Does either piece of equipment have a fatal flaw or advantage?
What is the most even pairing of regulation sports equipment?

2nd Test, India tour of Australia at Melbourne, Dec 26-30 2020

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Innings	Score
Australia	195
India	206/5 (69.2 ov)

Batsman	Runs	Balls	SR
Ajinkya Rahane	62	136	45.59
Ravindra Jadeja	12	35	34.29

Bowler	Overs	Runs	Wickets
Mitchell Starc	15.2	47	2
Josh Hazlewood	17.0	34	0

Recent : . . . . | . . . . 4 . | . 3 . 1 . . | . . 

India lead by 11 runs. CRR: 2.97
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2nd ODI (D/N), India tour of Australia at Sydney, Nov 29 2020

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Innings	Score
Australia	389/4
India	338/9 (50 ov, target 390)

Australia

Batter	Runs		Bowler	Wickets
Steven Smith	104		Josh Hazlewood	2
David Warner	83		Adam Zampa	2
Marnus Labuschagne	70		Pat Cummins	2

India

Batter	Runs		Bowler	Wickets
Virat Kohli	89		Hardik Pandya	1
KL Rahul	76		Mohammed Shami	1
Shreyas Iyer	38		Jasprit Bumrah	1

Australia won by 51 runs
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In a parallel universe, Rohit Sharma hits Nathan Lyon for a six and brings up an overseas half century against (probably) the world's best current bowling attack in just 74 deliveries.
Commentators and analysts would exclaim "And Sharma brings up his 50 in style! What a shot that is!" Not a single person would cry "That was so irresponsible. In this situation, how can anyone in their right mind play that shot?"
I find it amusing that the result of a risky decision is what determines how valid that decision was. If going for a six in a certain set of circumstances is foolish, then why not call it out even if it goes for six? Similarly, if going for a six makes sense to keep the momentum going, don't show outrage even if the batsman gets caught at the boundary.
Rohit's statement about how he will continue backing himself to play that shot (which he says he's good at) is, in my opinion, perfectly valid. You can't just keep letting the result of the shot determine whether it was a good idea to play it in the first place.
Thoughts?

Introduction
Hello all! And yes, I am that bored. We all know that Steve Smith is a batsman (and man) full of eccentricities and quirks. His leaves, fidgets and unorthodox technique has attracted much attention, but so has his obsession with batting away from the game. His shadow-batting and visualisation is nothing less than glorious, but it comes at a price, sleep. Smith told Sky Sports before the start of the 2019 Ashes that he averages 15-20 hours sleep per test match, across the 5 days. So, lets average that to 17.5 hours throughout the test, 3.5 per day (including the night before the test).
The sleep foundation says, as do many institutions, that adults should get 7-9 hours sleep per night, so let's call that 8. Let's take a look at how many hours of sleep smith is "behind" the average recommendation, per day:

Day	Recommended sleep	Smith's sleep	Hours in the red
Day 1	8.0	3.5	4.5
Day 2	16.0	7.0	9.0
Day 3	24.0	10.5	13.5
Day 4	32.0	14.0	18.0
Day 5	40.0	17.5	22.5

Steve Smith, and the fab 4
To even things out, I will only be looking at Smith's numbers since he returned to the test team as a specialist batsmen (the Border Gavaskar trophy of 2013). In other posts, this would be seen as cherry picking because his stats are, obviously, a lot more impressive since then, however here we are not measuring how "good" batsmen are, so to make it fair on Smith the bastman, I've elected to do just that. So, how much does Steve Smith's record vary across innings?

Player	Inn1	Inn2	Inn3	Inn4	BattingAve
SPD Smith	99.08	61.14	46.89	30.73	64.01

Wow! Look at that decline. Averaging 100 in the first innings, down to a measly 30 in the fourth. But let's put them into context; compare them to "similar" batsmen. Innings averages of all 4 batsmen to average 60+ in tests (minimum 40 innings):

Player	Inn1	Inn2	Inn3	Inn4	BattingAve
SPD Smith	99.08	61.14	46.89	30.73	64.01
RG Pollock	56.71	76.88	48.30	142.00	60.97
GA Headley	84.90	40.62	47.42	89.00	60.83
H Sutcliffe	61.58	56.88	74.75	53.66	60.73

Pollock's 4th innings average is helped by having 3 innings and 2 not outs there, but you can see that, while averages vary a little among other batsmen, none have such drastic changes, and none have such a clear pattern.
Analysis of fab 4:

Player	Inn1	Inn2	Inn3	Inn4	BattingAve
SPD Smith	99.08	61.14	46.89	30.73	64.01
V Kohli	53.18	74.85	34.69	49.77	53.41
KS Williamson	47.07	66.27	47.56	49.14	52.90
JE Root	47.80	58.05	46.77	35.26	47.99

Again, a little bit of deviation there, mainly with Kohli, but no such clear pattern. Smith vs "the big 4" of the 2000s:

Player	Inn1	Inn2	Inn3	Inn4	BattingAve
SPD Smith	99.08	61.14	46.89	30.73	64.01
JH Kallis	56.80	53.07	65.26	41.62	55.37
SR Tendulkar	65.97	55.26	46.81	36.93	53.78
BC Lara	70.17	59.01	40.42	35.12	52.88
RT Ponting	61.39	52.92	38.54	50.41	51.85

Aha! So we've found two other decliners in Tendulkar and Lara. From what I can find, Lara had no sleeping problems at all, and Tendulkar only complained of insomnia when he had injury, which would certainly affect his record, but a 30 year career would level most of those affects out.
Measurements: The Coefficient of Variation
It's all well and good to look at these numbers and know what they mean, but is there a metric we can use to analyse players' consistency across innings? Yes! When looking at means and standard deviations, a metric that can be used is the "coefficient of variantion", which effectively equalises standard deviation across different scales. It is the relative standard deviation. It's simply calculated by standard deviation over mean.
Having said that, let's look at the relative standard deviation of some batsmen (the higher the figure, the more spread the data is):

