Head-to-head stats highlight why Test cricket is greatest sporting format

et’s start, as all bad pieces of writing should, with a cliche: cricket is an individual sport dressed as a team game. Every match comprises hundreds or thousands of contests between a batter and a bowler. That unusual gameplay is one of the main reasons why Test cricket, in particular, touches the parts other sports cannot reach. But never mind all that soulful, meaning-of-life stuff; we’re here to talk about the joys of the humble statgasm.

For the first WCM piece, we looked at which players had the best Test record against the great West Indies quicks of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. To our surprise, top of the list was a limited-overs trailblazer who was dropped from the Test team for the final timeThe late Dean Jones averaged 42.57 against the best of the West Indies’ best; the only other players to average over 40 were Graham Gooch and Alec Stewart.

Another Tendulkar statistic is a bit more profound. The first person to dismiss him five times in Tests was not Ambrose, Shane Warne or any of the other greats of the 1990s. It was Hansie Cronje, South Africa’s occasional medium pacer. Tendulkar couldn’t work out his dibbly-dobbly bowling and was often paralysed into strokelessness. In a seven-year period he made 56 runs at 11.20 off Cronje in Test matches, with a run-rate of 1.69 per over.

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