Ranking Nations in terms of producing Batsmen and Bowlers

[Zinzan]

Interesting question. If we're talking 'all-time' & making it 'relative' to the number of tests each country has played, then the Windies have a reasonable case in terms of all-time great batsmen with;

Headley
Lara
Richards
Sobers
Weekes
Walcott
Chanderpaul


Batting:
Aust/Windies/England - 1st =
South Africa - 4th
Pakistan - 5th

The rest

Pace Bowling:
Windies
Australia
England/South Africa
Pakistan

The rest

[Migara]

Originally Posted by doesitmatter

Australia is one country which consistently produces good teams and that means good/great batsmen and bowlers..That said..

Workman like batsmen

Australia/England/SA/NZ

Batsmen with flair

West Indies/India/ Pakistan and to an extent SL as well

Bowlers :

Fast : Aus, WI, Pak,SA
Spin : Aus,Eng,India,Pak

Very harsh on SL with spin department. They have been producing spinners on par with India and Pakistan since 1950s. Any one read about Sahabandu would know that SL had some serious spin talent out there.

[Daemon]

Originally Posted by sledger

WI haven't produced anyone good for years. All of their young players these days are terrible.

AWTA. That left arm chinaman that's being talked up these days is especially terrible.

[Slifer]

Again so what, in the history of test cricket WI is one or two in batsmen, one in fast bowling andwell probably 6 or 7 in spinners.

[Inferno]

West Indies are neither 1 or 2 in any department overall. That's why they have been crap for so many years. And they weren't just bad these last couple of years they were crap for a while in their beginning years too. Unless a magic portion was invented when I wasn't looking that prevents players from getting old their quality players will eventually run out. If you put the the best they have to offer they will probably be in the top 2 or 3 for about 20-25 years or so but after they run out of fuel they will once again be forced to pick the likes of Fidel Edwards and Darren Ganga.

Anyways, this seems pointless. All one has to do is go on statsguru and look at the numbers of teams overall in both department to figure this out.

[Bahnz]

Left Bangladesh out because they've only been around for a decade. It's also a bit tricky with Sri Lanka, as they've only been on the scene since the 1980's, and were pretty rubbish up until about 1993/94.

Batting
AUS
WI
ENG
IND
SAF
PAK
SRL
NZL

Fast Bowling
AUS
WI
SAF
PAK
ENG
NZL
IND
SRL

Spin Bowling
IND
AUS
ENG
SRL
PAK
WI
SAF
NZL

[Slifer]

Originally Posted by Inferno

West Indies are neither 1 or 2 in any department overall. That's why they have been crap for so many years. And they weren't just bad these last couple of years they were crap for a while in their beginning years too. Unless a magic portion was invented when I wasn't looking that prevents players from getting old their quality players will eventually run out. If you put the the best they have to offer they will probably be in the top 2 or 3 for about 20-25 years or so but after they run out of fuel they will once again be forced to pick the likes of Fidel Edwards and Darren Ganga.

Anyways, this seems pointless. All one has to do is go on statsguru and look at the numbers of teams overall in both department to figure this out.

I honestly dont get the jist of this post. If u mean WI arent one or two in producing top batsmen and bowlers now then u have a point but if u mean in crickets history then WI are easily top 3 in both quality batsmen/fast bowlers produced (esp when measured against tests played)

[SJS]

Who produces what is a very interesting question and the answers are not simplistic. However, addressed with a little bit of effort to understand the history, they can produce very fascinating analysis and fuel exciting debate.

There are three things, mainly, that determine bowling resources.

• Physical characteristics of different ethnic communities
• Ambient conditions
• Playing surfaces

Another aspect affects what young bowlers are more likely to take up and that is changes in laws of the game but that affects all nations although the effects can be felt more in one country than the others.

Batting follows what is happening with the bowling. If a country has wickets and, thereby, bowlers who lean towards a particular type of bowling, the batsmen will tend to play that type of bowling better than players from countries where such bowlers do not prosper.

I intend to show it by taking one bowling type at a time. And I am picking them at random - well not really . . .

Finger spin :-

By the time test matches began to be played at the beginning of the last quarter of the 19th century, over arm bowling had come to be accepted in the game almost universally. There were a few who bowled with a considerable round arm action, a la Malinga, among whom WG is the best known and the odd bowler could still bowl lobs since these were not banned in the game till Trevor Chappell and his skipper-brother decided to go into history in that infamous incident involving the Kiwis.

