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The ATG Teams General arguing/discussing thread

Logan

U19 Captain
Lara averages 34 against Ind after playing 17 Tests. Good sample size.

Sobers averaged 15 in NZ after playing 7 Tests there. Good enough sample size.

Lara too averages 36 in NZ after playing 7 Tests. Good sample size

I do agree Richards sample size is small.

I was just pointing out stats. Nothing else
 

OverratedSanity

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Chappell was barely tested against quality spin in the subcontinent. Never toured India, played one series in Pakistan played on pitches which provided the spinners no help. Don't think him averaging 40+ "everywhere" is some great feat remotely comparable to Sachin having multiple successful tours of every nation.

I think the discussion around "you have to average x in country a, b, c" thing in this thread is mostly contextless garbage anyway. Cricket isn't a ****ing checklist.
 

honestbharani

Whatever it takes!!!
Sure, but in my view that renders the stat fundamentally meaningless. Not to say that India haven't been the consistently best team in said period, just that that particular measure is so laughably far from robust that it's easier just to ignore it and look at other things.

Personally I think a WC win and two SF runs and consistent performance outside of those (looking at you, post-2015 Australia) means that it's a perfectly supportable assertion. Just pushing back at the desire to quantify things in ways that shouldn't be quantified.
Yeah of course but "our second XI is better than your second XI" has never felt like a compelling point to me.

I remember being astounded as a kid following a rugby league season when I realised the team running second last in first grade was running first in reserve grade. If every club in the comp had the sort of rotation and trial policies ODI teams have had this decade, then this team probably would've done really well, but it it obviously wouldn't suddenly mean their full strength team was good.

Don't get me wrong, India have absolutely been the best ODI team for the past eight years or so and I don't think them losing a semi-final they would've won four times out of five suddenly means their best players are no good, but win:loss ratio isn't really a great way of showing that IMO. Not only because of what Spark said but because of the different makeup of home/away games and different percentages of games against different opposition. It's a lazy stat to show something that happens to be true, and at the end of the day people arguing a good case poorly annoys me a lot more than people arguing a bad case.
I agree with both your broad points but I don't think it ever got as bad as teams fielding their second XIs, especially in ODIs. T20Is were more like what you were describing. Teams mostly played most of their best players in ODIs with the experimentation being around rotation than a complete mash up of the side. So I guess you can conclude reasonably that in an era where teams kept rotating their best players, India still had the best side overall. I agree it does not mean much especially given we have world cups every 4 years and teams are always building towards that, but it is still something. :) Also agree India have been the 90s RSA when it comes to ODIs, been the best ODI side in terms of overall results, looks a team that will win the cup, but blows it away in key KO games. Hopefully that changes real soon, feel it will too with Virat being the captain. Guy has made a career out of correcting mistakes and blemishes in his records, will be surprised if that does not happen with his LO captaincy too, and yes, I am including IPL here.

Ee saala revenge namadhe... :p

Dhoni is definitely not better than Bevan as an ODI batsman. Bevan accomplished as much as Dhoni statistically in a far more difficult batting era against far superior bowling attacks.

Dhoni was not any better than Gilchrist as ODI keeper. Are you forgetting he kept to quality spinners for literally his entire time as keeper? Dhoni is more unproven keeping to quicks than Gilly is keeping to spinners.

The thing is, you need to fit a keeper into an ATG side. Your choices are basically Gilchrist or Dhoni, though in recent times you might consider Buttler as an outside chance.

Playing Gilchrist gives you an aggressive opener who is going to either win you a game, set up the game or get out of the way for the middle order. Gilchrist was the best aggressive opener of his era - the era where the formula for winning was to have both an aggressive opener and a high averaging anchor (Tendulkar was the exception to the rule since he combined both).

Playing Dhoni gives you a great middle order safety net who could chase virtually any total down.

Pitching Buttler gives you the fastest scorer in history who is less reliable than Dhoni and a worse keeper than the other two.

Who you pick depends as much on what you need as anything else. An argument can be made for any of the three.

If you pick Dhoni, you can pick Jayasuriya to partner him which gives you a serious bowling option or you can pick a specialist batsman.

The argument here is that you would pick Rohit. But I don't think he'd fit the balance of the side at all. He would chew up way too many balls that the superior batsmen could use. I would argue that you're better off picking Roy who can bat more aggressively.

In fact, given the lack of bowling options amongst the best middle order batsmen, I'd argue you're best of with an all rounder - Jayasuriya or at a pinch Watson. But not Rohit.

