This is fairly obvious but worth setting out. Over lunch, I set up the statsguru on cricinfo to list all the tests which have been played since 1999 to work out the number of players for each country which have been (i) world beaters and (ii) world class. The former being people like lara, the latter being people like Hayden. For each country here goes:
SA - (i) Donald, Kallis, Pollock
(ii) Smith, Ntini
Ind - (i) Dravid, Tenduklar
(ii) Dhoni, Sewag, Ganguly, Laxman, Harbajan, kumble
SL - (i) Jayasuriya, Muralitharan
(ii) sangakara, Jayawardene
NZ - (i)
(ii) Fleming, Vettori, Cairns
Zim - (i) Andy Flower
(ii) streak
WI - (i) Ambrose, Lara, Walsh
(ii) Chanderpaul, Gayle
Pak - (i) Akram, Waqar
(ii) Mushtaq, Inzamam, Mohammed Yusuf, Saeed Anwar, Younis Kahn
Aus - (i) Ponting, S Waugh, Gilchrist, Warne, McGrath
(ii) Hayden, Langer, M Waugh, Martyn, Lee, Gillespie, McGill, Clarke, Hussey
England, however, is impossible to judge given our nationality....
Who do we think?
I'd suggest
(i) nobody
(ii) Flintoff, Stewart, Gough, Atherton, Caddick, Trescothick, Hoggard, Vaughan, Thorpe, Pietersen, Hussein.
This might explain why we kept losing the ashes but we were pretty good against all other teams.
God, this analysis is painfully obvious isn't it. I'll post it anyway to see if it can induce some comments. Ben, you are free to apply the 'cuntometer' to the list if you so choose.
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6 comments:
Pat- I really enjoyed this analysis, thank you.
I would suggest that Pietersen might sneak into the i) catagory. Not sure, but he's certainly the closest we've had.
Is it worth creating an 'all-time greats' catagory for the likes of Sachin, Lara, Warne and Murali?
er, i'm working on a list of:
1) 'cunt beaters' and
2) cunt class.
can't actually; sniggering too much.
ok, i'm better now.
one interesting feature of pat's insightful analysis is what role do we see for statistics?
i consider there to be two issues:
1) whether, say, an average over 50 having played a good few games gets you into (i)?
2) how many wickets and what average do you need as a bowler?
given this, a good few would make the transition to i).
on another matter, i was really enjoying the icc cup until i noticed that some fuckhead had decided that a bowler's economy should be displayed instead of their average. this is the work of those fucking ipl lot. because average means nothing in the nonsense-nonsense format, they've infected odi. wankers. cuntometer's gone up to 9 on this one
fully recovered now.
the results are in, and
surprisingly, not to many 7+ cunts in that list (this is the score at which one turns into a massive cunt). except australians. and is this why they've been so good for so many years?
ntini is more of a rapist than a cunt. harabajan is a cunt, but annoys the hell out of australians, so this cancels his rating out. ganguly is probably the closest to a full blown cunt.
by the way, i'm flying cunt class to visit you all in November (well, may be not to visit pets; north of swindon is just too far north from singapore).
and pets, how does one edit a post without having to delete it?
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