I believe in a full career Barry could have been as good as any great?Posted an article from cricket web.Arguably the most perfect and complete batsmen of all time If you consider WSC cricket supertset stats could have been as good as Viv Richards or later Sachin Tendulkar if not better.I feel he was more complete than any batsmen after Bradman.
"Barry Richards closest thing to Don Bradman"
by Geoff Wijesinghe
In 1946, as a little boy of 11, early each morning I used to cycle to the Bambalapitiya junction and join the crowd of cricket enthusiasts gathered at a vegetarian hotel, where now the Majestic Bakery is located, to listen to the ball-by-ball commentaries of the first England-Australia Ashes series after the Second World War being played Down Under.
The Australians were led by Don Bradman and England by Walter Hammond in a series in which the latter were routed.
The graphic description of play by Alan McGilvray, the doyen of Australian commentators, and his colleagues gave my mind's eye a picture of what was happening in the Tests being played thousands of miles away across the seas, as do the TV screens today. Of course, not having the benefit of a live television view, the pictures projected in the mind's eye fed by the commentaries were based on imagination and photographs of the venues and the players I had seen in newspapers. But, the run of play and the atmosphere relayed to the listeners were so explicit and lifelike that I had a fair picture of the proceedings.
Alan McGilvray, in his very informative and knowledgeable book, "The Game Goes On" as told to Norman Tusker, published after his retirement, in a chapter titled "Bradman Revisited", compares several leading batsmen (except Hayden, who was yet to emerge on the cricketing scene and Sachin Tendulkar who had just begun his career) to the great Don.
He rates the South African Barry Richards, now a leading commentator, who is one of those covering the present Test series between the Sri Lankans and the Proteas, as the closest to Bradman.
"Nobody will ever touch Bradman. He was one apart. Yet, through a couple of generations of cricketers since Bradman left center stage, comparisons have repeatedly been made, or at least attempted. Perhaps it is because those who saw him long to see something like him again. Maybe it is just the eternal hope that ultimate excellence regenerates itself. Whatever the basis of it, another Bradman is a tag that has been given to more than one young hopeful in the forty years since Bradman ended his playing days".
Citing a couple of examples of the new Bradman tag, McGilvray speaks of Ian Craig who first made the New South Wales team at 16, scored a magnificent double-century against South Africa at 17, and found himself in an Australian team of extraordinary talent and experience when still three months short of his 18th birthday.
There was a natural romance of one so young in the Australian side, which, boasted Arthur Morris, Lindsay Hassett, who succeeded Bradman as captain, Keith Miller, Neil Harvey, Bill Johnston and Douglas Ring, to say nothing of young bloods like Richie Benaud and Colin McDonald.
However, Craig found the Bradman comparison hard to live with. He failed in England in 1953, did a little better there in 1956 and ended up as captain of Australia at age 22. An illness thwarted his career thereafter. But McGilvray felt that Craig would have done so much more had the world not lined him up as another Don Bradman.
O'Neil too, found the weight of Bradman stature within the cricketing community, and particularly the press, weighing upon him.
O'Neil made a spectacular impact on Sheffield Shield cricket in the 1950s, scoring 1,005 runs in the 1957-58 season when he was just a lad of 21. Most of his runs came with a great flourish and he had some glorious strokes, wonderful strength off the blackfoot, an attitude that demanded he get on with it. He had also had enormous crowd appeal. O'Neil scored plenty of runs for Australia for seven or eight years and captured all those qualities of daring and aggression so admired in the Australian nature. But, another Bradman? That was asking too much, says the veteran broadcaster.
"I have watched many great players down the years and there is only one ever considered to be in the Bradman mould. I have seen the best from those who pre-dated Bradman like the remarkable Charlie Macartney, to contemporaries Bill Woodfull and Bill Ponsford through a plethora of world-class batsmen of every nation who have graced the game in the half-century since. For sure, there have been plenty of masterful players. Charlie Macartney was one of them. They called him the Governor-General, for his bearing at the wicket, one of total command".
