In Response: CCP’s top five Guyanese cricketers list hits a nerve

This kind of discourse is a healthy thing, and the riposte was well reasoned, so I include their letter below so you can make up your own mind.

Where do you stand?

Machel, I generally do not have time to respond when you mention something that triggers me, but lucky you, I had a couple of hours of spare time this Sunday morning to respond.

In the YouTube video where you discuss the top five Guyanese cricketers, you stated that Chanderpaul’s career was unfairly cut short by the WICB (or whatever it was called at the time). And you then mentioned the rum shop conspiracy theory that was to prevent Chanderpaul from passing Lara for Test runs. In principle, I agree that Chanderpaul was probably let go too soon. I find it harder to believe anyone in the WICB did it to protect Lara’s legacy.

I found your statement particularly jarring because I am a Trini, and I have long held a grudge that Lara’s own career was cut short prematurely because the WICB had a very difficult relationship with him. He challenged them a lot during his career. Lara has a flawed personality and is not well-liked by many, myself included. I don’t think he had many allies on the board in 2007 when he retired, or in 2015 when Chanderpaul was forced out, so I doubt your conspiracy theory.

I was particularly upset because Lara was very close to passing the 12k Test run mark as the first cricketer to do so. He was ahead of Tendulkar at the time and only needed another 47 runs.

But as you always say, let's get some facts together and compare them to see whether Chanderpaul and Lara had their careers curtailed unfairly. I added Viv Richards as a third example to add a little more context.

To do the comparison, I looked at their last twenty innings, covering approximately one calendar year (slightly longer in Richards case), as this seemed like a reasonable period of time to judge performance.

Facts:

Chanderpaul was 40 yrs and 258 days old when he played his last Test innings.

Lara was 37 yrs and 209 days old when he played his last Test innings.

Richards was 39 yrs and 154 days old when he played his last Test innings.

In the last twenty innings, the three accumulated the following number of runs:

Lara: 992 runs

Chanderpaul: 668 runs

Richards: 670 runs

But because of the number of not-out innings Chanderpaul had, I don’t think that number is a fair reflection. To that end, I have created a plot that shows in a bar chart how many runs were scored by each player in their last twenty innings, but also what their twenty innings rolling Test average was (line): 

Now you can see that because of the large number of not-out innings, Chanderpaul had a rolling average up near 80 at the start of the last year he played. But it did start to trend downwards, around 50 in his fourteenth and fifteenth innings, and his last century was his ninth innings of the twenty. But considering his efforts for WI, they could have given him more time to see if he could have worked his way out of the slump. The only caveat was his age, which was approaching 41.

Richards, on the other hand, had a rolling average of around 40, didn’t have a century in his last twenty innings, and was visibly seen to struggle as his hand-eye coordination started to fall off. An average of 40 was still good in Test cricket in the ‘90s, but it was not what he had been.

Lara, I would argue, has the best case for his career being prematurely cut off as a batsman. He had two centuries in his last five innings, including a 200, and his rolling average over the last twenty innings was close to 50. He was also younger. 

The next tour was to England after the World Cup, where he had a good record, but he was retired because the selectors and board felt he had to pay for the team’s poor performance at the 2007 home World Cup, where he was captain. That is justifiable, as he didn’t get the best out of the team. But why couldn’t he have just gone as a batsman with a new captain? He had been a batsman when Carl Hooper had been captain. I think that was a mistake.

So, if Lara and Chanderpaul both had their careers unfairly cut short by a couple of tours, where would they have reached? Both over 12k, yes, but who would be on top? I love them both and have no problem with Chanderpaul beating Lara on weight of runs, though I know who I was more excited to watch bat.