V.S. Naipaul has written about a question he had to answer in a school test when he was in the fourth grade: Who is the greatest cricketer? Despite being a fan of Learie Constantine, the West Indies all rounder, Naipaul answered “Bradman”. By the 1940s (when Naipaul wrote the test), Bradman had captured the imagination of the young and old. But that was the wrong answer, apparently. The correct answer was indeed “Constantine”.
“The teacher was brown-skinned,” wrote Naipaul of that incident in 1963, “but this is a later assessment and may be wrong…it is possible now to see his propaganda for Constantine as a type of racialism or nationalism.”
Your heroes say a lot about you. Perhaps if the question were asked of today’s youngster, he might reply, “Virat Kohli” if Indian, or “Steve Smith” if Australian. A keen follower — I speak here of the general fan, not the fourth-grader answering a test paper — might notice that there can be a difference between greatest cricketer and greatest batsman, and choose accordingly. My generation would probably answer “Garry Sobers”, who is still the first name to be selected in a match between the Earth and Mars.
All this is occasioned by an interactive session I had recently with cricket fans. Don’t you think Kohli is over-rated, asked one, adding helpfully that international bowling is inferior all around (presumably he was talking of the days of his hero, Sunil Gavaskar), there is better protection, wickets are flatter and so on.
My father’s hero was Vijay Hazare, and when Gavaskar made his debut in the West Indies with 774 runs, he was quick to point out that Hazare had made two centuries in a Test in Australia against better bowling.
Is there an objective measure? In recent years, statisticians have given breath to something sports thinkers (to borrow a phrase from the musician T.M. Krishna) have been saying for long: that players of a particular era may be compared to one another using a matrix that calculates all performances of that period.
It is possible to compare two middle order batsmen, say Smith and Kohli, by working out the averages and strike rates and actual figures of all middle order batsmen playing in their time. Also, those in the same team. The more statistics you throw into the pot, the closer you will get to a definitive answer.
However, there are too many variables involved to make a meaningful comparison between players of different eras. Bradman played on uncovered pitches; Sachin Tendulkar on covered ones. Bradman played only one format, and travelled far less than Smith (or any top modern player). W.G. Grace and the big hitting Gilbert Jessop played at a time when the batsman had to clear the ground (and not just the playing area) for a shot to be counted as a six.
Is A.B. de Villiers a better player than C.K. Nayudu was? It is a meaningless question, regardless of how many statistics you can generate. Laws have been amended (the leg-before, to take an example), equipment has changed, and the game itself is a different one today than was played over eight decades ago when Nayudu first led India.
Over that time frame, the changes are obvious. But many recent ones are incremental and too subtle to make comparisons over even a couple of decades meaningful.
So perhaps the casual fan, who isn’t bothered with history or statistics has, ironically, got it right. If you can’t do it objectively, then it has to be done subjectively.
If you think Virender Sehwag was a better batsman than Geoff Boycott, then there is no objective argument either way. Anecdotes will have to serve as defining characteristics.
The traffic flows in both directions. Younger fans cannot imagine a player with the authority and range of a Kohli; today’s best is the all-time best. The old-timer, his judgement enriched by time and romance sees a Gavaskar or a Vishwanath as the epitome of perfection. The charm of sport is that both sets of fans are right.
Wasn’t it just the other day when all of India decided that Tendulkar was not only the greatest batsman ever but also possibly the greatest for all time to come? And now you can hear the whispers: Was he really as good as Kohli is? Whatever you conclude is right. You can only make a subjective choice.
Bradman himself seemed to understand this when he — subjectively — decided that Tendulkar was the greatest batsman of his time. Forget the runs, forget the records, what Bradman was saying in effect was, “If you think I was the greatest batsman, Tendulkar is the one who looks most like me at the crease…” leaving it to us to make the leap he had already made in his mind.