I think it is close enough between Bevan and Dhoni that you can argue either way. I think Dhoni is easily better as a batsman alone than Bevan in ODIs but they are both ATGs and in my top 5 all time ODI batsmen, so its fine if you think otherwise. Don't want to run into a stats battle over this - but I will put it this way, I am not opening with Rohit and Sachin. I get Lara and Sachin to open, they are amongst the greatest batsmen of all time, across formats, they can play different tempos, styles, conditions, types of bowlers etc. And they will have the right-left combo going. Both have awesome records as openers as well, to boot. And given Lara + Dhoni is miles better than Gilchrist + Bevan, I think picking Dhoni is easy for me. Also because he will be the best captain in the side and coz he is more proven against pace as a keeper than Gilly is against spinners, and he is a better keeper to spinners than anyone to have ever played the LO game. He creates chances out of nowhere. He was basically India's 6th bowler and the only reason Yuvi remained a viable 5th bowler for India across an entire WC. Also, he is the DRS King.

And, plus, I don't think Bevan ever did this:


No, I will never stop posting this.

EDIT: Holy **** I didn't realise how hard Ashwin tried to lose that game. Wtf was he thinking trying to ramp that first ball of the last over?
Ethical mind works in its own calculations, Sparky.. :p

That's a bit unfair to both Ashwin, who at the time was still a very solid ODI bowler, and Zaheer Khan
He only played few games that WC but yeah was very good when he did play.

Flintof good by Pommie standards but meh otherwise and Klusener has a couple of awrslme years but otherwise unexceptional. Kapil a top shout imo but I always really liked him so probably biased
The 7 and 8 slots will forever be up for debate in an AT ODI XI, there are just so many different options you can go with, no one can conclusively prove one is better than the other IMO.


If you absolutely muuuuust do that kind of average era adjustment then you should do it properly and formulate it in terms of above-replacement level, i.e. how much better a certain player was than a generic "median" standard international of the same type in the same era. Not just percentage comparisons.
Yep, the analysis is flawed mathematically, statistically and cricketingly :p
 

honestbharani

Whatever it takes!!!
Chappell was barely tested against quality spin in the subcontinent. Never toured India, played one series in Pakistan played on pitches which provided the spinners no help. Don't think him averaging 40+ "everywhere" is some great feat remotely comparable to Sachin having multiple successful tours of every nation.

I think the discussion around "you have to average x in country a, b, c" thing in this thread is mostly contextless garbage anyway. Cricket isn't a ****ing checklist.

Its like Bradman averaged almost 50% less when confronted with short pitched bowling from around the wicket with 7 men behind square on the on side.
 

_00_deathscar

International Debutant
You didn't get my point . I am saying all of Tendulkar, Kallis and Dravid should have averaged atleast 60 at one point in their career if their home pitches were like Aussie roads because their overseas average at one point in their career was better than Smith current overseas average.
I am not debating who is better batsman .

Basically I am trying to do a Stephen on Smith test average :ph34r:
Sachin's highest cumulative was 58.87 at the end (?) of his 90th test vs Zimbabwe in 2002.

Sachin's issue is that he started too early/young - and had an insanely long career span (which resulted in a very sharp decline at the end knocking a few points off his average - I recall even late into his career he was hovering just over 56 at one point) - see also, Ricky Ponting and many others.

He wasn't consistently averaging in the 40s until (starting) his 23rd test, and only hit a cumulative 50 average starting his 29th test. For some, that's 25% of a career right there (or higher in some cases). He was a literal child when he started playing.

He also didn't have the 'peak' of a Ricky Ponting or a Kohli/Smith (although not sure re: either if you adjust for eras/averages etc) - but more that he was consistently great throughout without really piling on the runs (relatively few 150+ or 200+ scores, but lots of 50+-100+).
 
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ankitj

Hall of Fame Member
Tendulkar had most 150+ scores in history of test cricket last time I checked.
 
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Slifer

International Captain
Lara averages 34 against Ind after playing 17 Tests. Good sample size.

Sobers averaged 15 in NZ after playing 7 Tests there. Good enough sample size.

Lara too averages 36 in NZ after playing 7 Tests. Good sample size

I do agree Richards sample size is small.

I was just pointing out stats. Nothing else
Lara's record vs India is one of those head scratchers just like Sobers' vs NZ. Lara mostly played India at home and at no point did they have a particularly strong attack. Sobers is even worst. Anybody have any idea why Sobers sucked so bad vs a moderate NZ attack??
 

Coronis

Cricketer Of The Year
Tendulkar had most 150+ scores in history of test cricket last time I checked.
He also has the most innings in the history of test cricket. I believe he’s saying during their peak periods he didn’t “go big” as much as the other players mentioned. Funnily enough he actually has a better career ratio of 150 to 100 than any of Ponting, Kohli or Smith. A testament to his consistency over time. Starting at 16 was almost certainly why he never averaged over 60 at any point in his career.
 

