Melbourne, Dec 22: Griffith University researcher Dr. Nicholas Rohde has used economic theory to prove that Sachin Tendulkar is the greatest batsman of all time, ahead of even the great Sir Donald Bradman.
Rohde’s analysis compares batsmen from different eras and says India's Little Master, who will pad up against the Aussies at the MCG on Boxing Day, is the premier batsman in the game’s history.
Sachin Tendulkar has scored 15,183 Test runs at an average of 56.02 while the great Bradman posted the mythical average of 99.94 after playing 52 Tests and scoring 6,996 runs.
“The rankings are designed to allow for meaningful comparisons of players with careers of different lengths,” Dr. Rohde said while speaking on the results of his study. The rankings by the researcher have been created according to a player's career aggregate runs, minus the total number of runs that an average player of that era would accumulate over the same number of innings.
Rohde also said that it was entirely possible for people to disagree with his study since “there would be other statistical ways of looking at [the comparison] which would give you different results.”
“I don’t see it as entirely trivial, but it isn’t an indisputable result either; it’s somewhere in the middle. My feeling is that devotion to Don Bradman probably robbed India of a national icon a little bit. And if you wanted my personal opinion on who was the better of the two, Bradman or Tendulkar, I would say that it was perhaps too close to call,” he said.
The only caveat Rohde added was that it was possible that Tendulkar and Bradman could swap places on the list many times over before the Indian retires as a dip in form would affect the former’s standing.
Rohde’s Top 10 batsmen of all time are as follows:
Sachin Tendulkar (Ind)
Sir Donald Bradman (Aus)
Jacques Kallis (SA)
Rahul Dravid (Ind)
Brian Lara (WI)
Sir Garfield Sobers (WI)
Allan Border (Aus)
Sunil Gavaskar (Ind)
Steve Waugh (Aus)
Javed Miandad (Pak)
