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70,80s cricket

joel garner #1

Cricket Spectator
firstly hello all.this is my 1st post so be gentle with me!!!.
what i would like to know off yourselves is do you think the characters of the late 1970,s and early 1980,s are better/worse or the same as the current crop of internationals.
i just feel the likes of clive "big cat" lloyd, big bird garner,derek randall,dennis lillee,sunny gavaskar and beefy botham to name just a few provided far more entertainment than todays crop who are suberb cricketers but seem to be now ultra proffessional if you know what i mean.i suppose this is the modern age and money is so much more prevalent now but how i would long to watch a john player sunday league match again with beefy and big bird with hangovers from sat night still doing the goods.
any views.
 

aussie tragic

International Captain
My favourite 70's cricket team would be:

1. Gordon Greenidge
2. Sunil Gavaskar
3. Ian Chappell
4. Viv Richards
5. Clive Lloyd
6. Doug Walters
7. Ian Botham
8. Rod Marsh
9. Malcom Marshall
10.Dennis Lillee
11. Joel Garner

12. Michael Holding


My favourite 70's drinking team would be:

Ian Chappell
Viv Richards
Doug Walters
Ian Botham
Rod Marsh
Dennis Lillee
 
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joel garner #1

Cricket Spectator
My favourite 70's team would be:

1. Gordon Greenidge
2. Sunil Gavaskar
3. Ian Chappell
4. Viv Richards
5. Clive Lloyd
6. Doug Walters
7. Ian Botham
8. Rod Marsh
9. Malcom Marshall
10.Dennis Lillee
11. Joel Garner

12. Michael Holding


Thanks for the reply but I think my order will give you a run for you're money

1. Gordon Greenidge
2. Desmond Hayes
3. Viv Richards
4. Alan border
5. Steve Waugh
6. Ian Botham
7. Richard Hadlee
8. Alan knot
9. Malcolm Marshall
10. Imran Khan
11. Joel Garner

Quite a few the same but great minds think alike eh :laugh:
 

PhoenixFire

International Coach
Thanks for the reply but I think my order will give you a run for you're money

1. Gordon Greenidge
2. Desmond Hayes
3. Viv Richards
4. Alan border
5. Steve Waugh
6. Ian Botham
7. Richard Hadlee
8. Alan knot
9. Malcolm Marshall
10. Imran Khan
11. Joel Garner

Quite a few the same but great minds think alike eh :laugh:

Why have Imran so far down the order? I'd have him between Knott and Botham, and move Hadlee down a bit.
 

silentstriker

The Wheel is Forever
Why is Imran Khan batting below Marshall, Hadlee (maybe even Knott)? Can't really argue with your choices.
 

silentstriker

The Wheel is Forever
Well, if we are talking about Botham in the non-lardass phase, then it would be: Botham, Knott, Imran, Hadlee, Marshall. Otherwise, it would be Knott, Imran, Botham, Hadlee, Marshall.
 

aussie tragic

International Captain
Thanks for the reply but I think my order will give you a run for you're money

1. Gordon Greenidge
2. Desmond Hayes
3. Viv Richards
4. Alan border
5. Steve Waugh
6. Ian Botham
7. Richard Hadlee
8. Alan knot
9. Malcolm Marshall
10. Imran Khan
11. Joel Garner

Quite a few the same but great minds think alike eh :laugh:

Steve Waugh doesn't meet your criteria, he didn't start playing until 1985 and he was crap anyway until around '89 ;)
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
One could argue he was crap until 1993, in fact, with an anomaly period in the English season of 1989.
 

steds

Hall of Fame Member
One could argue that you're an annoying pedant.


...Infact, one does argue that you're an annoying pedant. :p
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
firstly hello all.this is my 1st post so be gentle with me!!!.
what i would like to know off yourselves is do you think the characters of the late 1970,s and early 1980,s are better/worse or the same as the current crop of internationals.
The calibre of cricket around that time was enormously superior to just about anything in the last 6 years IMO.

