Dwindling?

It's now lunch at Headingley and Star Cricket is playing highlights from the 1994-95 Ashes. An ageing David Boon slashes a young Darren Gough for four, and a ripple of applause greets the shot. A ripple of applause from a very sparse MCG crowd. Three quarters of the seats were empty, on a day Australia piled on the third innings runs and pulled away decisively from England.
A couple of days ago, Zee Sports played the Trent Bridge Test from West Indies' 1976 tour of England. Now, the series is vividly remembered for how charged the atmosphere was in the wake of Tony Greig's 'grovel' comment, for Viv's 829 runs and Holding and Roberts tearing through the English batting. Nowhere will you see a mention of the near-empty stands that provided the backdrop for the first Test.
In twenty-first century England and Australia, crowds at most Tests seem far healthier than what I saw of the '94-'95 Ashes and the '76 Wisden Trophy on TV.
Yes, I agree that this is no indication of an overall rosy situation. Pakistan has played its precious few recent home Tests in front of ridiculously small crowds, and Test match attendance in New Zealand, West Indies has been middling to poor. South Africa, India and Sri Lanka throw up more conflicting pictures. But all this could be due to a number of factors. We need to interpret the situation the right way. What we need is more numbers.
Before anyone comments about dwindling Test crowds, therefore, it would help if they substantiated their claims with attendance figures from past decades. It would certainly be more constructive than all the rhetoric pundits have spewed over the last few months.
If we had this data, we'd be able to spot links between attendance and things like ticket prices, scheduling (early May brought thin crowds for the recent England-West Indies series), whether the series happened during a period of success or even promise for the home side or not (West Indies and New Zealand), the concept of 'traditional' Test venues (which might help the BCCI decide whether India should play Tests only in centres like Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai or rotate them everywhere) and so forth.

Sri Lanka versus Pakistan, third Test, day three

This afternoon, Misbah Ul Haq and Shoaib Malik inched Pakistan's lead towards 200 at the Sinhalese Sports Club.
From one end, Rangana Herath got the ball to loop and dip, and both batsmen played watchfully late. From the other, Chaminda Vaas, bowling in his last Test - left arm over, pitching middle and off, teasing the batsmen to reach out. No clouds, no swing; even so, 10-5-14-0.
Between deliveries, the TV cameras panned the crowd, contemplating the cricket as it consumed ice lollies.
A group of kids, led by Percy Abeysekara, Sri Lankan cricket's most exuberant fan, sang 'Happy birthday to you,' prompting Nuwan Kulasekara, 27 years and 0 days old, fielding on the boundary, to break into the biggest grin ever seen on a cricket field.

Soft batsmen, or average bowlers?

India's batsmen, historically, have scored a greater proportion of 'soft' runs than batsmen from anywhere else.

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.