What if Sachin finishes on 99?

In August 2008, a scientist turned statistician called Charles Davis uncovered what he thought might be Don Bradman's 'missing' four runs, the boundary that would produce the 'perfect' career average of 100.

It came in the final stages of the eight-day fifth Test of 1928-9 at Melbourne, where Bradman made 37 not out batting at number seven [decent top six in that game, evidently]. A boundary attributed to Bradman's partner Jack Ryder appeared in a couple of the 'wrong' sections of the book, suggesting that it might actually have been struck by Bradman.

Davis was not sensation seeking: his was an endeavour of forensic, almost thrilling, nerdiness. He spent some years re-scoring Bradman's entire career, and found along the way that there were many small anomalies in the books, concerning Bradman and others too. He was diligent enough to confess that there are several plausible explanations for the Melbourne error, of which Bradman notching an extra boundary is just one.

'At least one resolution involves transferring the boundary to Bradman,' he wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald. 'If so, a Holy Grail of statisticians has been found, and the 'perfect' average of 100.00 achieved. Is it really possible? Well yes it is, but unfortunately it is unlikely'.

The interesting reaction is Davis's regret. It's understandable from the view of a statistician who has laboured long and hard, panning his numbers for years on end awaiting that sliver of gold in the mud, but the truth is, the best thing about 99.94 – aside from its ability to inspire awe – is its imperfection. Contained within it is the story of that last innings, when the Don, with watery eye, let one from Hollies slip through. Along with everything else, he was human, too.

Ninety nine point nine four, when spoken, almost alliterates; anyone can remember it. While '100.00' might have its glassy, unapproachable sheen, the reality is that had Bradman survived that first over from Hollies, he was unlikely to have made just four. We would have been left instead with something like '100.32' or 101.09' or some other figure that lacked both the lyrical fragility of 99.94 or the roundness of 100.

Buried now by time, unalterable, monolithic, we don't often stop to think about 99.94. It just is. One day, there will be Sachin Tendulkar's final tally of international centuries alongside it. It's becoming just slightly conceivable that it too will stay shy of three digits, mildly more so that it will finish on the round 100, but most likely to end up just over.

In terms of statistical impact, such fractions matter little. Bradman remains, by average, 30 per cent better than anyone else who has ever played, a distance that makes him not just the best cricketer of all time, but the best sportsman [as I've blogged before, Usain Bolt would need to run the 100m in six seconds to be 30 per cent better than other sprinters; Woods would require another ten majors and so on]. Tendulkar's feat, though, is perhaps even greater, and he will be more than 30 per cent better than anyone else in terms of international hundreds scored.

Yet there is an undeniable romance to his finishing on 99, if that's what he does. It's the number he'll be remembered by, purely because it's the number that best represents the epic grandeur of his enduring brilliance. If the number shows both his greatness and his humanity, if it tells his story the way 99.94 tells Bradman's, then it will be perfect whether it's 100 or not.

Why Andy Flower got it wrong with Monty

Monty Panesar's career has been haunted by Shane Warne's one-liner: 'He's not played 30 Tests, he's played the same Test 30 times'. It was a piece of dressing room wisdom that capped Monty's destructive reputation for guilelessness, the Frank Spencer of left-arm spin.

It somehow seems more than five years ago that Panesar took the first of his 126 Test wickets - Sachin Tendulkar was his duck-breaker, Rahul Dravid his third. Inzamam ul-Haq, Mohammad Yousuf and Younis Khan followed the next summer. Monty was good enough for the best.

Since his move to Sussex, he's been doing pretty much everything right, trying to reconcile the need to grow his game while remaining in touch with the innate skill he produced so naturally at first.

When he had the chance to go and bowl at the world's premier batsman in the nets a few weeks ago, he took the initiative, just as everyone kept telling him he needed to do. He jumped in his car, got himself down to Lord's and turned his arm over for Sachin Tendulkar.

'I thought it would be a chance to get some tips for my bowling,' he said. 'These things are great opportunities and it gave me the chance to add further development to my game'.

Andy Flower took a different view. Flower called Monty 'naive'. Monty, being Monty, will probably roll over and agree. He shouldn't. He is not contracted to England, just to Sussex. He's 29 years old and has responsibility for his own career. If he thinks that bowling at Tendulkar will help him, he has every right to do so.

Flower has been revelatory in his time with England. He is a hugely impressive man, deserving of respect. He is wrong in this instance, though. His concern should not be Sachin Tendulkar, who, let's face it, after 14,000 runs is probably going to get a few more at some point regardless of who bowls at him in the nets or in the Test matches. His concern should be for Monty, who is the sort of man who will take being called 'naive' by the England Team Director to heart.

Even if Flower was able to make his case for Panesar bowling to Tendulkar as being detrimental to England, this was an issue best handled with a quiet word in private. Monty deserved better than a public slapping down in a way that reinforces a perceived weakness in his make-up.

Steve, Sachin and the foibles of great men

The deeper states of mind of batsmen remain essentially mysterious. You'd have to search for a long time to find two players mentally stronger than Steve Waugh and Sachin Tendulkar, but they have their foibles too.

Even the Texas courts will not accept polygraph evidence, and yet Steve Waugh wants to see it in cricket [South Korea are said to use it on their football team - any player passing doubles their wages]. The lie detector's natural arena, though, is the piss-artists and pub stuntmen of the Jeremy Kyle Show, where his motley collection of gormless shaggers line up daily to try and beat it, no doubt armed with some facile tip or trick that they think will save their lying asses.

The reason that courts don't accept lie detectors is that they don't work on liars, especially liars who don't believe that they are lying, or that do it so often it's almost a version of their truth. Steve Waugh took a polygraph test and was impressed by the pressure it exerted on him, but that is because he's an honest man responding as an honest man does to the polygraph's psychology.

Waugh is typical of a particular kind of sportsman, one who loves empirical evidence. His belief built as he proved things to himself, as he worked his mind and his game out. Once he believed he didn't look back, as the curve of his cumulative average shows. He might have proved to himself that the lie detector works, but it's not the ICC's get out of jail card, nor is it the match-fixers' get into jail one.

Steve appeared to yield to one talisman as he grew older - that red cloth that rarely left his back pocket. Sachin Tendulkar has one too - his bat. After he'd departed Lord's with a viral infection of day four of the Test, Sky's cameras showed him returning the ground, in civvies but, as Nasser Hussain observed: 'Still carrying his bat with him. It never leaves his side - he won't leave it in the dressing room'.

Admittedly, Sachin's bat would be a grand prize for anyone, but he is a batter who invests emotion in the ones he likes. Many players are far less talented and far more pragmatic about the tool of their trade. Tendulkar of all men could probably make runs with Geoffrey's mother's stick of rhubarb, yet he wields the same bat until it packs up [his last probably made more Test hundreds than any bat ever shaved from the tree] and he still uses buckle-up pads. The great man has some mental props of his own. He is all too human, and all the more glorious for it.

Sachin tomorrow

So, it looks like Sachin Tendulkar will walk out to bat at Lord's tomorrow. The numbers are aligned, as everyone knows. Here's something I posted a while ago that I think holds true:

Sachin Tendulkar stands on the edge of the greatest feat of batting in the history of the game. When he registers the 100th hundred of his international career, he will achieve something that, like Bradman's average, will never be superseded.

It's human nature to try and measure achievement and to be driven to close to madness when it proves impossible. Time and its changes usually mean that it is. But Tendulkar's argument as the best ever is gaining weight.

It's a question of degree of course. Bradman's is measurable. He is, statistically, more than 30 per cent better than anyone else who has played. That's a stat that makes him not just the greatest cricketer of all time, but by the gap that he created, the greatest sportsman of all time. To draw facile comparison, Usain Bolt would have to run the 100 metres in six seconds to equal him; Tiger Woods would have to win another ten Major Championships.

Yet Tendulkar edges closer. One hundred international hundreds will put him more than 30 per cent clear of the next best, Ricky Ponting who has 68. Only one other player has 40 Test hundreds [SRT has 51] and that's Jacques Kallis. Yet Kallis has 'only' 17 ODI tons. There is Tendulkar and then there is daylight.

The Don of course scored with greater mass. If he had continued at his career rate, he would have made 100 Test hundreds in roughly 250 innings [Tendulkar has batted 290 times for his 51] but that presumes Bradman would have been able to continue. All of sport's geniuses, from Ali to Woods, have been slowed down and altered by life. No, what separates Sachin even from the Don is endurance.

Tendulkar has spent more than a year of his life playing ODI cricket, and a lot more than that in Tests. He has played the game internationally from the age of 16, and he's now 37. That's 57 per cent of his time on earth. He has played 626 Tests and ODIs in that time. Bradman played for 20 years, for a combined 234 Test and first-class games. The pace of life and the pace of the game is irrevocably different.

