Atherton v McGrath
How much damage can one bowler do to a player’s career stats?
I tend to prefer words having some meaning. I was once providing details to someone filling them in on a form and on giving my name received the reply “Awesome”. Either it is not “awesome” to know one’s own name, or “awesome” no longer means what one would think it does. Cricket commentary can often abuse words to the point of no return. A “great shot” or even a “great innings” often falls well short of actual greatness. Michael Atherton was a very good Test cricketer. His figures were 7 728 runs at 37.69 in 115 Tests. Which is very good, but not great. While statistics are clearly not the only arbiter of greatness, a benchmark of 40 would be the minimum a batter would need to qualify for the ‘great’ conversion, except for those who played in the very early days of Test cricket when run-scoring was significantly more difficult than it is now.
It is reasonably well known amongst devoted followers that Glenn McGrath dismissed Atherton more often than any other bowler has dismissed one batter in Test cricket. He did this 19 times, which broke the previous record of Alec Bedser’s 18 dismissals of Arthur Morris. While they obviously faced each other a lot, which is a necessity for this time of record, Atherton also did not score many runs off McGrath. Just the 248 to be precise for a miserable average of 13.05. Take McGrath out of Atherton’s record and his career average magically goes up to 40.22. Atherton was also dismissed 17 times each by the great West Indies pair of Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh. He averaged 17.29 v Ambrose and a relatively respectable 27.94 v Walsh. Take out Ambrose as well as McGrath and his overall average goes up to 42.52, add Walsh to the removed bowlers and it is up to 44.15. Of course, “He was a great batter if he didn’t have to face bowlers X, Y and Z” is not an actual concept, but this does give an indication of the effect a dominant bowler or two can have over a batter’s career.
Of batters with over 5 000 Test runs there are two bowlers who are responsible for 10+% of an individual’s Test dismissals. Hedley Verity dismissed Don Bradman eight times out of his 70 dismissals for an average of 49.75. Without Verity (or, for that matter, any bowler who had an average below 100 against him) and his average goes (drum roll….) over 100. In Verity’s case it goes to 106.42. The other case is Doug Walters v Derek Underwood. And, like Bradman and Atherton, removing Underwood from Walters’ career bumps him over a benchmark average. Walters was dismissed 12 times by Underwood (out of a total of 111) for an average of 20.91. His overall average of 48.26 goes to 51.58 without Underwood.
If you feel inclined to support my work on the “Notcher’s Natter” you may consider buying me a coffee here: https://buymeacoffee.com/notchersnatter
It would be much appreciated.
Here is a bit more match-up trivia:
