Are today’s Test cricket batsmen better than the greats of yesteryears? A comparative analysis

In sports, including Test cricket, athletes from years past serve as performance role models and set benchmarks for subsequent generations of players. Sports fans often wonder: are players of today as good as greats from the past? Alternatively, how do today’s athletes compare with greats from yesteryears? This paper attempts to answer that question for Test match cricket. We applied data mining to batting performance of eighty, now retired, Test Cricket Greats (TCG from hereon) from eight major Test cricket countries. Batting performance attributes included batting average, strike rate, numbers of fifties and hundreds scored, among others. Using k-Means cluster analysis, TCG performance records were classified into three clusters which was our Training Model. Two clusters were populated by established batsmen and the third cluster included bowlers, all-rounders with significant bowling, and some batsmen. The Learning Model was applied to predict classifications of thirty two Test Cricket Active (TCA from hereon) players. Statistical tests were performed, cluster wise, to highlight similarities and dis-similarities between TCA and TCG players. Results show that several active players, while still mid-career, have already achieved batting performance records which are at par with the best of TCG.