Is this the most bowler dominated era of cricket?

 

There is an increasing obsession to convince ourselves that everything we are seeing is the best it has ever been. It is a rampant obsession in almost every modern sport. There is a lot of discussion amongst the cricket fraternity currently about whether this bowler dominated era is making batting harder than it has ever been before. When I say era it would probably be more correct to say half decade, but following on from a superb piece on cricinfo a few weeks ago the debate needs to be expanded to look at how effective the batting against these bowling attacks is, too.

The most common thing to do when looking at players past and present is to put too much emphasis on comparing stats directly against one another. Whilst having Test match averages such as Don Bradman’s 99.94 means we know who was probably the best batsman to grace the game, the ability to compare Mike Atherton’s career average of 37.69 against Rory Burns’s average to date of 33.90 is much trickier. The game has changed so dramatically even in the time I have been following it (the first Test match I went to was England vs India in 1990) so comparing eras with stats alone can be futile.

However, it would be hard to argue with the suggestion that India’s pace attack, for instance, isn’t the best that they’ve ever had and, in truth, you don’t need to look at the numbers to determine that. Although they have produced talented pace bowlers such as Javagal Srinath and Zaheer Khan over the last 30 years, they have never had three or four of the quality of Jasprit Bumrah, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Mohammed Shami and Umesh Yadav that they have available now.

It would also be tricky to debate whether any England pace attack consisting of Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad could not be their best simply because they are the nation’s two leading wicket takers. Nevertheless, the famed 2005 pace attack of Andrew Flintoff, Steve Harmison, Matthew Hoggard and Simon Jones might possibly have been the most potent, but injury sadly meant we never saw that foursome in tandem again.

Elsewhere though it would be tricky to say with any certainty that the pace attacks of Australia, Pakistan, South Africa, or the West Indies are the best they have had. In fact, in the case of Pakistan and the West Indies we can categorically say it is a long way from the best pace attacks they have had because they have such a rich tradition in this field. Curtly Ambrose, Joel Garner, Michael Holding, Malcolm Marshall, Andy Roberts and Courtney Walsh to name a few of the West Indies greats and for Pakistan the likes of Shoaib Akhtar, Wasim Akram, Imran Khan and Waqar Younis ruled supreme.

In the case of Australia there is probably a small argument to be had for the current generation but it’s impossible to look past the potency of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thompson’s era when they bullied teams with their pace and aggression, or the supreme side of the late 90s featuring Jason Gillespie, Brett Lee and Glenn McGrath along with some fairly decent back up options (and a not too shabby leg spinner of course).

When you come to South Africa, options for their pace attack over recent years have been plentiful. In Dale Steyn they’ve probably produced the best fast bowler in recent memory but it would be hard to look beyond the pace attack they could field in the late 90s of Allan Donald, Makhaya Ntini, Shaun Pollock and a couple of overs from Jacques Kallis so they could rest.

So, we can see that the bowling in today’s era is clearly abundantly talented, but it would be hard to say that it is the greatest era we have seen. Listing out the bowlers and their wonderful strike rates and averages does not really tell the whole story though and to really analyze how strong an era this is, the batting must be closely examined too.

We are fortunate to witness players of the caliber of Babar Azam, AB de Villiers, Virat Kohli, Steve Smith and Kane Williamson but the gap, in this era, between the truly great players and the rest is arguably greater now than it ever has been.

The current bowling attacks certainly don’t make it easy to score big runs, but it shouldn’t excuse England being bowled out for under 90 three times in a calendar year. The brittle nature of batting line ups has resulted in more occurrences of batting collapses in recent years than at any other point I can remember. There are some brilliant bowlers around in the game now certainly but to look at just the bowling averages without adding context about how poor some of the batting is doesn’t really tell the full story.

                                              ~Tarun Choudhary