With over arm bowling, finger spin was the main form of bowling if one was to obtain lateral movement. Swing and swerve were not yet mastered and all bowlers, from very slow to the fastest, spun or broke the ball in to the right handed batsmen (away if the bowler was left handed). Initially, specially in England, it was left handed finger spinners, taking the ball away from the right handed batsmen, who were the big stars.

However, as batsmen started using the pads more and more and the laws began to be revised, the lbw proportion in the dismissals rose dramatically. Here is a very revealing stat. It shows the number of lbw's in England for years chosen between 1870 and 1923

YEAR	WKT's	LBW's	Prop.

1870	1772	44	1 in 40
1890	3792	219	1 in 17
1910	6704	491	1 in 14
1923	7919	921	1 in 8

As the batsmen started resorting to more use of the pad as a second line of defense and as the laws were modified to allow for lbw to be given for balls that pitched outside the off stump as well, so the number of off spinners in the English game.

TYPE	Player       	Span         	Mat	Wkts

LALS	R Peel       	1884-1896	20	101
LALS	J Briggs 	1884-1899	33	118
LALS	W Rhodes 	1899-1930	58	127
LALS	C Blythe 	1901-1910	19	100
LALS	H Verity 	1931-1939	40	144
LALS	JH Wardle 	1948-1957	28	102
OS	JC Laker 	1948-1959	46	193
LALS	GAR Lock 	1952-1968	49	174
OS	FJ Titmus 	1955-1975	53	153
OS	DA Allen 	1960-1966	39	122

The finger spinners from other countries during this period were . . .

Country	TYPE	Player       	Span         	Mat	Wkts

AUS	OS	GE Palmer 	1880-1886	17	78
AUS	OS	H Trumble 	1890-1904	32	141
AUS	LALS	JV Saunders 	1902-1908	14	79
SAF	LALS	CL Vincent 	1927-1935	25	84
IND	LALS	MH Mankad 	1946-1959	44	162
SAF	OS	HJ Tayfield 	1949-1960	37	170
WIN	OS	S Ramadhin 	1950-1961	43	158
WIN	LALS	AL Valentine 	1950-1962	36	139
WIN	OS	LR Gibbs 	1958-1976	79	309
IND	OS	EAS Prasanna 	1962-1978	49	189

During this period, the three countries that played test cricket almost throughout were Australia, England and South Africa. Here is the number of world class finger spinners they produced and those figures as a percentage of the number of tests each team played.

Era            	AUS	ENG	SAF

19th century	2	2	
1900's-10's	1	2	0
1920's-30's	1	1	0
1940's-60's	0	5	1

Total spinners	4	10	1
Total Tests	314	458	168

Factor       	1.3	2.2	0.6

England produced 1.5 times as many finger spinners as did Australia and 3.5 times as much as South Africa South Africa.

If we take the entire period till date, adding the 70's-80's as era 5 and 90's-00's as era 6, we find that India have over taken England as the country that produces the largest number of quality spinners with Pakistan catching up fast. Sri Lanka and Australia form the next cluster with Windies, South Africa and the Kiwis at the bottom of the heap.

Era            	IND	ENG	PAK	AUS	SRL	WIN	SAF	NZL

19th century		2		2				
1900's-10's		2		1			0	
1920's-30's		1		1			0	
1940's-60's	2	5		0		3	1	0

1970's-80's	2	1	2	2		0	0	0
1990's-00's	3	2	3	1	2	0	1	1

TOTAL FS	7	13	5	7	2	3	2	1
Tests        	468	930	369	750	219	488	374	379

Factor   	1.50	1.40	1.36	0.93	0.91	0.61	0.53	0.26

Clearly, the sub continent continues to provide surfaces for finger spinners to flourish and the wet and soft surfaces in England continue to attract finger spinners with the bite they are able to get. This is not likely to change any time soon as is the lack of finger spin in NZL, Windies and SAfrica.

