I base this statement on numbers. Dodgy they may be, and liable to scornful ripping apart by statisticians, but numbers, nevertheless. And there's an eerie pattern to all this as well.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves, though. Let me describe how I arrived at my conclusion.
First, I made a lot of assumptions, based solely on intuition.
My first assumption: drawn matches = batting-friendly conditions. Historically, I assumed, bat-a-thon draws numerically overwhelm rain-affected draws and games saved on spiteful wickets by tremendous batting.
So drawn Tests = batting-friendly wickets, and result Tests = sporting, or bowler-friendly wickets.
Runs scored in result matches, therefore, equate to hard-fought runs. This, obviously, ignores knocks played with a 'what the hell, we've lost; let me bash it around a bit' mindset.
Once I made these assumptions, I calculated (on June 16 2009, so recent series like the Ashes and Sri Lanka-Pakistan don't figure), for the eight major Test teams in history - Australia, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, West Indies - the ratio of centuries scored to number of Tests played.
I then calculated the centuries per Test ratio for each country, ignoring drawn Tests.
I subtracted the second ratio from the first.
And discovered that India has had, through Test history, the biggest difference between centuries per match and centuries per result match. That is, in result Tests, Indian batsmen have suffered the steepest drop in century-production from their average rate than batsmen from any other team.
Here's the table (click on the image to see a bigger, more readable table):
This either means that Indian batsmen have scored a lot of soft runs in helpful conditions, or it means that India's bowlers have let Tests drift into draws in conditions where bowlers from other teams have bowled match-winning spells.
Look at the averages of India's great bowlers - Mankad, Gupte, Bedi, Chandrasekhar, Prasanna, Kapil Dev, Kumble, Srinath - high 20s or low 30s without exception. India hasn't had anyone with a Jason Gillespie-esque mid-20s average, leave alone someone with an average approaching Curtly Ambrose or Sydney Barnes. Is Gillespie a greater bowler than Anil Kumble? No. Has he been part of better bowling attacks? Most definitely.
So I decided to do the same calculation for this century - the 2000s. India has regularly won Test matches abroad in this period, a period that's included a number of memorable matchwinning centuries, and seen the emergence of a pretty decent bunch of bowlers.
Here then is the eerie pattern I referred to before. India has done no better or worse in this period than through its history, and the clinching number is exactly the same as in the previous table:
0.24, the most significant number in the history of Indian cricket.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves, though. Let me describe how I arrived at my conclusion.
First, I made a lot of assumptions, based solely on intuition.
My first assumption: drawn matches = batting-friendly conditions. Historically, I assumed, bat-a-thon draws numerically overwhelm rain-affected draws and games saved on spiteful wickets by tremendous batting.
So drawn Tests = batting-friendly wickets, and result Tests = sporting, or bowler-friendly wickets.
Runs scored in result matches, therefore, equate to hard-fought runs. This, obviously, ignores knocks played with a 'what the hell, we've lost; let me bash it around a bit' mindset.
Once I made these assumptions, I calculated (on June 16 2009, so recent series like the Ashes and Sri Lanka-Pakistan don't figure), for the eight major Test teams in history - Australia, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, West Indies - the ratio of centuries scored to number of Tests played.
I then calculated the centuries per Test ratio for each country, ignoring drawn Tests.
I subtracted the second ratio from the first.
And discovered that India has had, through Test history, the biggest difference between centuries per match and centuries per result match. That is, in result Tests, Indian batsmen have suffered the steepest drop in century-production from their average rate than batsmen from any other team.
Here's the table (click on the image to see a bigger, more readable table):
This either means that Indian batsmen have scored a lot of soft runs in helpful conditions, or it means that India's bowlers have let Tests drift into draws in conditions where bowlers from other teams have bowled match-winning spells.Look at the averages of India's great bowlers - Mankad, Gupte, Bedi, Chandrasekhar, Prasanna, Kapil Dev, Kumble, Srinath - high 20s or low 30s without exception. India hasn't had anyone with a Jason Gillespie-esque mid-20s average, leave alone someone with an average approaching Curtly Ambrose or Sydney Barnes. Is Gillespie a greater bowler than Anil Kumble? No. Has he been part of better bowling attacks? Most definitely.
So I decided to do the same calculation for this century - the 2000s. India has regularly won Test matches abroad in this period, a period that's included a number of memorable matchwinning centuries, and seen the emergence of a pretty decent bunch of bowlers.
Here then is the eerie pattern I referred to before. India has done no better or worse in this period than through its history, and the clinching number is exactly the same as in the previous table:
0.24, the most significant number in the history of Indian cricket.
