I've always found it weird kyear doesn't consider it much of a factor given how much time and effort he (reasonably, IMO) puts into making sure the all-time lineups he selects have good catchers.
I didn't say it's not a factor.
I actually made a post stating how important I see slip fielding to be to both team and individual success.
What I have said is how much do we deduct from the average or add to his wickets. Again how is that saying it should be down played.
Also some would point out that Botham had a very short peak and never performed even decently against the WI, or that Gavaskar's best selling point, his average vs the W.I was heavily boosted during the WSC days. I say all of that to say, everyone on this site knows about those factors, and factors them into their rankings of those players, similarly as PEWS, Subz, Smali or ORS knows about Wasim's difficulties with support and factors that in already.
PFK talks about why should we punish Wasim for playing longer, but one, it was past of his actual damn career and two, we don't automatically rate players just on numbers and ignore their peak. But it depends on the player, look at Viv and Ponting. Both had awful ends to their respective careers, but Viv is still seen as top 5 and Ponting in that second tier of batsmen. There's already nuance involved here and for the most part, the vast majority of posters who are coming after me, doesn't have Wasim rated any, if at all higher than I do (referencing a ratings vote completed about a month or so ago) most had Wasim on the tail end of the top 10 or just outside.
Again, with regards to my supposed hypocrisy regarding slip fielding, as stated above I've been the no 1 proponent on this site for factoring in slip fielding for ATG teams and player rankings and it's importance to team success is undeniable. If one looks at the great teams of the modern game, more if them had good cordons than had strong tails (not starting that conversation, because they are more a factor among evenly matched teams). So I've never downplayed it.
What I did say, which was misconstrued, was how can you consistently have a poor fielding team for over a decade. It's almost like there was no emphasis on it at all, to the point that they almost didn't care. As such I made a glib comment as to of they didn't care, why should we. But that's not downplaying the impact. But seriously why was Aamir in the slips that long.
So, I'm not downplaying the impact of cordon support, I'm saying it's hard to exactly quantify and for many it's already baked into their opinions of the player. Ironically though it's the posters who do play down fielding support, especially in the slips, who are pushing this now, but again not pushing back on that.
". Yeah because quantifying the impact of ball tampering is so easy right? Who gives a **** if his fielding support is quantifiable, it clearly was a disadvantage. It is incredible how blatantly inconsistent you guys are on players that aren't your favourites.