"Charlie Macartney perhaps had Bradman's competitiveness. On his day, he certainly had his aggression and when things were right, much of his technical excellence. But for all his strengths, he could never put them all together, match in and match out, as Bradman could. He was no Bradman".
"Similarly Woodfull and Ponsford offered their particular strengths. But, they were no comparison to Bradman".
McGilvray says of Barry Richards, "In all the times since, only a handful of players have built careers to be mentioned in the same breath as Bradman. I narrow the field to one. By the test of technique and attitude and precision and performance, the only man I would measure against the Don is the South African Barry Richards. And, all things considered, I would suggest it would be a pretty close thing.
"There was so much about Barry Richards and Don Bradman that was similar. The anticipation and the speed with which they got themselves into position to play a shot. The timing and the power of their strokes. The thoughtful, analytical way they went about working out the bowling.
The manner in which they worked to dominate, then devastate, the best of attacks. Richards, if anything, was a little stronger than Bradman with shots on the off-side.
Bradman undoubtedly was more forceful and more effective than Richards when he played to the on-side. On either count, both were gloriously effective. Their footwork was supreme. They conserved their energy, waiting for the ball to come on and dispatching it with superb timing rather than brute power. Yet, they would dance to smother a spinner; their speed in getting into position seemed to give them so much more time, compared even to the greatest of players down the years".
Richards who launched himself almost at the precise moment when South Africa were banned from Test cricket due to its apartheid policies, could play in only four tests from 1969-70, with an average of 72 and included two centuries against the Australians.
His 140 in the second test when he passed 100 in just 116 balls, and Graeme Pollock who hit a majestic 274, consigned Australia to the scrap heap, says McGilvray. Richards scored 79 centuries in first class cricket.
"This cricket would have given Richards the hard edge he needed, enough, perhaps, even to have challenged the redoubtable Bradman".
"I have always liked to use a particular innings of each player as a measuring stick of just how similar their talents were. These were innings in which each of them scored 300 runs in a day. Bradman's was scored at Leeds in 1930 in a Test against England when Bradman was a 22-year-old prodigy.
Richards' was scored at perth in 1970, in a sheffield shield match between South Australia and Western Australia. Bradman went in eight minutes after the start of play at the fall of Archie Jackson's wicket, finished the day on 309 not out and was out next morning for 334. Richard opened up, ended the day on 325 not out, and was eventually out for 356".
"Bradman took 375 minutes to hit his 334 and hit 46 boundaries. Richards hit his 356 in 372 minutes. He found the boundary rope 48 times, and hit a six as well. It takes batsmen of rare quality to play like that. Neither player managed a century in each session in topping the 300.
Bradman hit 105 before lunch, 115 in the session between lunch and tea, and 89 in the final period when weariness was catching up with him. Richards hit 79 in the first session, 137 in the next and 109 in the last".
Both Bradman and Richards made these blistering triple centuries against very strong bowling attacks.
McGilvray says that "some would put Vivian Richards, the man who had been widely labelled as the Black Bradman, into the same class of supreme players to be measured with the Don. Great player Richards has been, he is limited when he is put against the standards of Bradman and Barry Richards".
"The original Black Bradman was George Headley, a contemporary of the Don and prolific batsman when the West Indies were just finding their feet on the international scene".
"As to whether Vivian Richards, for all his magnificent power and flamboyance can even measure up with George Headley for the Black Bradman tag remains a problem with me".
Sunil Gavaskar now stands as the most accomplished batsman of all time.
He had certainly scored more runs than any other player, and batting records have cascaded about him in 15 years or so of Test cricket, he has won a status in his homeland that the Maharajah and the princes of other times would envy. McGilvray describes the Little Master as a product of India's evolution who had become the ultimate artisan.
. No body knows whether Barry Richards would've had the the same impact as Grame Pollock but an FC average of 54.00 surely suggest that he would've been one of the greats of the game regardless. 