Bit different if you compare it to, say, the 1990s, but to now? No contest.
i just feel the likes of clive "big cat" lloyd, big bird garner,derek randall,dennis lillee,sunny gavaskar and beefy botham to name just a few provided far more entertainment than todays crop who are suberb cricketers but seem to be now ultra proffessional if you know what i mean.i suppose this is the modern age and money is so much more prevalent now but how i would long to watch a john player sunday league match again with beefy and big bird with hangovers from sat night still doing the goods.
any views.
Even though you mention the entertainment value factor which he was certainly high in... Derek Randall still seems out of place amongst those other names. :huh:
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
One could argue that you're an annoying pedant. :p


...Infact, one does argue that you're an annoying pedant.
And one could argue that you're nought but a :wacko: ****stirrer, too, but it might be a bit unkind to derail the thread by doing so. :)
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
My favourite 70's cricket team would be:

1. Gordon Greenidge
2. Sunil Gavaskar
3. Ian Chappell
4. Viv Richards
5. Clive Lloyd
6. Doug Walters
7. Ian Botham
8. Rod Marsh
9. Malcom Marshall
10.Dennis Lillee
11. Joel Garner

12. Michael Holding
Myself I'd take...

(Marshall wasn't any good until 1980, playing just a single series and that only due to the Packer Schism)

Roy Fredericks
Sunil Gavaskar \ Geoffrey Boycott (honestly can't imagine it'd make much difference, IMO there's nothing to divide the two)
Ian Chappell (c)
IVA Richards
Greg Chappell
Clive Lloyd
Ian Terence Botham
Alan Knott (w)
Dennis Lillee (if the Test was anywhere but India) \ Bishen Bedi (if it was in India)
Michael Holding
Joel Garner
First-reserve seam-bowler: Anderson Roberts
Reserve spinner: Bhagwat Chandrasekhar
First-reserve batsman: Javed Miandad

Hell of a lot of Australians and West Indians in there... :mellow:
 

Burgey

Request Your Custom Title Now!
Firstly, welcome Joel to the forum.

I kind of got the impression from your post that it was more to do with the entertainment/ character factor rather than saying one way or another that a certain group/ era was better technically than another.

My view is that from a purely entertainment point of view it's a near-run thing. I say that in a general sense rather than saying that this era has a better group of greats than the past era, which I don't think it does.

The impact of ODIs and other factors on modern techniques certainly means that run rates have increased, whilst the standard of fielding today, which I find entertaining in itself, is vastly superior. So, to that extent this era is very entertaining.

I saw a lot of cricket in the 70s and 80s, so to a large extent I probably look at it through rose coloured glasses. I certainly believe that there were far more characters around then than now.

Lloyd was a great leader who gelled a culturally diverse side into world beaters, Richards had that swagger even in an era dominated by sheer pace, there was the Andy Roberts glare and Holding's fluidity.

You had the (perceived?) arrogance of Greig, the eccentricity of Knott, the stoicism of Boycott. Then Botham came along.

Imran came along and began to take Pakistan to new levels, as did Javed. Both were characters in their own right. One a pin-up boy, the other irrascible.

Gavaskar and Kapil were both great for India, as was Vishy and Vensakar, although he was pretty young then iirc.

New Zealand saw the emergence of Hadlee who, along with Howarth then Coney and others began to make NZ more consistently competitive as a team, to the point where they seemed to believe they could take on anyone.

For Australia there were the Chappells, Marsh, Lillee, Thommo and, arguably the biggest character of all, Dougie Walters.

So certainly it as an era of great characters, perhaps because, at least until Packer came along, there was still an air of innocence about cricket at that time.

In terms of entertainment, all of the players I've listed above brought certain qualities to the game (Boycott perhaps more for the purist than the wider watching community). Their personalities and auras entertained. Today, I don't think players can do that because of the wider scrutiny placed upon them owing to their professionalism. They perhaps fear saying anything for fear of it being misinterpreted or used by opponents as ammunition against them.

Certainly, as Andrew Symonds found out in England 2005, you can no longer go out on a bender and front up to play, even against Bangladesh. It's a far cry from the early-mid 80s when Wayne Phillips apparently went out to bat in a tour match in Zimbabwe wearing a walkman.

