Rich2001 said:
I've always look at it like this, Yes the batsman might have the game tailored his way in a couple of areas but remember that a batsman only has one life, a bowler has an infiante amount of chances to redeem that poor delivery (he could bowl rubbish all day long but still pick up a 5 fer), if a batsman has a poor shot the chances are he(she) is walking back to the hut.
And at the end of the day Cricket just like anything else in the world is a business to an extent, fans want to see some action and generally it's the batsman hitting big shots that gets the fans going, not dot ball after dot ball.
Fans can get bored of big shot after big shot if wickets never fall. Witness the unutterable tedium of Test matches in Antigua.
Action depends on there being a reasonable balance between bat and ball, not dominance of one over the other.
One of the few things averages are actually good for is demonstrating the bat-ball balance in different eras.
In the 30s, the constant manicuring of pitches over decades had led to featherbeds on which batsman could bat all day and bowlers despaired (and eventually to bodyline), and that's why the averages of people like Larwood and Tate look so poor and those of Sutcliffe and couple of others so amazing.
The reaction was the welcome extension of the lbw Law to allow the ball to pitch outisde off, and the extremely unfortunate underpreparation of pitches which was tantamount to doctoring, climaxing with the shoddy disgrace of Old Trafford 1956 which turned square on the first morning (not that Jim Laker ever complained), but carrying on to the extent that when Peter May mused to Everton Weekes that there was little answer to Laker and Lock, Weekes's reply was that there was no answer at all in those conditions. As a result, you had batsmen conditioned to the grimly defensive, so that the 56-57 tour of South Africa, which sounds on paper to have been rather exciting with SA coming back from a 2-2 deficit to square the series, was so indescribably tedious to watch that Jim Swanton was accused of faking injury to avoid having to report on it.
In the Fifties, you had most of the leading bowlers with averages well under 20 and hardly a batsman in the 40s - and an all-time great batsman like Peter May gets left out of a lot of people's lists because he only averaged 47, even though it was amazingly high for the period.
Today's averages are very similar to those of the 30s, with decent Test bowlers struggling to keep their average below 30 and anyone below 25 being very good indeed, and seemingly dozens of batsmen with 50+ averages.
The time-recovery mechanisms now in place which compensate for the weather mean that we now get more results than would otherwise be the case, which is partially reflected in the 1930s by the fact that all Tests in Australia and deciding Tests in England were timeless and weather only played a part by affecting the pitch.
The ideal balance is probably when good bowlers average about 26 (rather than the 28-29 which is the norm today) and good batsmen average 45 (rather than 48-50), so we're a little too far in favour of the batsmen at the moment. I mostly blame the pitches, which are mostly too slow, low and true to give bowlers help, which in turn reduces the range of stroke the batsmen play because the ball doesn't arrive high enough or fast enough to use the full repertoire. But the authorities won't necessarily try and move things in that direction because they fear the loss of fifth day revenues (which are usually so pitiful that I don't know why they bother).
Cheers,
Mike
) - and if it clears a fielders head then the batsman hasn't really been given a life as nothing really has happened, whereas if it's dropped then in all reality the bowler "should" have got a wicket but bad luck let him down.