The criteria for eligibility of bowlers to be included in the list was

1. Minimum 75 Test wickets (100 for the period after 1970's)
2. Under 35 bowling average (under 30 for 19th century)
3. Minimum 2.5 wickets per Test

. . . to be continued

[smalishah84]

:

great analysis

[SJS]

Leg Spin :-

As I mentioned earlier, wrist spin (mainly right arm leg spin) came later to the game than finger spin. The difficulty to control line and length made the art a les profitable on but there was another very important reason for that.

Bowling progressed from under arm to over arm in stages. In the first stage of over arm bowling, the arm and hand could not be raised above shoulder height. This meant that the action was a super exaggerated version of what Malinga has in so far as the hand was close to three feet away, horizontally from the shoulder. So much was over the shoulder bowling looked down upon that the terms throw or jerk were first used for bowling which we now understand as the only legitimate bowling, viz, overarm with arm above shoulder height. This was compounded with the lbw law.

Right arm leg breaks would not have been very attractive

As arms started getting straighter and higher, the faster bowlers started using the leg break as a weapon most famously the legendary Barnes. However flighted slow leg spin remained relatively behind the scenes till a Middlesex and England amateur "introduced into cricket the three-card-trick or the thimble-and-pea trick"

The English call Bernard, James Tindall Bosanquet's this mind-boggling invention of the turn of the century, the googly but the Australian name for it is 'bosey' in deference to "the man who first worked this big bluff on batsmen from both countries", Bernard James Tindall Bosanquet.

Starting with a table tennis ball on a dinner table, Bosanquet found that he could spin the ball from off to leg with a leg break action. Amid ridicule, laughs and jeers from his contemporaries, Bosanquet developed the delivery to the extent that he could bowl it with success in the first class game. But as AG Moyes writes, "the illegitimate member of the leg-break family . . . was just as uncontrollable as most delinquents . . . the first victim to it was stumped off one that bounced four times" Mailey is supposed to have yorked a Victorian batsman at the SCG off the third bounce !

While it was an Englishman who introduced the world to the devilry of the bosie, it was a trio of South Africans who 'commercialised' it, as it were, on the world stage. Between the home series against England in 1905-06 to the Triangular in England (Australia being the third team), Aubrey Faulkner, Reginald Schwarz and Albert Vogler claimed 201 Australian and English wickets in just 24 Test matches.

Year and Series	Tests	Wkts	 5w	 10w	 Avg	 S/R

1905-1906 SAF v ENG	5	41	0	0	19.1	47.7
1907 ENG v SAF       	3	36	2	0	19.6	44.2
1909-1910 SAF v ENG	5	65	6	1	22.3	40.8
1910-1911 AUS v SAF	5	39	2	0	34.4	50.7
1912 Triangular Series	6	20	1	0	34.2	67.3
						
Combined Total     	24	201	11	1	24.7	47.3

As can be seen from those figures the magic of the leg break/googly bowler was wearing thin by the second decade of the 20th century and then in 1914 came WWI. When the world returned to cricket after the war, a new breed of leg spin bowlers was being bred in another part of the Southern hemisphere albeit half way around the world, in Australia

Mailey, Grimmett and O'Rielly took the art of leg-break googly bowling, at the highest level, to a completely different plain. That they were all Australians, was not a coincidence. The bouncy hard wickets of Australia were ideal for the true purveyor of this new and deadly form of bowling and the Australians mastered it and have continued to produce world beaters till this day.

However, with the changing surfaces in Australia, the productivity in the leg-spin factory down-under has dropped with the gap between Benaud in the 50's and sixties and Shane Warne nearly half a century later, being telling. The intervening period was again taken up by the two emerging giants of the sub-continent who in the last half century have provided the world with Gupte, Chandra, Wadir, Mushtaq and Kumble.

Here are the leg spinners of the world who satisfy our criteria listed in chronological order

Country	Player	Span	Mat	Wkts

SAF	GA Faulkner 	1906-1924	25	101
AUS	AA Mailey 	1920-1926	21	118
AUS	CV Grimmett 	1925-1936	37	127
AUS	WJ O'Reilly 	1932-1946	27	100
IND	SP Gupte 	1951-1961	36	144
AUS	R Benaud 	1952-1964	63	102
IND	Chandrasekhar 	1964-1979	58	193
PAK	Abdul Qadir 	1977-1990	67	174
PAK	Mushtaq Ahmed 	1990-2003	52	153
IND	A Kumble 	1990-2008	132	122
AUS	SK Warne 	1992-2007	145	297
AUS	SCG MacGill 	1998-2008	44	159
SAF	PR Adams 	1995-2004	45	134
PAK	Danish Kaneria 	2000-2010	61	212

Once again it is clear that the surface determines the type of spinner. No Englishman has prospered long enough to make a mark at the highest level although in Wright they had a unique but highly expensive and difficult to manage bowler and in Freeman another who, at least at the first class level, had figures that were Bradmanesque if such a word could be used for a bowler.

