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Vivian Richards vs Sachin Tendulkar

Who was the better Test match batsman?


  • Total voters
    90
  • Poll closed .

Precambrian

Banned
Ponting's 55% of career runs have come from 4 or 5 grounds in Australia. Sachin's top 5 grounds have conributed abt 30% of his career runs and one of them is SCG. Sachin has performed well against spin, swing and bounce. Ponting has done exceptionally on bouncy tracks, but is a cropper on spin dens (India - 8 test maches average of 12), and average in swinging conditions (England - avg - 42)

Tendulkar is much versatile and have performed all round the world than Aus-SA-WI (!)Ponting
 

Precambrian

Banned
Had Ponting been born in India, he'd been probably defected to ICL and playing as a useful lower order bat with a bit of medium pace bowling.

And as regards to Sachin's matchwinning centuries away from home, he is hardly to be blamed, as there are ten other players responsible for winnng matches. It's not Sachn alone who bas and wins test matches. Had India possessed bowlers of the calibre of McGrath or Warne, this comment wouldnt have come up and thats why I bwlieve this concept of "matchwnning" centuries is bull crap.
 

Ikki

Hall of Fame Member
Ponting's 55% of career runs have come from 4 or 5 grounds in Australia. Sachin's top 5 grounds have conributed abt 30% of his career runs and one of them is SCG. Sachin has performed well against spin, swing and bounce. Ponting has done exceptionally on bouncy tracks, but is a cropper on spin dens (India - 8 test maches average of 12), and average in swinging conditions (England - avg - 42)

Tendulkar is much versatile and have performed all round the world than Aus-SA-WI (!)Ponting
Ponting can only play on grounds the rest of his team does and are instructed to do. You are talking aggregate figures. What you should talk about are averages. If Ponting has played only 10 tests, for example, in a certain country, what is his average? As his record shows, he is great everywhere bar India.
 

Precambrian

Banned
Ponting can only play on grounds the rest of his team does and are instructed to do. You are talking aggregate figures. What you should talk about are averages. If Ponting has played only 10 tests, for example, in a certain country, what is his average? As his record shows, he is great everywhere bar India.
Instructed?

Consider his average in England also. Not "great". And he's hardly played in Pakistan to set the record. But I will ignore that.

Pontng's done well against the toothless WI attack of the 00s, while Sachin played when the two WWs were at their peaks. Ponting doing well in Australia is hardly surprising, coz he;s literally brought up playing in those 5 grounds. Show me one ground which Ponting can call his, like Sachin could call the SCG, overseas. Accept it, Ponting;s just a backfoot prodigy who's done exceptionally in SA, NZ and Aus against mostly weak bowling attacks. And he's ultra crap front foot against spinners in the Indian subcontinent.
 

Ikki

Hall of Fame Member
Instructed?

Consider his average in England also. Not "great". And he's hardly played in Pakistan to set the record. But I will ignore that.

Pontng's done well against the toothless WI attack of the 00s, while Sachin played when the two WWs were at their peaks. Ponting doing well in Australia is hardly surprising, coz he;s literally brought up playing in those 5 grounds. Show me one ground which Ponting can call his, like Sachin could call the SCG, overseas. Accept it, Ponting;s just a backfoot prodigy who's done exceptionally in SA, NZ and Aus against mostly weak bowling attacks. And he's ultra crap front foot against spinners in the Indian subcontinent.
Except, no one made the point that Ponting did well against Windies, pre-2000 or post. Sachin did well against Australia and Windies, Ponting did well against the Saffies and the Pakistanis. Two different successful records.

Your points are just dreadful. If doing well overseas is something to tout, why would you tout SCG, which is the closest ground to bowling in India?

And I am pretty sure Ponting can call Durban and Colombo his. ;)

ADD: if averaging 42 in England is 'not great' then Tendulkar is 'not great' in Zimbabwe, Pakistan and New Zealand whilst being even less than "not great" in S.Africa. Here is where I ask people to actually go look at the two players' record in question. Because there is a double-standard here which is pretty disgusting to me.
 
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Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
one question to richard ?

