning the player in question performed as well as the rest of his team mates did in the same games under same conditions. A factor of 2.5 would mean he was 2.5 times better than the rest of the team mates put together.

THe same can be done for bowling.

Then figures of 5 for 75 in a 150 run innings will have a different meaning than 5 for 75 in a 300 run innings. The first would give a factor of 1 and the second a factor of 3 (225/75).

After all we must assess the greatness of any sportsman only in comparison to his peers.

Actually, it might be even better to compare with all world batsmen/bowlers during a players playing career but that would take even longer in compiling :@

I am still thinking of a time saving method of getting at these figures :p
 
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Beleg

International Regular
All this quantative analysis, you folks are real nuts.


nerds more likely. :p


Anyway, great job! makes for intresting reading and some ouf of context statistic-wagging if need arises.
 

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