Best Indian batsmen overseas

[Raghav_12]

Now listen up pup, I already said once I may have been harsh on SRT and produced proof to show there was not much difference between the four. It is just that I have a long evaluation period before I qualify a batsman(which is different for every fan) so while you may have crowned SRT as the Reincarnation of Grace while he pottered around in diapers, I chose to wait till 1996. Grow up and quit squealing just because other fans view things differently.

You may have been harsh? Still may have been? You made a blunder with that statement. There is no harm in admitting that. You still trying to say that there wasn't much difference between Kambli and Sachin at the end of 95. While fact is that by end of 95, Kambli was being considered so pathetic that he didn't get a chance to play for India again. Sachin established himself as number 1 test batsman of India when he was highest run scorers for India on two consecutive series' at two toughest possible places to bat on for an Indian, Australia and SA. And he was not no.1 o potential, he was number one on performance. I ignored rest of your post though I appreciate that you took so much effort to write all that.

[Lurker]

I ignored rest of your post though I appreciate that you took so much effort to write all that.

With that atitude no wonder you are clueless :winky: Let go of the false vanity and read up that post of his(and the one that follows), that is one of the better ones seen here recently.

[vvvslaxman]

Azharuddin's gifted srength became his own weakness abroad. Bulk of his game is based on wrist movement. Once the ball bounces above waist , it is difficult to control shots with wrists. http://youtu.be/1Aj6EINaDXc?t=3m55s Look how he tries to play a shot. He is trying to use his wrists to play this shot.. it is never going to work. An artist for sure. But this limitations didn't help him much abroad.

[StatsRock]

Tony Cozier was awfully pissed in this series. After Mohali win for West Indies he wrote a sarcastic article digging at Indian batsmen.

What was he pissed about? I remember in during 1990 Eng-WI Test series, he wrote in his article about expressions of bias by England commentators in the commentary box. He didnt spare even Christopher Martin Jenkins in his accusations. Cozier has always been a bit of a fanboi and easily gets cranky. I remember him praising Roland Holder's batting ability once as if he were the next Greenidge.

[StatsRock]

Sachin established himself as number 1 test batsman of India when he was highest run scorers for India on two consecutive series' at two toughest possible places to bat on for an Indian, Australia and SA. And he was not no.1 o potential, he was number one on performance.

You have tortured statistics enough that it is finally confessing that Sachin was No.1 from 1989-95. Unfortunately only in your mind. Now you can take some tissues and your timeout.

[StatsRock]

This is almost like reading Widen and Cricketer Stats saab. Unfortunately more of Indian writings, by fans or experts, tend to be around numbers, stats, ratings and of course the modern day phenomenon of links(including video). It was like reading KN Prabhu once again. Brilliant. :hatsoff: Cant wait for the next part :nice:

A small illustration: For ages, Indian fans until Lax's 281 have been talking of Vishy's 97 as the greatest innings on Indian soil. (I personally wondered if his 139 in the previous Test @ Eden were not a better innings, since it came in the 2nd knock, he batted with the tail and if not for the ton, WI would have clinched the series taking a 3-0 lead at Calcutta itself). Raju Bharatan called that Chepauk innings an epic against the fury of Roberts. However Tony Cozier called it a docile wicket even though Sundar Rajan said it was a bouncy track(or vice-versa). Which writer would you believe? Was the wicket as fast as the WACA? Was Roberts really making the Indian batsmen **** their pants? Was there a million-dollar strategy behind Vishy's calculated assault? The speculations abounded. Finally one guy wrote about meeting Vishy himself and asked the great man about that 97*. He simply shrugged it off and said it wasn't rocket science, wickets were falling around him so he needed to keep the scoreboard moving so he just decided to throw the bat at everything without paying much attention to the circumstances and it paid off! So which means, all those people running those debates on that 97 actually knew jack about it. As much as we like to be a fly in the wall, we will never really figure out some things in black and white. We just want to throw together various bodies of evidence and see if we can collectively piece together a coherent act of mind-reading. If there are strong evidences of rationality, we will endorse a theory. Or possibly, few years down the line, new evidence might arrive to demolish our conclusions. We just hope that the strands of evidence that come our way help us understand and not end up as a red herring. That's what I'm trying to do.(In fact, we can look up 2 different biographies of the same cricketer, and the same incident might be portrayed very differently by the 2 biographers). I wont be surprised if we can make a successful attempt occasionally in mind-reading the thought process of cerebral cricketers like a Gavaskar, Tendulkar, Dravid, Chappell. What would be very challenging would be cases like Sobers, Botham or Kambli.

