The Quintessential Outsider

Sachin Tendulkar And His Challengers October 31, 2010

Sachin Tendulkar’s getting-better-with-age performance and his Bradmanesque statistics this year have been the focus of a lot of discussion and analysis recently, like this one on Cricinfo. While his performance has silenced his critics and delighted his fans (I am one of the latter), it has also rendered questions about his retirement and comparisons with contemporaries largely irrelevant. However, I am still tempted to draw some comparisons, do some analysis of my own and try to answer some questions –  Will Sachin’s record ever be broken? What will it take to break, or even come close to it? Who from the present generation can break this record?

Before proceeding to try and answer this question, let me define it more clearly. By record, I mean one “important” record – most runs in a Test career. Not ODIs because even a casual glance at the table of highest ODI run-scorers and century-makers will show how far ahead Sachin is of the rest, and if ODI cricket becomes less and less popular with the increasing popularity of T20, then no one might ever be able to play enough matches to break Sachin’s ODI records, a la Jack Hobbs or Wilfred Rhodes in first-class cricket. Other formats like first-class, List A, T20 and T20-Internationals are too mundane or too new in Sachin’s case.

So the question is – what will it take to break Sachin’s record of most runs in Tests? Sachin currently has 14,240 runs from 171 Tests, and he is going to play at least 6 more Tests (against the Kiwis and Proteas) before the World Cup. While it is widely believed that he will retire from ODI cricket after the World Cup, we do not know whether he intends to retire from Tests as well. If Sachin really means what he said a few days back, then it does not seem like he is going to retire from Tests any time soon. I quote:

However, he has mentioned that he would like to reach 15,000 runs in Tests, which on current form, he might achieve within the next three months. So let us suppose for the time being that 15,000 runs will be the mark that Sachin will set before hanging up his bat.

Whoever aims to reach even close to this number will have to perform exceedingly well for an extended duration of time. How do we define “exceedingly well”? Let us say an average of 1,000 runs a year. Ponting has managed it over the last decade (2,233 on 1st November 2000 to 12,250 today), which is why he came to be regarded as a potential challenger to Sachin’s record. Though Sachin has been pulling ahead of him recently, Ponting still has a chance to catch up before age catches up with him. So we can still look at Ponting’s record, as well as those of other potential challengers. Here, we restrict ourselves to batsmen who have scored at least 5,000 Test runs. It does not make sense to analyze the statistics of a Suresh Raina or a Tamim Iqbal, as they have a long way to go and you never know what path their careers might take. We do not even know how much or how little Test cricket will be played 15 years from now.

With this criteria in place, I looked at the table of highest run-getters in Tests, and came up with the following names who have scored at least 5,000 runs and are still playing – Ricky Ponting, Rahul Dravid, Jacques Kallis, Mahela Jayawardene, S Chanderpaul, Kumar Sangakkara, Mohammad Yousuf, VVS Laxman, Graeme Smith, Virender Sehwag, Chris Gayle, Andrew Strauss, Ramnaresh Sarwan, Kevin Pietersen, Younis Khan, Mark Boucher.

To shorten this list further, I subtracted each player’s current age from 40 (assuming that 40 is the maximum age up to which someone can play respectably in today’s times), multiplied the remaining number of years by 1000 (assuming that they score, on average, 1000 runs a year, according to our definition of “exceedingly well”, till they reach the age of 40), and eliminated those who are still not able to reach 15,000. The following are thus eliminated – Rahul Dravid, S Chanderpaul, Mohammad Yousuf, VVS Laxman, Andrew Strauss, Younis Khan and Mark Boucher.

For the remaining batsmen, here are their current statistics:

Since all of these batsmen made their debut after Sachin, we can look at one more statistic – runs Sachin has scored since each of these batsmen’s debut.

From these tables, we can conclude the following:

1.)   Chris Gayle and Ramnaresh Sarwan are nowhere in the race. Their inclusion here was by statistical accident, because their figures so far show no sign of being able to compete with Sachin’s.

2.)   The most immediate challengers to Sachin’s record are Ricky Ponting and Jacques Kallis. While Ponting has been regarded as a challenger for some time now, Kallis has quietly sneaked up behind him. Their task is fairly well cut-out – to try and narrow, or at least maintain, the gap between them and Sachin while he is around, and then go for the record once he retires.

3.)   The numbers of Jayawardene, Sangakkara and Sehwag also compare favourably with Sachin’s. Jayawardene has an advantage in terms of many more matches played than Sangakkara and Sehwag, but the latter two have been closer competitors to Sachin since their debut. Since all of them are currently in top form (ranks 4, 2 and 3 respectively in the ICC Test batsmen rankings) and have quite some time left before retirement, it will be interesting to see how their numbers shape up in the years to come.

4.)   Graeme Smith and Kevin Pietersen are the youngest of the lot here and also have good records so far. Their best in Tests may be yet to arrive, and they might be the batsmen to watch out for once the others in this list hang up their bats. Graeme Smith has the advantage of having started his career much earlier than Pietersen, due to which he is currently well ahead, but that advantage could be wiped out in a few years, much like Ponting did to Sachin between 2003 and 2006. However, unlike Ponting who is younger than Sachin, Pietersen is older than Smith, and how crucial this age advantage can be for Graeme Smith, we will see below.

For a more quantitative answer to our question, let us see how old each of these batsmen will be when he reaches 15,000 runs, if he scores at the rate of 1,000 runs a year from now on. Ponting, Kallis and Jayawardene will be around 39, while all others except Graeme Smith will be close to or just above 40. Graeme Smith can achieve it before his 38^th birthday, much like Sachin is likely to do in the next few months. So in the long term, Graeme Smith has a better chance of seriously challenging Sachin’s record of most Test runs than anyone else. Unlike Ponting and Kallis, he is not in Sachin’s rearview mirror as of now, but his record so far and the advantage of age put him in this position.

Of course, what I have assumed here, scoring 1,000 runs a year on average, is a very tall task for any batsman. Ponting has managed it over a decade, while Sachin himself, plagued by injuries in his early 30s, has managed an average of 1,000 runs a year only from 1999 to 2002, and is now poised to attain it in the “since 2007” period if he continues his form into the upcoming series. Moreover, such statistical analyses could have been conducted at different points of time over the last 20 years, and would have thrown up a wide range of names as challengers to Sachin, Brian Lara having been one of them for a long time, all of whom were eventually left behind. Sachin’s arguably greatest achievement has been his longevity, having started much earlier than others and still going strong when others his age are panting and walking away into the dusk.

That brings me to my last point. All this analysis could mean nothing if Sachin decides to play on for a couple more years even after reaching 15,000, and maintains his current form. That could see the record being set at something like 17,000 or even 18,000, so high that it may be outside the reach of batsmen for generations to come. That is something a lot of his fans, who cannot imagine cricket without him, would like to see.