South Africa fell away once the batsmen in the world found that, if you were to survive at the top, you had to be able to read the 'wrong one' and the best could. The other countries just did not produce bowlers of test class. There is no reason other than conditions for bowling to explain this. The second wrist spinner from South Africa who appears in the last era was Paul Adams whose USP was his action rather than the fact that he was a left handed wrist spinner. Most countries played him better after the first series except England who took three series to work him out :o)

Here are the the three countries that have produced leg spinners who qualify for our list . . .

Era/Decades	AUS	PAK	IND	SAF
				
19th century				
1900's-10's				1
1920's-30's	3			
1940's-60's	3		1	
				
1970's-80's		1	1	
1990's-00's	2	2	1	
				
TOTAL FS	6	3	3	1
Tests        	750	369	468	374

Factor   	0.80	0.81	0.64	0.27

Before we move away from spinners, I would like to come back to something I mentioned at the start of this article - that physical attributes determine what kind of bowlers an ethnic community produces. The fact that Australia produces leg spinners does not have to do with the physical attributes of Australians but that they produce fast bowers does. So while they produce leg spinners since the conditions help (still to an extent) the combination of conditions and physical attributes makes it an even bigger nursery for fast bowlers.

In the West Indies on the other hand, the fact that the best physical specimen were brought in those ships for the terrible purpose of selling them into centuries of slavery meant that those who survived the ordeal of the journeys had the potential to produce sportsmen in the most physically demanding of sporting ventures. Hence the American-African community produces sprinters after world beating sprinters while those whose ancesters were not considered strobg enough to be taken on those terrible ships, produce long distance runners. In West Indies, thanks to the English colonisation of so long, cricket attracted them and they produced some of the game's most ferocious fast bowlers. The Indian community, brought to the plantations of the Caribbean continues to find spin bowling to be a better way to try and make it to the top. The fact that conditions do not really encourage spinners has meant that not many have been able to emulate Ramadhin.

In the sub-continent, the evidence is strongest of this ethnic element to explain why Pakistan produces fast bowlers and India does not. I have mentioned it here before and some, mostly Indian friends, have disagreed. But the fact remains that when the country got partitioned, the areas which produced the biggest men, physically, mostly were in the North west of the country and hence went to what was then known as West Pakistan which is why a stream of fast bowlers continues to come from the west Punjab and the North western areas.

Before partition the fastest of Indian bowlers, at the domestic level as well, were players like Nissar, Khan Mohammad, Jehangir Khan etc. After partition we struggled to produce fast bowlers.

to be continued . . .

[NUFAN]

SJS, which world class finger spinner did you include from South Africa in the 90s/00s??

[Daemon]

He didn't

[NUFAN]

Era IND ENG PAK AUS SRL WIN SAF NZL

19th century 2 2
1900's-10's 2 1 0
1920's-30's 1 1 0
1940's-60's 2 5 0 3 1 0

1970's-80's 2 1 2 2 0 0 0
1990's-00's 3 2 3 1 2 0 1 1

TOTAL FS 7 13 5 7 2 3 2 1
Tests 468 930 369 750 219 488 374 379

Factor 1.50 1.40 1.36 0.93 0.91 0.61 0.53 0.26

Thanks Daemon.

[Daemon]

Oops. Was looking at the table for leggies.

Paul Adams is the only reasonable spinner I can think of that fit the criteria, but he was obviously not a finger spinner.

[NUFAN]

Yeah the reason why I asked was I couldn't think of anyone that would fit the criteria and after looking at the stats page Paul Harris is the closest to making the cut, but his average is over 35 so he doesn't make it.

Overall with what SJS has done, I've enjoyed his written article but find the figures misleading and not the best way of addressing the question. The criteria rewards average cricketers who played lots of matches.