[vvvslaxman]

What was he pissed about? I remember in during 1990 Eng-WI Test series' date=' he wrote in his article about expressions of bias by England commentators in the commentary box. He didnt spare even Christopher Martin Jenkins in his accusations. Cozier has always been a bit of a fanboi and easily gets cranky. I remember him praising Roland Holder's batting ability once as if he were the next Greenidge.[/quote'] He wrote something like "Batsmen averaging in 50s were struggling to put bat to ball on a lively wicket" . True. Tony is at heart West Indian cricket fan first then a commie.

[vvvslaxman]

Vikram Rathour, Surendra Bhave, M.V.Sridhar, Abhijit Kale they were all domestic bullies during the early 90s. Dravid had 4 good first class seasons before being drafted into national side.

[Texan]

Now listen up pup, I already said once I may have been harsh on SRT and produced proof to show there was not much difference between the four. It is just that I have a long evaluation period before I qualify a batsman(which is different for every fan) so while you may have crowned SRT as the Reincarnation of Grace while he pottered around in diapers, I chose to wait till 1996. Grow up and quit squealing just because other fans view things differently. Okay, first you quoted Test Career Averages to prove that SRT was India's No.1 batsman. The averages showed Kambli ahead of SRT by 3 and Azhar within 3 off SRT which really isnt clinching evidence. I pointed out ODI aggregates where SRT was #4 but you did not want to consider it. Now you want you look at ICC Ratings. The 4th link you posted above shows that in Apr 1993, Shoaib Mohammed, Miandad(post-1992 when he was pretty crap) and Malik were all better bats than Tendulkar. Do you agree with that? Now the same table shows Manjrekar, Greatbatch and Gurusinha ahead of Kambli even though Kambli was had tonked out 540 runs in 4 innings in Mar 1993. Do you still agree with that? Azhar in contrast had some measly 256 runs(which is less than half of Kambli) and still was ahead of Kambli by 76 points. How do you explain that?(BTW, I know 3 popular pitfalls of this ICC rating system, I am not going to name them. Let me see if you are going to name atleast 1 of them, just to make sure you really understand them and are not clutching at these numbers as straws - I already gave a hint) Again there is no magic number to decide a No.1 bat, be it averages or ICC Ratings, although some times you may glean a useful insight or two. I found it more reliable to run through series aggregates and run them across players. This is epic butthurt-ness! So wait, from when did you think Sachin became India's No.1 ? Again, your standard may be different(perhaps reaching Test average of 25.00+....I personally felt Sachin coming from the great tradition of Bombay's School of Batting, he needed to cut his teeth on treacherous conditions and the acid Test came only after 1996) Okay, these were his runs in 1995: 4 0* 52* 2 The above may be good enough for you to break a coconut at Sachin's feet but I seriously feel you should have cracked that on your head instead. NOM :winky:

Trust me, there is no point in reasoning with some fanboys :winky: They don't see any logic. Let them continue living in their fantasy world. :sherlock: Great post by the way. :two_thumbs_up:

[vvvslaxman]

Title of the thread is "best Indian batsmen overseas" How did this descend into glorifying guys like Kambli? He should not even come into this thread.

[Raghav_12]

Title of the thread is "best Indian batsmen overseas" How did this descend into glorifying guys like Kambli? He should not even come into this thread.

Because he was much dominant than Sachin till late 95. Stats your knowledge of cricket is great and you write well as well. But you are prejudiced and trying to cover up your extremely loose statement with unsolicited exhibition of your knowledge. Now, one may be greatest scientist of all time, but that person makes statement that moon is brighter than sun, than that has to be contested. You can't prove that even with your vast knowledge of science.

[Crookbond]

Kambli scored like 20 runs off Warne charging down the wicket. He just minnowbashed his way at the start. He had lot of weaknesses. With a bit of luck he had a great start to his career. Unlike Sachin he didn't have to start his career in hostile conditions. If Kambli had started his career in such places with lot of technical weaknesses he would have been brutally exposed. I remember how Ganguly's ODI debut was. He was like a 2 year toddler timidly facing Aussie bowlers.

