Jack Gregory, Imran Khan and Ian Chappell: The dangers of pseudo-analysis

There is no issue in Ian Chappell naming Garfield Sobers as the best after Don Bradman. These ‘best ever’ debates are always based on opinion.

It is perfectly natural for cricketers to choose their favourite in the so-called ‘best ever’ lists. However, when such a claim is accompanied by a hint of academic analysis that is actually fallacious, it does more harm than good. Arunabha Sengupta looks at a claim by Ian Chappell in singling out major all-rounders, with supposed analysis that fall flat on scrutiny.

In one of those myriad and near-futile exercises of determining about the next best batsman after Don Bradman, former Australian skipper Ian Chappell picked Garfield Sobers. His views were published on ESPNCricinfo.

The genius of Sobers can be doubted by very few. An average of 57.78 with the bat over 8,032 runs and 93 Tests speak for themselves. Yes, we believe in numbers rather than opinions. And in this case, the opinion of Chappell is borne out by the figures the great West Indian all-rounder left in his wake.

Although his bowling skills are not really an indicator of his phenomenal batting prowess, the 235 wickets at 34 in three different styles do prove him to be a once-in-an-aeon genius seldom to be seen again. Add to that a 109 catches, many of them breathtaking.

The claims of men like Jack Hobbs, Herbert Sutcliffe, Len Hutton, to Ken Barrington, Greg Chappell and Graeme Pollock, to the modern phenomena of Sachin Tendulkar, Brian Lara and Kumar Sangakkara are definitely loud and clear. But, no one can have any beef with Chappell’s singling out Sobers as the next best after Bradman. There has hardly ever been a better batsman, even if one ignores the bowling and fielding brilliance.

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The issue here is, however, different. It is in the way Chappell argues his case.

He says: “He (Sobers) is one of only three players, Jack Gregory and Keith Miller being the others (and Imran Khan a borderline fourth), who were genuine new-ball bowlers and batted high in the order. Jacques Kallis is close but he doesn’t qualify as a genuine new-ball bowler.”

It is our contention that such misleading arguments are harmful for the followers of the game. Especially when a weighty name picks his favourite cricketer as most do, and cloaks it in a scantily researched, smugly voiced, sketchy fragments of the cricketing past; toadd an element of academicpseudo-authenticity to his claim.

Disclaimer again. There is no issue in Chappell naming Sobers as the best after Bradman. These ‘best ever’ debates are always based on opinion, and as far as opinions go the choice Sobers can hardly be bettered. Even in a robust mathematical argument, we have little doubt that he will comfortably saunter in among the very best after Bradman, if not the best ever after the Australian freak.

However, Sobers, Miller and Gregory are hardly the only three men to have batted high in the order and bowled with the new ball.  Gregory, specifically, comes way down the list if we single out such stalwart cricketers.

‘My Favourite’ vs ‘The Best Ever’

An old cricketer recounting his experiences, discussing the technical details of the legions of performers he has witnessed through his years on and around the ground. Spinning a yarn that holds the wide-eyed and keen eared fan spellbound. One of the lasting lures of cricket.

We do know that in the bar, or in the commentary box when talking of old days, the sixes grow longer, the catches more breath-taking, the balls more unplayable. However, it is also a part of cricket. And its eternal charm.

True. Recollections have been proven to be tantalisingly prone to bias and error. But as far as tales of cricket go, they do have their place. Every cricketer and fan of the olden days can have a favourite. Someone he saw when the mind was broad and the waist narrow, before the two body parts exchanged dimensions. The heroes of one’s youth are the best.

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Hence, it will be Trumper for some no matter how unbelievable Bradman’s deeds turn out to be. Hammond for the Bristol-man who has seldom stepped out of his county. “To me Kanhai was a better batsman than Sobers. I saw him score two centuries at Adelaide in 1960-61. Brisbane? Never gone there. Sobers averages more in Australia? Numbers… what did they ever mean? I saw Kanhai with my own eyes.”

Hence, Sunil Gavaskar may very well be the favourite opening batsman of many of the ones who are still active in discussion forums. But to claim he was the best ever does Len Hutton, Jack Hobbs, Herbert Sutcliffe and a host of others sore injustice.

Similarly, Ashley Mallett was perhaps impressed by EAS Prasanna, and was perhaps swayed by the immense admiration his colleague and captain Ian Chappell (again) had for him.  They saw him in a couple of series in his prime, and not when he struggled towards the end of his career. However, to say he was the best off-spinner ever is stretching facts to disfigurement, especially with the likes of Hugh Trumble and Jim Laker and Hugh Tayfield … and later Muttiah Muralitharan … having tweaked their ways to far superior records.

