Son Of Coco said:
Or.................good luck can only last a short time before it has to be considered that what a certain player is doing/achieving may not be solely due to a perceived amount of luck on your part.
Yes, and I've analysed the thing and explained why I think otherwise.
Despite all this forward thinking about the game Richard I doubt that even you can be entirely objective when considering different players and their respective careers. I'd suggest that in certain cases you've also made up your mind in one direction or the other based on a very small sample of what's happened over a player's entire career.
I've never done anything of the sort - there are plenty of players I've never denied have made improvement (Flintoff and Symonds, to name two).
I am, however, far more loath than some to jump quickly to the conclusion that players have made improvement, as recently exemplified by my saying that I don't believe 3 or 4 ODIs of wicket-taking makes-up, yet, for 3 years of being totally useless with regard Ian Butler.
As I've said before, you can't explain away 400 wickets + by saying a player has been lucky.......and I think you know who I'm referring to in this particular instance. If you watched the test the other day, you might have seen why this player gets so many wickets in cases where other bowlers of his ilk struggle. The ball that got Fleming and the ball that got Oram in the second innings are two such examples.........look to how NZ bowled in this test for examples of how not to bowl on a batsman's paradise.
Both were exceptional balls, I've almost never seen McGrath bowl those sort of balls on this type of pitch before - gotta say I really do wonder why I've never seen it (I've seen most of his Test-matches in the last 3 years) given how many chances he's had to produce it.
I've never attempted to explain away 400+ wickets, just 137. Indeed, it's actually fewer than that because a few of those wickets will have been gathered on pitches I've never said McGrath is anything but magnificent at exploiting.
Please stop saying that to me.