Coronis

Cricketer Of The Year
Lara's record vs India is one of those head scratchers just like Sobers' vs NZ. Lara mostly played India at home and at no point did they have a particularly strong attack. Sobers is even worst. Anybody have any idea why Sobers sucked so bad vs a moderate NZ attack??
His first series in NZ was prior to his establishment as a batsman (he’d only scored 1 fifty and 0 centuries at that point) his second tour was less than a week after a 5 test tour in Australia and was kind of the beginning of his decline it seems.
 

Red

The normal awards that everyone else has
Rohit and Dhoni(WK) is a much better ODI combo than Gilchrist(WK) and Bevan . No way Gilchrist is a better ODI batsman than Rohit . AFAIC Gilchrist is permanently out of ODI ATXI spot.
Lol. Gilchrist had a ten point higher SR than Rohit and played a decade earlier. But, sure.


And fwiw I'm not including Bevan in any of my ATG XIs, so yeh.
 

Red

The normal awards that everyone else has
Except that you're the one dismissing Sharma as an "overrated, modern stat padding flat track bully" while refusing to consider that Gilchrist may also have had technical weaknesses, just because he played in a previous era in a side that won World Cups.

EDIT : @Stephen
I don’t think no Aussie cricketer except with the possible exception of McGrath deserves a spot in a ATG ODI eleven.

Rohit > Gilchrist as an opener

Kohli > Ponting as middle order batsman

Dhoni > Bevan as finisher

Kapil > Symonds as all round option

Saqlain and Murali > Warne as a spinner
Only someone who has a personal bias will say someone averaging 36 as an opener is better than someone averaging 57 as an opener.
Gilchrist has 2 centuries in Asia in 55 games . He simply wasn't good enough to be even flat track bully .
Gilchrist isn’t even Australia’s best ODI opener and some people he think he should open alongside Sachin in ATG ODI eleven.
Do these guys get the same warnings others get via email about forum atmosphere for this sort of posting?

Gilchrist is accepted into plenty of standard ATG ODI XIs, it's not controversial. All this anti-Australian **** coming from this bloc of Indian posters is pretty tiresome.


The men's ODI XI of the last 25 years | ESPNcricinfo 25 year Anniversary | ESPNcricinfo.com
 

Slifer

International Captain
Chappell was barely tested against quality spin in the subcontinent. Never toured India, played one series in Pakistan played on pitches which provided the spinners no help. Don't think him averaging 40+ "everywhere" is some great feat remotely comparable to Sachin having multiple successful tours of every nation.

I think the discussion around "you have to average x in country a, b, c" thing in this thread is mostly contextless garbage anyway. Cricket isn't a ****ing checklist.
Devil's advocate here but I dont see why all this hubbub over trying to knock down what Chappell achieved. It's not like Tendulkar played all atg attacks during his time. As memory serves me Tendulkar did also play quite a few tests vs the 'mighty' Zimbabwe and Bangladesh. No team Chappell played was remotely as bad as those two teams.
 

srbhkshk

International Captain

Red

The normal awards that everyone else has
Devil's advocate here but I dont see why all this hubbub over trying to knock down what Chappell achieved. It's not like Tendulkar played all atg attacks during his time. As memory serves me Tendulkar did also play quite a few tests vs the 'mighty' Zimbabwe and Bangladesh. No team Chappell played was remotely as bad as those two teams.
Yeh, I'm sure Chappell would've enjoyed 7 tests against Bang where he averaged 130 or 9 against Zim averaging 76.

Chappell just had to be content with the best record in the Supertests:

Greg Chappell scored by far the most runs in the SuperTests, 1416 at 56.60 from 14 games, including 621 at 69 in three matches against a full-strength West Indies attack in the only series played outside Australia.
 

Slifer

International Captain
Yeh, I'm sure Chappell would've enjoyed 7 tests against Bang where he averaged 130 or 9 against Zim averaging 76.

Chappell just had to be content with the best record in the Supertests:
Just so we're clear, I was advocating For Chappell. In hate the people who try to knock his record for any number of silly reasons. The guy is an atg and imo should be in any atg Oz Xi....
 

ataraxia

International Coach
Just read 15 pages of Australians and Indians fighting. Real waste of time.

Tendulkar
Rohit
Kohli
ABDV
Gilchrist/Richards
Dhoni +

I don't do this crap adjusting for era thing here. In an ODI XI Bevan will score far too slow. I'm putting Gilchrist in at 5 to do what he did in Tests. Dhoni and Gilly are interchangeable here. The thing is, someone like Bevan won't magically strike 30 more in the modern day. I do do stuff like this in Tests, but that is because they had the ability to score and average at the same level as modern Test cricketers do. If you are going to obey this adjusting thing then you might as well open with Greenidge (ave 45, sr 65).
 

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