This poll will close on 31-03-2009 at 10:52 PM any particular reason ??? :confused:

only thing i can think is for you a year is 356 days ??? :laugh:
Not entirely sure why I picked 356 instead of 365 - may just have been that my fingers landed on the keys the wrong way around. But no matter - I'm happy to have it closing on the last day of a month.
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
Sorry, Richard...... There is no way you are going to convince me that Sachin carried his team more than Lara did.....



India were always a very very good batting side at home... Sachin was the star and the best, but the others were more than handy, esp. given some of the sides we faced in the mid to late 90s...... The only real quality side we faced were possibly the Walsh led Windies (who beat us), Hansie lead Saffies (we won mostly coz of some bad umpiring in 96 and were walloped in 2000, in the fixing year)... I really don't remember any other really good side we faced at home. England and the excuses they brought for spinners were laughable and the 98 Aussie side wouldn't have won much anywhere... Paul Wilson opening the bowling says it all.. Kasper was nowhere near the bowler he went on to become and the likes of Robertson would have struggled to make Ranji sides..... You are making a mountain out of a molehill about Sachin carrying our batting.


Remember that as a youngster, he walked into a side with Manjrekar, Azharruddin, Shastri etc. as well..... Again, not great quality batsman but no way were they so bad that he had to carry them... He did carry them in away tests because most of them almost never performed in tours but that is the extent of it. And again IIRC, we didn't even tour much 94-96.... And in 96, Sourav and Dravid emerged. I am sure Lara had some good batsmen around him too, but for me, he was easily carrying more of a load than Sachin in that regard.


It is one point I always want to bring up to people who point out how Lara scores big in drawn or dead matches. The fact is, in most of those games, if he hadn't scored, they would have lost them too, instead of being draws...... That is how much they depended on him...
I wasn't attempting to suggest that Tendulkar neccessarily carried India more than Lara carried West Indies from 2001/02 onwards (and occasionally between 1997 and 2001 too). Merely that it'd be nonsense to suggest Tendulkar never carried India, as he did so many times, and that when Lara had to carry West Indies he changed his gameplan quite significantly compared to what it had been 1992-1996.
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
Peter May was considered the best batsman in the world for a period, how many remember him?
Most people who know that much about cricket history, TBH. May, however, was an underachiever at Test level, not unlike Mark Waugh.
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
BTW, if some Mod felt they could do the job without losing the will to live, is there any chance we could move any posts relating to Tendulkar-Ponting to the thread Master Morris so kindly created for the purpose?
 

Prince EWS

Global Moderator
BTW, if some Mod felt they could do the job without losing the will to live, is there any chance we could move any posts relating to Tendulkar-Ponting to the thread Master Morris so kindly created for the purpose?
If it's still not done in about 12 hours, I will do it. Too tired now though, with it being 4am in Sydney.
 

Perm

Cricket Web: All-Time Legend
Batting is about making runs - under all but the rarest circumstances, the more the better.
This fairly much sums up my thoughts on the matter. I feel, as does Richard, that people judge Richards as a cricketer, not purely as a batsman. As a basman I'd say he was perhaps the most freakishly special there was (behind Bradman), but that didn't always convert into runs.
 

Anil

Hall of Fame Member
This fairly much sums up my thoughts on the matter. I feel, as does Richard, that people judge Richards as a cricketer, not purely as a batsman. As a basman I'd say he was perhaps the most freakishly special there was (behind Bradman), but that didn't always convert into runs.
it doesn't always convert to runs for any batsman, expect maybe the don...that's not a good enough reason to rate him down, he was a match winner for most of his career, the most feared presence at the crease for any bowler during that time...that basically says right there that his approach converted into runs when it counted...the windies had some exceptional batsmen in their lineups during his time and he didn't always need to make tons of runs...but with his approach, to score at an average of 50 overall during that time with his kind of strike rate and importantly batting in the top order is as exceptional as it comes...
 

Sanz

Hall of Fame Member
This fairly much sums up my thoughts on the matter. I feel, as does Richard, that people judge Richards as a cricketer, not purely as a batsman. As a basman I'd say he was perhaps the most freakishly special there was (behind Bradman), but that didn't always convert into runs.
Batting is not just about making runs, it about how you score them, who are your oppositions, what situation you score them and what effect does it have on your opposition and your team.

Richards, in most cases, is judged only by his batting. He was so good as a batsman that people often ignore the fact that he was one of the best fielders of his time.
 

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