But, when such proclamations come from renowned names along withsketchy mouthing of a hazy past to lend credence to arguments, it becomes harmful because it can mislead many.

New-ball bowlers who batted at the top

Chappell picked Sobers because he was obviously in awe of the man’s immense talent. Again, there is no problem with that. Anyone who has seen the great man hit 254 against Australia for Rest of the World would seldom pick another. Besides, Chappell was the captain of Australia that day, and like many of the cricketers, his experiences on the field have left a significantly more impression on him than sketchy details of the past or smug analysis from the commentary box of the future.

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It is when he cloaks the same opinion in analysis that he does a dreadful job.

Let us look at his words again. “He’s one of only three players, Jack Gregory and Keith Miller being the others (and Imran Khan a borderline fourth), who were genuine new-ball bowlers and batted high in the order. Jacques Kallis is close but he doesn’t qualify as a genuine new-ball bowler.”

Let us ignore people like Bobby Peel, Len Braund, Hugh Trumble or Ravichandran Ashwin, men who were slow bowlers but opened the bowling attack with the new ball all the same. Let us look at only the genuine new-ball bowlers.

Chappell rightly says Miller was a genuine new ball bowler who batted high in the order. Miller, in fact, batted 95 per cent of his career innings in the top 6. And Sobers, of course, was a top order batsman by any count. He batted as many as 89 per cent of his career innings.

However, when we come down to Jack Gregory, we find he batted 47 per cent of his innings in the top 6. And that is just 16 innings, and his small sample is skewed by one solitary century. Only 3 of the 16 innings ended in half-centuries or more.

Gregory, along with Ted MacDonald, formed one of the feared opening partnerships with the new ball and was instrumental in the routs over England just after the First World War. But, his bowling average of 31 can only be considered average. There were plenty of better performers with the new ball, who formed excellent pillars at the top of the order over a far greater span than Gregory.

Curious inclusion as one of the select three, one must say.

Players who batted at the top of the order and bowled with the new ball

Name	Innings	Innings in top 6	%	Batting average in top 6	Bowling average
Trevor Goddard	78	77	99%	34.91	26.22
George Giffen	53	52	98%	23.44	27.09
Keith Miller	87	83	95%	37.15	22.97
Garry Sobers	160	143	89%	57.81	34.03
Monty Noble	73	65	89%	31.2	25
George Ulyett	39	34	87%	26.61	20.4
Trevor Bailey	91	67	74%	29.8	29.21
Ian Botham	161	114	71%	33.18	28.4
Manoj Prabhakar	58	34	59%	33.54	37.3
Andrew Flintoff	130	70	54%	32.98	32.78
Dattu Phadkar	45	23	51%	31.76	36.85
Gerry Gomez	46	23	50%	31.23	27.41
Jack Gregory	34	16	47%	38.18	31.15
SJ Snooke	46	21	46%	15.3	20.05
Chris Cairns	104	29	28%	25.62	29.4
Imran Khan	126	28	22%	62.38	22.81

Among others, Chappell overlooked the famous Australian stalwarts like George Giffen and Monty Noble, both of whom spent most of their careers either bowling with the new ball or facing it. Their batting averages are inferior, but one has to consider that they batted on dicey wickets of the pre- War era while Gregory had the shirtfronts of the 1920s.

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Giffen batted 98% of his innings in the top 6, Noble 89%; 55% of Giffen’s innings came as an opening batsman, while 55% of Noble’s batting was done as one of the top 4. Gregory spent only 27% of his days in the middle batting in the top 4, 9% of them at the start of the innings. Both Noble and Giffen had better bowling averages than Gregory. Both, especially Noble, was exceptional with the new ball.

Chappell most probably did not know much about them. After all, he played with Sobers. Miller was larger than life in the lore of Australian cricket. When Chappell was growing up, Miller’s deeds were being accomplished and turning legendary.

Noble and Giffen are too far back in the chapters of history. The reason Gregory did emerge into Chappell’s list from the 1920s, can presumably be attributed to the fact that he was grandpa Vic Richardson’s teammate.

So, Chappell’s analysis is most probably a sum-total of folklore, family stories and experience, with scant regard for data.

If we look at the table above and the other one given below, we find many other worthies missed out by Chappell. George Ulyett’s extraordinary all-round figures hail from the 1880s and thereby take on special significance.

