James Anderson and how to gauge greatness

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/apr/21/james-anderson-how-to-gauge-greatness-cricket-england

Version 0 of 1.

WOULD ANDERSON MAKE ENGLAND’S ALL-TIME XI?

The first was Mark Vermeulen at Lord’s, bowled while playing inside the line of a delivery that came back down the slope and hit the top of his off stump. And the last, for now at least, Denesh Ramdin, done by a cutter that caught the outside edge and flew through to Alastair Cook at first slip. A little luck for one, then, and a lot of skill for the other. Apt that, given Jimmy Anderson began his career as one of England’s most richly gifted young quick bowlers, blessed with a talent he hardly seemed to understand, and is now, 12 years later, one of his sport’s master craftsmen, in control of every last little nuance of his art.

Between the two, 382 more. Enough altogether to break a record set by Ian Botham back in 1992, which, like so many other marks in English cricket, from Graham Gooch’s haul of 8,900 Test runs to Geoffrey Boycott’s tally of 22 Test centuries, stood for so long that the uppermost reaches of Wisden’s lists had been unchanged for a generation. Altogether, James Anderson now has 77 more than Fred Trueman’s 307. And Anderson is, undoubtedly, “bloody tired”, just as Trueman promised anyone who broke his record would be.

Since Anderson became a regular member of the England team in November 2006, he has bowled 20,179 balls in Tests, 27,577 in all international cricket. Astonishingly, both measures are around 20% higher than those of the next man, Stuart Broad in both instances. Since the end of 2007, Anderson has done a fifth-again as much work as any other bowler in international cricket. He may not be the greatest fast bowler around right now, but he is the hardest working.

Appropriate then, that Anderson is England’s leading wicket-taker in both Test and ODI cricket. We measure excellence in bowlers in all manner of different ways, from averages through to strike-rates through to five and 10 wicket hauls. By those standards, Anderson is good, but not great. Among the 103 fast bowlers who have taken at least 100 Test wickets, Anderson’s average, 29.77 as I type this, ranks 67th. Among the Englishmen above him, Geoff Arnold, Chris Old, and Graham Dilley. It has suffered, of course, from the very fact of his longevity, because his figures include the early, inconsistent, years, and the barren middle ones. Anderson’s strike-rate, 58.3, puts him 48th. His 16 five-wicket hauls, put him 17th, and his two 10-wicket hauls, 21st.

Anderson is not the most incisive then, nor the most influential, nor the most parsimonious. But he is the most enduring. Wickets taken is a measure of longevity, of fitness, and of excellence sustained over time. And in that, he’s the very best England have ever had. Which leads to the interesting question, would he make their All Time XI? Or even their best side of modern times? The BBC attempted to answer that question at the weekend. Or at least, they addressed some of the issues you’d have to consider.

They asked Test Match Special’s statistician, Andrew Sampson, to concoct a formula that would allow them to compare the achievements of bowlers from different eras. Sampson took England’s top wicket-takers, and assigned each of their wickets a value from one to 11, based on the career average of the batsmen they dismissed. The totals were divided by the number of wickets taken. And at the end of it all the man who came out top was … Matthew Hoggard. A prime candidate in a contest to find England’s best-loved bowler, perhaps, and a dead cert if we were looking for the player most often described as a “yeoman”. But a distant runner-up, surely, in this race.

Related: Jimmy Anderson, probably the most skilful bowler to hail from British shores | Ali Martin

Even Hoggard said he was “very surprised” to find himself top. The next three were Anderson, Stuart Broad, and Graeme Swann. Which tells you all you need to know about what went wrong. Modern batting averages, swollen out of all proportion to those of even the recent past, meant that advantage lay with men who had played in the last decade or so. No doubt Hoggard is underrated, but I wouldn’t much fancy having to tell Trueman, or even Anderson for that matter, that they were being cut from the team to play the Rest of the World so that he could get a game.

In among the maths, though, the BBC were on to something, in that the best way to compare bowlers from across eras is to look at how they measured up against the best batsmen of their time. Take Hoggard, for instance. During the span of his career, the top 10 batsmen in the world (judged by runs scored) were Ricky Ponting, Matthew Hayden, Jacques Kallis, Mahela Jayawardene, Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, Brian Lara, Kumar Sangakkara, Graeme Smith, and Justin Langer. A who’s who of batting in the era. And Hoggard does have a remarkably good record against them. He had the better of Hayden, who he dismissed six times in 12 games for an average of just 9.5. Likewise, Dravid, Jayawardene, Smith, and Sangakkara. Against Kallis, Tendulkar, and Ponting, though, he struggled. All three had averages against Hoggard that were way above their career figures; 65 for Kallis, 68 for Tendulkar, 127 for Ponting.

The numbers aren’t really the point. They’re just an imprecise way of reckoning who came out on top in the contests, a gauge taken from how often the bowler dismissed the batsman, and the batsman’s average in those dismissals. So Anderson has a superb record against Tendulkar, having got him nine times in 14 games, for an average of 30. He has the edge, too, on Sangakkara, Smith, and Michael Clarke. He has dismissed Ponting rarely, but cheaply. And he has never figured out how to bowl to Jayawardene or Smith.

Run it back through history. Botham gets a free place in any England XI as the all-rounder. As a bowler, he had a good record against Gordon Greenidge, a middling one against Javed Miandad and Allan Border, and rarely got the better of Viv Richards or Sunil Gavaskar. Bob Willis was up on Ian Chappell and Greenidge, but got battered by Richards, Border, Greg Chappell, and Gundappa Viswanath.

Frank Tyson, sadly, had such a short career that he never got to play against Clyde Walcott, Everton Weekes, and Garry Sobers, the most prolific batsmen on the circuit in his time. Alec Bedser did play the Three Ws, and didn’t enjoy much success against any of them. But he gets bonus points, of course, for his record against Don Bradman, who he dismissed six times in 10 matches, for an average of ‘only’ 54.66. Once with a ball Bradman described as “the finest ever to take my wicket”. The Don was never so complimentary about Harold Larwood. Unsurprising that, given that, as Larwood said, “There’d never been a lot of love lost between us.” Larwood got Bradman five times in 11 games, for an average of 77. But he never got to play against the Caribbean’s own Bradman, George Headley.

The two bowlers who come out best in this entirely unscientific analysis? One was something of a surprise. The other less so. John Snow had the upper hand in his contests against almost all of the top 10 run-scorers of his era, from Ian Chappell, Bill Lawry, and Ian Redpath, through Rohan Kanhai, and Roy Fredericks. He dismissed them all at least once in every two matches he played against them, all for figures well below their career averages. He was only a little less effective against the rest, Doug Walters, Greg Chappell, Clive Lloyd and Sobers. Oddly, the one he could never better was Bev Congdon, who he didn’t dismiss once in six matches.

Then, of course, there is Trueman, “t’greatest fast bowler who ever drew breath”. Trueman had most of ‘em on toast. Neil Harvey, Kanhai, Weekes and Frank Worrell, Hanif Mohammad, Polly Umrigar. The only men he never really collared were Walcott and Sobers. There’s an idea that Trueman had an advantage because he played so many of his Tests at home. But 20 of his 67 were overseas, and he took 78 wickets at an average of 26 in them. Better, I suspect, to borrow a line AJ Liebling used to describe his own journalism. Liebling said he was “better than anybody faster than me, and faster than anyone better than me.” Trueman would approve. Anderson can join the queue behind Trueman, and perhaps Snow too, for places in England’s All Time XI.

• This is an extract taken from the Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe, just visit this page, find ‘The Spin’ and follow the instructions.