Switching eras, the bottomline

Written by Sreeram Ramachandran & Jatin Thakkar

Thursday, 25 October 2007

Trying to credit or discredit the batsmen based on the eras they played is pointless, and leads to nowhere in particular. It has been discussed and acknowledged several times over before.

It would, however, be interesting to try and picture what would happen when we try and interchange the eras that these batsmen played in. The immediate picture is that of Richards flaying modern attacks, and almost with the listlessness of a highly-ranked Commander-in-Chief asked to tackle minor pickpockets, going about gorging on runs and records. Perhaps the guile and trickeries of modern-day bowling would have troubled him a bit. Perhaps he might have had a few problems handling the advanced use of reverse swing, the slower balls, the dead, swampland wickets of Sri Lanka. But at any rate, the modern game with its subtleties, subterfuges and general lack of rawness seems inappropriate for Richards' aura and belligerence, and he seems best fit to have ravaged the helmetless eras when fast bowlers were fast bowlers looking to break bats and bones, and not clever little buggers sneaking in deliveries from the back of the hand.

As for Ponting, you can picture him soldiering on with the same resoluteness and pugnacity that he does now against the West Indian quicks. It would, however, be interesting to see how he coped with the most skilful set of exponents of spin bowling in the history of the game, India's spin quartret from the 70's, who Richards managed to tame in his very first series.

Perhaps Ganguly would be the worst to suffer in this transposing of eras. The absence of helmets and other protective gear would have perhaps rendered his famed weakness chest-upwards on the leg side raw and exposed. But that is a problem that has always been built of more hype than substance, and it is reasonable to imagine that with his bullheadedness and grit, he would have survived the body blows.

What would certainly have survived, and there is no doubt about it, irrespective of eras, irrespective of whether it was Garner, Larwood, Voce, Lee, Mc'Grath, Roberts or Ambrose bowling, would have been the elegant, effusive and extraordinarily beautiful offside play. It probably wouldn't matter who the bowler was, or what year it was, anything remotely loose on the off-side would bring the best out of Ganguly.

The interesting thing that the previous pages reveal is that there is little overlapping, and each batsmen has his own space in the long and wide galleries of cricket's history. Richards probably converted more people to cricket than anyone else in the game, and many who have seen him walk on to the pitch remember covering in admiration and reverence. He was more than runs, he was about dominion, and as the stats show, one of the foremost bulwarks of on which the West Indian era of terror was built. Ponting is probably cricket's least statesmanlike captain, and one of the games least liked but most respected batsmen, and clearly a 'Test Match Special'. Ganguly is to ODI's what Ponting is to Tests, and in a land where heroes rise and fall everyday, he has caught and held popular imagination for over a decade.

The lines differentiating what each batsmen stood for are clear. They do not, perhaps, suggest who would give the maximum returns between the three when selected to play, but they do suggest the dreamy prospects of a batting line up with Ganguly at number 2, Ponting at 3 and Richards at number 4.

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