Promptly Kambli and Azhar came up to knock off the rest, infact Kambli coming up with that brazen and fantastic assault off Warne :D

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[Manny_Pacquiao]

my vote went to amarnath. great away record in general but mainly because of this series: http://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/records/batting/most_runs_career.html?id=249;type=series i think thats the best an indian batsman has ever played away from home. 600 runs against the best bowling attack in the history of the game. impossible to argue with that. and a massive :hysterical: :hysterical: :hysterical: :hysterical: :hysterical: :hysterical: at all the bhardwas in this thread voting for DRAWVID... drawvid's incredible record in AUS/SA: 27 matches, batting average of 36. take away that tour of Aus in 2003/04 against an understrength australian bowling attack and that average drops even further. ever seen a batsman hitting a grand total of just THREE BOUNDARIES in AN ENTIRE TEST SERIES? drawvid in AUS 1999/00...http://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/records/averages/batting_bowling_by_team.html?id=423;team=6;type=series surely this has to be rank as the most spineless batting ever seen away from home by a well known indian batsmen?

[Manny_Pacquiao]

Yes, Jimmy was more successful in the 'fearsome foursome's' backyard. Tendulkar has been a quantum leap above everyone almost every single overseas series on the basis of consistency. Tendy hasn't failed anywhere, he hasn't failed against overseas attack very often- infact, Tendy is by far and away the greatest batsman in Tests for 'batting away'. He's done well facing Hadlee in New Zealand, he's done well in the caribbean facing Ambrose-Walsh, he's done well in South Africa facing Donald-Pollock and Steyn-Morkel, he's done well against McWarne in OZ. Jimmy had a brilliantly successful series in the caribbean but this alone is not enough to make him a better overseas batsman than by far the most consistent batsman 'batting away from home' in history of the game, barring Sir Don ofcourse.

tendulkar beats almost anyone for consistency, but he was never massively prolific even at his peak. you would get some great hundreds from him on every tour but he never scored 600 in a series away from home against a top bowling attack. counts against him big time, IMO.

[Texan]

Now this is for the others, not for the Diehards or the Fanbois. There usually are several tipping points in players' careers. I felt that in Kambli's case, he started out mastering domestic bowlers for a few seasons starting from around 1990. Once he got to Tests, he realised the English pacemen had little venom, and the spinners little bite, and he extended his mastery to the international level. Now it must be said that he really was on top of his game - just to quote an instance, there was this Oct 1993 Duleep trophy game where South Zone was playing West Zone, Kumble came on to bowl the first morning and promptly Kambli went down the pitch and slapped the first ball so hard and high, it smacked the parapet wall of the stadium and bounced inside. This was confidence at its peak, those were 2 golden years where Kambli could do nothing wrong(Dravid mentioned this in Cricinfo recently). The run continued till '94 till the day of reckoning which was the Bombay test morning against WI. It was a very lively wicket and Walsh simply made the ball talk. Kambli kept flashing and lived dangerously to score 40 but clearly he was sorted out in that innings. He came face to face with some serious deficiencies that he'd never encountered before in his armour. There was no real test by fire in 1995 so Kambli chose to take things easy and not work on his flaws. More significantly he was running into discipline issues and his drinking problem escalated. Where Kambli lost out was in the 1994-95 series with England A who were travelling India. India A had a very extended series with them and the prominent ones for Ind A were Dravid, Ganguly, Amre, Mazumdar etc. That was a very crucial series played on lively wickets all along with the English seamers finding plenty of help. Dravid and Ganguly played several decent knocks then, often having to endure several periods of testing to work out the runs. I think later in 1995 there was also a SAARC Cup played in Bangladesh or so....this was also on very lively wickets. Ganguly, Dravid and Amre were very much in the thick of things there. That proved to be a valuable experience as well. Honestly, I was pretty surprised at the tremendous transition of Ganguly when June 1996 came along. Looking back, its not hard to see how it happened. Meanwhile, Tendulkar had a pretty glorious 1994-95 as well in the Ranji trophy. I remember him belting out 856 runs in Ranji, in 4 games with 5 centuries. Those 856 runs came off a mere 853 balls. I believe this was the time he really decided to dominate and hit the ball at every scoring opportunity. The piece de resistance was the 1995 semifinal on a treacherous pitch at Mumbai. TN batted first and were all out for some 145 or so. It was expected to be a competitive total on that pitch. Mumbai batted and Tendulkar smashed up 175 off 130 balls to take Mumbai to 330. A modest total but more than enough to win by an innings. There was a huge difference between the Tendulkar of 1994 and 1996. Note that in the Australiasia Cup 94, he had just started out opening after the success at Auckland in Feb 94(82 off 49 balls blitzkrieg). He was hammering Akram left and right, racing to 72 off 61 balls in the league match and Akram was actually trying to keep Jadeja on strike in around the 10th over or so :haha: When the run rate was motoring at run a ball around the 12th over, he really should have looked to consolidate and bring up a 275. Instead he threw his wicket and India collapsed to a modest score. Against Australia, chasing 244, he went after McGrath but it was only a matter of time before someone was going to take a blinder(Taylor did) and he fell for 24. Now Sidhu and Jadeja took over, they were happy to milk the bowling. Warne had them all at sea, coming up with a 7 over spell for 14 runs. Even though, Jadeja and Sidhu notched up 80 plus each. Sidhu decided to go after Warne and fell. Promptly Kambli and Azhar came up to knock off the rest, infact Kambli coming up with that brazen and fantastic assault off Warne :D (to be contd later).

