C_C
International Captain
And i said i would rather have Sobers in the team than bradman ( ideally i would have them BOTH).Who would you rather have in your cricket team? Sobers or Bradman. That is how you shuld base the best cricketer. It seems as if you are just clutching at something that just doesn't make any logical sense, to try for some reason to dethrone bradman as the King of cricket.
Why ? Because Sobers was a hall of famer batsman, hall of famer fielder and an excellent bowler.
Bradman was the greatest human being to pick up a bat but utter mastery in one outta the three disciplines doesnt cut it for me, when compared to top 1% in terms of batting and fielding and maybe top 10% in terms of bowling.
Bradman's contributions ends with the bat....Sobers on the other hand, contributes stellarly in every discipline of cricket.... you get Bradman for Zero and he is neutralised. You get Sobers for Zero and he might still get a 5-fer with the ball, save 20-30 runs in the field with his athleticism and hold on to a few stunners to swing the match your way.
Simple as that.
Bradman may be the king to the Aussie-English posse but to the rest of the cricket world, Sobers is the popular choice ( and justifiably so) when it comes to the ultimate cricketer and the king of cricket. Infact, i would pick Sobers and Imran Khan before ANY other player for my XI, be it bradman or Murali.
Besides, Bradman scored his runs in the amatuer era and against bowling which were several notches below the bowling of the 60s,70s,80s,90s and early 2000s....I am not convinced at all that he would average anything more than 70-75 in the modern era of professionalism.
The game was easy-paced then and not as physically demanding....simply because most players didnt exert that much, didnt take the game as seriously and that is evidenced by oh-so-many 40+ players playing the game back then...in the professional era a player is lucky if he makes it past 37-38.
Kinda gives you an idea of the 'competitiveness' of the field when 9 outta 10 players back then who were 'good enough to play test cricket' continued playing test/FC cricket till their mid 40s despite the fact that they were less physically fit and capable and had inferior nutritional standards.