Was the game itself more entertaining then though? That's actually not an easy question to answer. By the mid-80s people were worying about the death of spin bowling, such was the domination of pace. Similarly, slow over rates were perceived as killing the game of cricket, to the point where the 90 over rule had to be introduced. The game today is more diverse than it was, and offers more variety in terms of the influence of spin, which became less and less through the 70s and 80s. Also, 250-260 runs per day was considered exceptional in those days. That in itself does not mean the play was dull, as anyone who loves test cricket would tell you, but it says something about how the game has developed as a spectacle to where it is now, for better or for worse.

Joel, a really good, thought-provoking 1st post imo. After going through everything I've mentioned again, I still can't say which is the more entertaining era, tbh!
 
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silentstriker

The Wheel is Forever
I think the fact that virtually every game has a result automatically makes this a pretty good era. I would certainly have liked to see guys like Lillee, Marshall, Garner, etc play live, and their individual excitement might have made up for the overall rubbishness of the match that you knew would end in a draw...but I think in terms of cricket matches in general, I would definitely prefer this era.
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
I don't know, really - the main reason the game is so result-orientated at the current time is because of rules meaning (at last) that a certain number of overs have to be bowled, and that if rain or poor over-rates happen there are ways to compensate.

Would the game with the hundreds of fine players which we currently don't have have been better with these alterations? Sure. But do they compensate for the current dearth of talent? I don't think so.
 

silentstriker

The Wheel is Forever
I don't know, really - the main reason the game is so result-orientated at the current time is because of rules meaning (at last) that a certain number of overs have to be bowled, and that if rain or poor over-rates happen there are ways to compensate.
Yup, and thats why its more exciting now. If we had the same result oriented rules back then, than I am sure it would have been more exciting.

When you play for five days without losing any time, there really shouldn't be a draw unless something really great happens (like a fantastic rearguard by someone).

Richard said:
Would the game with the hundreds of fine players which we currently don't have have been better with these alterations? Sure. But do they compensate for the current dearth of talent? I don't think so.
Guess we just disagree on that point.
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
Something I'd be really interested in would be results stats in England, New Zealand, Australia and West Indies (outside Guyana and Antugua) in the 70s and 80s. I wonder how many bore-draws (ie, games that were always nailed-on draw certainties) there really were.

I've only ever skimmed through the archives so far as series scorelines are concerned, but most of these long boring constant-draw series seem to have been in Pakistan and India.
 

silentstriker

The Wheel is Forever
Something I'd be really interested in would be results stats in England, New Zealand, Australia and West Indies (outside Guyana and Antugua) in the 70s and 80s. I wonder how many bore-draws (ie, games that were always nailed-on draw certainties) there really were.

I've only ever skimmed through the archives so far as series scorelines are concerned, but most of these long boring constant-draw series seem to have been in Pakistan and India.
Yea, they might have been. As a purist, I don't mind low scoring rates and in fact I always find it more interesting, provided that the low scoring rate is due to some very good bowling (being a guy who always prefers bowlers to batsman). But when you're not really doing anything, and the bowling is mediocre....it's really not good cricket IMO. There seemed to be a lot more of those back then.

Right now, the bowling is mediocre often, but the batting is more aggressive, so you do get a lot of results. Ideally, I'd have it the other way around where batting was defensive and the bowling was top class, so 70s/80s would be the ideal time for cricket for me, if the current rules were in place then.
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
I think it's fairly straightforward, personally - better (ie, more accurate) bowlers meant lower scoring-rates.

Sure, you don't really want to see an out-of-form Geoff Boycott scratch around for a session for 21* against 3 spinners on a totally non-turning wicket plus a couple of mediocre seamers who hardly bowl, but I actually hugely enjoyed Michael Atherton's 133 at Karachi in 2000\01 (and even more in hindsight when we won the game) which was massively criticised before the victory. And the bowling was hardly first-rate (though not terrible either with a Waqar, a Saqlain and a Kaneria), it was just a decent if slow pitch and a batsman who was deliberately making a conscious effort to play safety-first.

And even with a few overs lost, a result was still possible.
 

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