Efforts have been made to calculate what Bradman's average might have been had he played today, given the differences in bowling and especially fielding, and it comes out to around 77. What's unknowable is how modern life and the demands of the game would have impacted upon him. There is empirical evidence of Sachin's apparently unquenchable desire.

You'll get no argument from me if you want to surmise that Bradman could have scored a hundred international hundreds. But Sachin is actually going to do it, and given the likelihood of ODI cricket [and perhaps even Tests] surviving for long enough to prove that anyone can outstrip him, his record will stand forever, as distant and unreachable as anything of the Don's and as worthy of consideration as the greatest ever. It's hard to imagine that Bradman was better.

Life Under The Pump

In that cheesy, sobby, magnificent old movie The Shawshank Redemption, there's a scene in which Morgan Freeman's character, world-weary, repentant killer Red, finally understands the protagonist Andy's love of rock-polishing. 'Geology's like everything,' he says in that celestial voice, 'it's just pressure and time'.

Whether Sachin makes that 100th hundred on Saturday, or if Murali takes a wicket with his last ball [or whether there's a real Hollywood ending, and both things happen], the CWC 2011 has been all about pressure and time.

Geoffrey Boycott was lambasted for his comments on the withdrawal of England's Michael Yardy with depression. The condemnation was merited if self-righteous, but Boycott, who was offering an opinion on radio immediately after hearing the news, was clumsy rather than thoughtless. Indeed, he went through something similar himself after the death of his mother and his sacking by Yorkshire, which made his thoughts worthy of further examination. His initial reaction was to look to Yardy's on-field performances as a cause. That's inevitable, given Boycott's own obsessive personality, but it doesn't make the point entirely invalid. Humans are humans, and it is always a difficult moment when one comes up against the limits of their ability, especially when that ability has done so much to define their self-image.

What's more fascinating is whether a team can have a collective psyche, and if so, whether that psyche can dominate the individual within it. How else do you explain South Africa? And how do they explain themselves? The application of pressure made the unit fold again. Can something as intangible as the past really play a part?

Time has proved one of the best defences against pressure, or at least experience has, and experience is really time by another name. In different ways, Ricky Ponting and Sachin Tendulkar have resisted it. Experience gives you options, offers perspective. They have provided the most enduring memories of the tournament - fitting given the time and pressure they've embraced and withstood.

Tendulkar: Greater Than The Don

Sachin Tendulkar, I think, stands on the edge of the greatest feat of batting in the history of the game. When [and it is when - his batting is an absolute at the moment] he registers the 100th hundred of his international career, he will achieve something that, like Bradman's average, will never be superseded.

It's human nature to try and measure achievement and to be driven to close to madness when it proves impossible. Time and its changes usually mean that it is. But Tendulkar's argument as the best ever is gaining weight.

It's a question of degree of course. Bradman's is measurable. He is, statistically, more than 30 per cent better than anyone else who has played. That's a stat that makes him not just the greatest cricketer of all time, but by the gap that he created, the greatest sportsman of all time. To draw facile comparison, Usain Bolt would have to run the 100 metres in six seconds to equal him; Tiger Woods would have to win another ten Major Championships.

Yet Tendulkar edges closer. One hundred international hundreds will put him more than 30 per cent clear of the next best, Ricky Ponting who has 68. Only one other player has 40 Test hundreds [SRT has 51] and that's Jacques Kallis. Yet Kallis has 'only' 17 ODI tons. There is Tendulkar and then there is daylight.

The Don of course scored with greater mass. If he had continued at his career rate, he would have made 100 Test hundreds in roughly 250 innings [Tendulkar has batted 290 times for his 51] but that presumes Bradman would have been able to continue. All of sport's geniuses, from Ali to Woods, have been slowed down and altered by life. No, what separates Sachin even from the Don is endurance.

Tendulkar has spent more than a year of his life playing ODI cricket, and a lot more than that in Tests. He has played the game internationally from the age of 16, and he's now 37. That's 57 per cent of his time on earth. He has played 626 Tests and ODIs in that time. Bradman played for 20 years, for a combined 234 Test and first-class games. The pace of life and the pace of the game is irrevocably different.

Efforts have been made to calculate what Bradman's average might have been had he played today, given the differences in bowling and especially fielding, and it comes out to around 77. What's unknowable is how modern life and the demands of the game would have impacted upon him. There is empirical evidence of Sachin's apparently unquenchable desire.

You'll get no argument from me if you want to surmise that Bradman could have scored a hundred international hundreds. But Sachin is actually going to do it, and given the likelihood of ODI cricket [and perhaps even Tests] surviving for long enough to prove that anyone can outstrip him, his record will stand forever, as distant and unreachable as anything of the Don's and as worthy of consideration as the greatest ever. It's hard to imagine that Bradman was better.