At the same time it has to deal with ignorance of the past. Tip Snooke also plied his trade in the hazy days before the First World War. Dattu Phadkar could have come from a cricketing nation considered minor in the days when Chappell was growing up. But one would assume that Chappell would be aware of Trevor Bailey’s barnacle-like qualities and would have grown up reading about the feats of Gerry Gomez.

All these men spent far greater portions of their career as top order batsmen than Jack Gregory and simultaneously handed the new ball splendidly as well.

The other major surprise is Trevor Goddard, the man who opened the South African innings in 74 of the 78 times he batted in Test cricket. He had a batting average of 35, a bowling average of 26. While he had faster men opening the bowling attack, in the form of Peter Heine and Neil Adcock or Peter Pollock and Mike Procter, he did share the new ball when required and was more than useful with it as first-change. He picked up wickets regularly and was incredibly difficult to get away. Goddard, first with his choking tactics along with Tayfield, and later as a pillar in the side along with the Pollock brothers and the rest, pitchforked South Africa from one of the also rans to the top of the cricket world.

The surprise is even greater because Chappell actually played against the man. But perhaps by then in his late thirties, Goddard no longer gave the impression of being a frontline bowler. And of course Chappell did not bother to look it up. He had seen Sobers hit 254. And he had heard about Gregory from grandpa.

Now let us look at Chappell’s other comment, that Imran Khan is a borderline fourth in the list.

We can perhaps grudgingly grant that Gregory, Giffen, Noble et al were too far in the hoary past to dig out.

But Imran played in the modern days, most of his cricket after Chappell had retired into the commentary box. The Pakistan legend batted only 22% of his career innings in the top 6, never once in the top 3, only once at No. 4. Even if we ignore men like Manoj Prabhakar (59% in the top 6, 52% as opener) because he was too inferior a bowler to make this category, one cannot ignore others like Ian Botham, Andrew Flintoff and Chris Cairns.

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Botham spent 71% of his innings in the top-order and was as good as any with the new ball. Cairns and Flintoff too had a fairly decent runs with the ball and batted more in the top order than Imran. In fact, among all the all-rounders discussed, Imran finishes at the bottom in terms of proportion of innings batted in the top order (look at the provided table).

And yet, Chappell claims that Sobers, Miller and Gregory (!!) formed the elite group with Imran a borderline fourth.

It is perfectly okay to choose favourites. In the case of Sobers, one does not need to justify the claim with a look at numbers beyond his career statistics. A past cricketer need not be a researcher or an analyst. With time, comments of such cricketers come with the unwritten statutory disclaimer for the discerning reader — the opinions are strictly personal, based on an enormous faith in his gut and involves no number crunching or analysis.

However, to underline the claim with a false and scarcely researched fact, based on perceptions and tales heard from grandpa, without even rudimentary look at the data, is tantamount to misleading even some diligent followers of the game with a false claim of robustness.

A detailed look at the top-order distribution among new-ball bowlers

Name	Innings	Innings in Top 6	%	Opener	No. 3	No. 4	No. 5	No. 6	Batting average in top 6
Goddard	78	77	99%	95%	1%	1%	1%	–	34.91
Giffen	53	52	98%	4%	55%	13%	6%	21%	23.44
Miller	87	83	95%	0%	11%	17%	41%	3%	37.15
Sobers	160	143	89%	5%	11%	15%	23%	36%	57.81
Noble	73	65	89%	15%	8%	32%	22%	12%	31.2
Ulyett	39	34	87%	38%	26%	10%	3%	10%	26.61
Bailey	91	67	74%	15%	2%	1%	3%	32%	29.8
Botham	161	114	71%	–	–	1%	11%	58%	33.18
Prabhakar	58	34	59%	52%	2%	0%	2%	3%	33.54
Flintoff	130	70	54%	–	–	1%	2%	52%	32.98
Phadkar	45	23	51%	–	–	–	7%	44%	31.76
Gomez	46	23	50%	–	–	9%	22%	20%	31.23
Gregory	34	16	47%	9%	9%	9%	9%	12%	38.18
Snooke	46	21	46%	–	13%	4%	15%	13%	15.3
Cairns	104	29	28%	–	1%	2%	1%	24%	25.62
Imran	126	28	22%	–	–	1%	3%	18%	62.38

(Arunabha Sengupta is a cricket historian and Chief Cricket Writer at CricketCountry. He writes about the history of cricket, with occasional statistical pieces and reflections on the modern game. He is also the author of four novels, the most recent being Sherlock Holmes and the Birth of The Ashes. He tweets here.)

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