Kohli? A career of milking runs against dumb bowlers or on dead tracks.
stats considered in isolation are always misleading. which means not only that other stats besides ave also matter - ie SR, number of centuries in clutch situations etc - but, above all, that one can only begin to know the worth of a 50 something average if other averages are not compared to it.
understanding this most basic of premises is the problem equally for detractors of kohli and for those who extrapolate, from the poor quality of domestic cricket in pakistan, to the idea that stats can not be used as indicators in selecting players for the national team.
nothing stops other batsmen from milking more runs than kohli, from today's supposedly inferior bowlers, but he has progressively put more and more distance between himself and the rest of the pack. if anything, i feel the 8 point gap between his average and babar's underestimates the chasm separating the two players.
one of the things that always stood out for me is what numbers could have told us about a player like rahat ali, who got a long run in the national squad on the basis of pretty ordinary stats by domestic standards. at some point he averaged high 30 in LOIs, while someone like sadaf averaged 18.
that is a ludicrous gap. but what really stood out for me is rahat's inability to take big hauls in fist class cricket - in his entire domestic career, in a time in which other bowlers were running rampant, he never took a single 10 fer.
this is a bit like another mentally weak player, today seen in action in the psl, whose physical attributes should have made him a great bowler, steve finn. here is someone who could run through a lineup, and did, on a few spectacular occasions, but could so rarely hold it together long enough over a course of one match. and as with rahat, we might see signs of this is we look in his stats.
the problem is not that stats lie, but that they don't provide that which we otherwise and erroneously expect from numbers and scientific measurement, which is certainty, the comfort of feeling a stable ground beneath our feet. science is not based on certainty, but precisely on leaps of faith, the aha moment of a theorist, who must then go about putting their theory into practice. ie, testing it out.
I was just trying to be derogatory!
