Who all are 8,9 ,9.5 then ? Nobody?Alastair Cook - 4
Hashim Amla - 4
AB de Villiers - 4
Michael Clarke - 4
Kevin Pietersen - 4
Just so it's clear what I define as 10....that is Bradman.
watJust so it's clear what I define as 10....that is Bradman.
Not all diamonds are the same hardness - and not all 10's have to be Bradmanesque.You could do it like the Mohs scale. The difference in hardness between Diamond (10) and Corundum (9) is much greater than that between all the other minerals.
So the best players after Bradman get nine, and you simply need to remember how big the gap is.
This.I don't quite get the Bradman thing. If 10 is the upper ceiling that's a limitation of the methodology. The best player doesn't have to be the benchmark for the upper limit. It doesn't mean no one else can also be 10 or that there can't be 9's because no one else has an average beyond the 50's. As far as I'm concerned Richards, Sobers, Lara and Tendulkar are all 10's.
This reminds me of when Cribb tried to measure a player's career mathematically. We got a list of most players failing to make a score of 1, a decent specialist bat scored 1-2, and anyone who was real standout got 2 or above. The top ten batsmen of all time scored 3-5 except Bradman, who scored 10.Alastair Cook - 4
Hashim Amla - 4
AB de Villiers - 4
Michael Clarke - 4
Kevin Pietersen - 4
Just so it's clear what I define as 10....that is Bradman.
As far as I'm concerned the truly great players are 10's. Not sure that Mark Waugh is a benchmark for anything unless you want your trees pruning.