Different bat, same old, same old...

Sachin finally changed his bat then. The new one seemed to go okay...

Brightness falls

It always happens, and I always feel this way. There's something about the last days of great players, something noble, something ineffably sad that makes them seem greater than they were at their best.

India beat Australia [you may have heard], Tendulkar beat Ponting, Sachin beat Ricky, the Little Master bested the Punter, and it was magnetic, hypnotic cricket. The stats were too beautiful: Cheteshwa Pujara was one when Sachin first batted for India, which means he was a veteran of seven when Ricky first took block in a Test, and not yet born when Australia last lost three in a row [not even Ricky was playing when that happened 'although it feels like I was,' he said ruefully the other day].

What a tale Pujara can tell. At the crease with Sachin [who told him that the nerves would pass, so he should not fight them but feel them], in the field as Ponting raged against the dying of the light, both his own and his country's.

The state of Tendulkar's bat told its own tale - it was a reflection of him, thick-set and broad, well-used but still mighty. What craft there was to his batting, what skill and know-how, and what inevitability. No-one has deserved a swansong more.

While Ponting was a component of the great Australian machine, his batting, though merciless, seemed to lack the aesthetics of his peers, but now, as he fades, the beauty is manifest. In a country where he has barely averaged 30, he made three 70s against his nemesis Harbhajan. His craft matched Tendulkar's, the position of his feet and his head immaculate, his determination implacable. That he knew, in his heart, that he would lose made his effort more glorious.

Some people in Australia want to sack him. Maybe they will, if this curiously flaky team loses to England at home. But history will be kind. He was great, Sachin was great, the pure spirit of the game was inside them.

So farewell then, Charles Coventry

You don't need to write anything when Sachin Tendulkar scores 200 in an ODI. You've seen him bat. Just close your eyes and imagine. 

But The Master [surely it's time to drop the almost pejorative 'little'...] has eradicated one of the great trivia questions: who holds the record for the highest score in ODIs, along with Saeed Anwar? Yup, it's so long to Charles Coventry and his 194 for Zimbabwe against Bangladesh. 

Regardless, Sachin now has 93 international hundreds. Seven more, and it would have to be considered one of the all-time feats of batting, the equal [at least] of the standard 100 first-class hundreds. 

The Don: not done yet

Found an old piece of Frank Keating's for Wisden on Bradman's pre-eminence that mentions the research of Charles Davis, the mathematician who found a method of calculating the Don's domination.

Davis came up with a table that gave a numerical rating to the stats of great sportsmen. Pele rated 3.7, Nicklaus 3.5, Michael Jordan 3.2, Bjorn Born 3.15. Then he worked out Bradman - 4.4.

Statistically speaking, Davis said, Bradman's career 'should not have existed'. To top him, a footballer would have to score in 100 consecutive internationals, a tennis player win 15 singles titles at Wimbledon, a golfer 25 majors.

It would be interesting to have Davis go back again now that the careers of Roger Federer and Tiger Woods have evolved. Woods may be serving his time in the doghouse, but at one point a couple of years ago he was so far ahead in the world rankings that the number two player, Phil Mickelson, was statistically closer to the man ranked 999 than he was to Woods. Tiger needs another eleven majors to reach 25, but he has a lot of years left. Federer may not make 15 titles at Wimbledon, but what's so special about that one major? He has 16 already, and may play for another five years. 

But there are other miracles to consider too. Bradman is remarkable, but is he any more unlikely, statistically, than the outliers of the great West Indies sides? Representing a nation that exists only notionally, from a few small islands [and a thin strip of mainland], came the great men of the 60s and early 70s. Amazing enough. Then consider the next few years: Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards, Desmond Haynes, Gordon Greenidge, Malcolm Marshall, Michael Holding, Joel Garner, Colin Croft, Andy Roberts, Sylvester Clarke, Wayne Daniel and more, plus, at the tail end of the comet, Courtney Walsh, Curtly Ambrose and Brian Lara. Per head of population, what are the odds of that?

And then there is Sachin Tendulkar. He has scored 90 hundreds in international cricket. Ten more, and how do you compare?

Come back Charles Davis. You're needed here...

Go on, lettem in...

The gentle sense of melancholy that followed Mark Ramprakash's one hundredth hundred last season was not entirely down to Ramps and what might have been. It felt like one of the game's great marks of batsmanship was sliding into the past. No current player was close enough to the line to get there; no future player would play enough first-class cricket. Perhaps Ramprakash was the last.