Very nice post. I like the way you have narrated this story... with a good mix of events on the international scene as well as the domestic scene.

[putrevus]

tendulkar beats almost anyone for consistency' date=' but he was never massively prolific even at his peak. you would get some great hundreds from him on every tour but he never scored 600 in a series away from home against a top bowling attack. counts against him big time, IMO.[/quote'] You are spot on with respect to Tendulkar,he has been the most consistent without being match/series winning batsmen. It is like Rahul Dravid's last series in England he scored 3 hundreds but none of them had any bearing on the end result, do we blame Dravid for not scoring even bigger hundreds or blame others for not contributing. Tendulkar supporters show the consistency and averages his distractors cite his lack of big scores in a series. It is not just Tendulkar whole Indian batting line up if you look up and down the order everybody has great to good stats but rarely those stats have transformed into match winning totals especially overseas against good bowling attacks. Indian batsmen have stats comparable to any batting line up in the history of the game yet they have so many low scores and collapses. It is mostly one or two batsmen who come to party when they play abroad rest of them fail to even chip in that's why we have many 201/2 to 288 all out scenarios and sprinkled in with 66 all outs.

[Manny_Pacquiao]

You are spot on with respect to Tendulkar,he has been the most consistent without being match/series winning batsmen. It is like Rahul Dravid's last series in England he scored 3 hundreds but none of them had any bearing on the end result, do we blame Dravid for not scoring even bigger hundreds or blame others for not contributing. Tendulkar supporters show the consistency and averages his distractors cite his lack of big scores in a series. It is not just Tendulkar whole Indian batting line up if you look up and down the order everybody has great to good stats but rarely those stats have transformed into match winning totals especially overseas against good bowling attacks. Indian batsmen have stats comparable to any batting line up in the history of the game yet they have so many low scores and collapses. It is mostly one or two batsmen who come to party when they play abroad rest of them fail to even chip in that's why we have many 201/2 to 288 all out scenarios and sprinkled in with 66 all outs.

india in general don't win many series away from home because their *****y bowlers can't take 20 wickets. still, their away record in the last decade is really good and that coincides with better bowling options. any comments on drawvid's fine record in AUS/SA? still think he is the best overseas batsman when he averages a puny 36 against the two bowling attacks of his era??

[Raghav_12]

my vote went to amarnath. i think thats the best an indian batsman has ever played away from home. 600 runs against the best bowling attack in the history of the game. impossible to argue with that.

Yes. That is beyond debate.

[putrevus]

india in general don't win many series away from home because their *****y bowlers can't take 20 wickets. still, their away record in the last decade is really good and that coincides with better bowling options. any comments on drawvid's fine record in AUS/SA? still think he is the best overseas batsman when he averages a puny 36 against the two bowling attacks of his era??

Dravid in my view has two great/all time overseas tours, 2002 England and Australia in 2003-04 but that Aussies bowling attack was putrid.Rest of time he has done very little in Australia or SA and also his batting in SL is horrible. I agree with only part of crappy bowling unable to take 20 wickets but when they delivered a good innings like in Karachi 2006 or second test in last England series when they got other teams to reasonable 230 or 240 in first innings. If the batting showed some mettle in both tests and got more than it got both of those matches could have been wins but our batting greats never delivered ended with just 20 or 30 runs leads which was never enough. Once other team is not under pressure our bowlers are flat out incapable and it is known fact so batsmen have to take more onus on themselves to be more consistent. Batting is strength of this team and when bowling does its job even if it is half done you expect superior batsmen to drive home the advantage.The batsmen delivering when bowlers did their job even if it is just one innings is very rare for India.

[Laaloo]

tendulkar beats almost anyone for consistency' date=' but he was never massively prolific even at his peak. you would get some great hundreds from him on every tour but he never scored 600 in a series away from home against a top bowling attack. counts against him big time, IMO.[/quote'] he has never scored 500 runs in a series and that's what goes against him the closest he cam was in Aus 2007