But statistics only mean anything if they allow for some kind of adjustment: no-one denies Grace his status despite a Test average of 32.29. Watching Ricky Ponting score a sublime, chanceless ton against England last night, another adjustment seems due. 

It really doesn't need saying that Ponting and Tendulkar are not just contemporary greats, but worthy of comparison to anyone who's played the game. They are due that accolade of 100 centuries.

Ponting has 72 by the current measure, Sachin 69. But it feels like it's time to start counting their one-day international hundreds, too: Ponting has 28 of those, Sachin 44 [44!].

The argument against has always been that ODI hundreds were scored in reduced circumstances. Bowlers were limited in the number of overs they could send down, fields have been restricted, powerplays introduced and so on. Yet could anyone watch Ponting deliver last night, or in the World Cup Final of 2003 and say that those were innings any less brilliantly constructed, any less dominant or wilfull, any less pressured or easier than a nice afternoon knock in the LV county championship division two? Was the bowling any worse, the fielding any poorer?

Between them, Ponting and Tendulkar have played 763 ODIs - almost two solid years' worth. The structure of their careers will not allow them to get a hundred hundreds in the conventional manner, so maybe the conventional manner should change with the times.

If it did, Sachin would already be there, Ponting would have arrived last night, via a glorious knock in an international game. And it's not as if the change would open the floodgates: the great Lara would still have fallen short.

Born into this

While Sachin Tendulkar was in London this summer, he gave his son Arjun some coaching. In the nets. At Lord's. Arjun is nine. He might grow up knowing a bit about how to play this game. 

NB: This morning, good old blogger kept chewing the rest of this post. Maybe it's a Sachin fan. Not that the post said anything bad about Sachin: aside and away from his ability at the crease, he seems like an extraordinarily decent and rounded man, especially given the distorted life he has led. 

Further along in the interview where he talks about coaching his son, he says: 'I also love going for a drive at 5am, when the roads are empty and people won't see me... I listen to relaxing music, there is no-one else. I like it just being me on my own'.

Tendulkar cannot live his life alone, though, aside from those few moments he carves for himself on empty roads at 5am. Who would wish the same for their children?

Little Master, big bat

Thanks to Prabu, here's some of your actual empirical evidence as to the size and shape of that most mythical and productive of weapons, Sachin Tendulkar's bat [you can read the story of how Sachin came to hand it over in the comments beneath this post].

Weight: 3lbs 2oz [1.4 kilos]

Edge at its thickest: 1.25"

Bow of the bat at its meatiest point: 2.25"

So it's true: the Tendulkar bat does top 3lbs. And as Prabu points out, not everyone can bat with it...

Virender Sehwag and the Next Age

In certain sports at certain times come the avatars of its next age. They bring with them hints of what is possible, of how things will happen in the future. Arnold Palmer was one in golf. Sonny Liston was one in boxing. Arnold Schwarzenegger was one in bodybuilding (really, he was). Usain Bolt may be one in sprinting. Virender Sehwag might be cricket's newest.

We know the stats. In Tests he averages 51.85 with a strike rate of 78.12. That is 15 runs per 100 balls more than Pietersen, 20 more than Ponting, 21 more than Gayle. But what are the stats telling us?

To me, they are saying, 'this is how things will be'. Sehwag is the first, the fluke, the avatar. Behind him will come a new age of Test cricket, fed its players from the shorter game. They will be the first generation whose primary skill sets come from a new area. They will not be long-form players playing the short game. They will be short form players playing the long one. 

In Chennai the old met the new. Sehwag set up the win. Tendulkar, with what might be his last truly great innings, won it. They were ships that pass. In ten years, more people will bat with Sehwag's mindset than with Tendulkar's. The New Age is coming. He even has his own religion to prove it. 

Batting: endless failure and despair

A nice little stat from Nagpur:

Sachin has more scores of 50+ than any other player in Tests: 

91, made in 251 innings.

By comparison, Ricky Ponting has 77 in 204 innings

Brian Lara 82 in 232 innings

Jacques Kallis 78 in 209 inns

Rahul Dravid 78 in 222 inns

Thus, statistically, even these great players fail more often than they succeed. And the bowlers try to tell you it's a batsman's game...

NB: India's debutant in Nagpur, Murali Vijay, just made a double hundred in an opening stand of 462 for Tamil Nadu against Maharashtra. His partner Abhinav Mukund got a triple. New ball wasn't doing much, then?