Player	SD	Mean	Rel-SD
SPD Smith	25.28	59.46	0.43
BC Lara	14.10	51.18	0.28
V Kohli	14.34	53.12	0.27
SR Tendulkar	10.70	51.24	0.21
JE Root	8.07	46.97	0.17
JH Kallis	8.49	54.19	0.16
RT Ponting	8.17	50.82	0.16
KS Williamson	7.98	52.51	0.15

So folks, there it is. Proof that Smith is a fair bit of an outlier when looking at consistency across innings of test matches. Is it because of his sleep? I'd say so, if you scroll up and look at the "hours in the red' table.

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Hey guys,
Full disclosure: I do not know much about cricket whatsoever. It is something I would like to get interested in, but I live in Canada so cricket is not a big sport here that people follow.
Anyways, I discovered who Don Bradman was last night and am absolutely fascinated by his dominance and how he seemed to be exponentially better than any of his peers. I was just wondering if someone could put his records (specifically his 99.94 batting average) into context for someone who is fan of American/Canadian sports leagues?
What would an equivalent record look like in baseball, American football, hockey, or basketball?
Has there been any record or athlete in those sports that even comes close to the dominance of Bradman?
Apologies for my ignorance on the subject, I just want to grasp how good this guy was and if there is/can be anything comparable to him in North American sports. Thanks!

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Title

I’m still baffled that owais shah managed to play for England for as long as he did. I know he was probably better than 99 percent of the population because you still need to be seriously good to even get to first class cricket but god damn his numbers are incredibly mediocre for someone who managed to play 71 odi’s and 6 tests.

Can't say I'm the greatest authority on being level headed and responsible on here, and I love a shit take just as much as anyone else - BUT there did seem to be a whole lot of them over the last few days. Some in regards to the actual match, and then of course some other things that happened.
So here's a (relatively) unbiased look at some I saw several times over:
Siraj is soft/too emotional
Crying during your national anthem is not a weird thing to do. Anyone who has watched the Olympics would know this.
India has ~20% of the world's population at this point. To be in the top 11 players in the nation's most popular sport is an unbelievable achievement. If you don't feel anything inside when the anthem plays and the realisation that you're about to play for your country sinks in... Who are you?
No one is born to play for a nation. You have to earn it. There is context behind these things.
What was said wasn't even that bad
Note the second word in the term 'casual racism'
They say worse things to minorities at NBA/NFL/NRL/AFL/Soccer etc
...That's bad.
That doesn't actually improve the situation. Not even the tiniest little bit.
I have said on here before that I find it very strange how fans of test cricket can be racist (perhaps a naive sentence) - given that test cricket is probably the only sport that has an elite team in every continent, who all routinely play each other. The Windies team covers both North and South America if anyone didn't know. And yes, Antarctica is basically Australia. Fight me.
In my mind it's very strange to follow a sport like this and still have some 1800s level opinions.
"The crowd is abusing me" is ripe for exploitation and time-wasting
The simple fact is that there are way better ways to waste time. I seem to remember Stuart Broad used to have an odd condition where he suddenly needed to remove both his shoes at very convenient moments. However, he never got the police involved and never had to get his nations board to make public statements.
If someone was found to do this purely for the sake of wasting time, their punishment wouldn't be small.

• Hopefully that covers some things. So to the actual game:

If Pujara batted faster, India could have won
Maybe? Very hard to tell.
The thing is, Pujara was never playing for the win. Pant was.
Pant and Pujara don't have to have the same gameplan. If Pant believes that he can win the test match, then good for him. But in a situation like this, Pujara has no reason to entertain something so insane.
Pujara was perfectly entitled to stonewall the whole day while Pant piled up runs. And if it got to a point where it looked like the win was actually doable, then Pujara might have changed his plan.
The most important part of the innings was that they don't lose. It's always better to only risk losing 1 wicket than 2. Pant can play at his own peril and if he fucks up then that's entirely his problem.
Paine's sledging went too far
Paine's chat is average at best. I don't know where this idea that he's a quick-witted mastermind even came from.
But to address the point - Paine lost that battle with Ashwin before he even replied.
In the middle of a Sydney test, when you can still win, and you're already chatting shit about the GABBA? Nah. Embarrassing. You've given up.
Ashwin replied and Paine calls him a dickhead. You lose again. You can't keep your cool because you've already accepted you can't win the game.
I would have no issue personally being called a dickhead if it came out of pure desperation. I would be surprised if it bothered Ashwin at all.
Wade throwing the ball at the batsmen was not on
Yeah maybe. It's hard to really have a strong opinion on. Collecting the ball and instantly throwing it at the stumps happens a lot. Even if the batsman never leaves their crease.
Simon Jones did it to Matt Hayden once, and hit him. Why did Jones throw it? Fuck I don't know, it's just something you do sometimes.
Wade didn't exactly throw the ball hard. If it was intentional, it wasn't harmful. If it wasn't intentional, it was pretty stupid to throw the ball at him in the first place. If the umpires took issue with it, Wade would have been in trouble. There's rules against these things.
If he gets fined, fair. If not, also fair.
Smith messing up the crease was not on
I agree. If I am batting, the crease is my personal space. Please don't touch it.
Lots of people saying that Smith can hardly do anything to the footmarks on a day 5 pitch - which is true - but that's not the point. If I'm batting and you're not, don't touch my fucking footmarks. They are mine.
Unless you're literally picking up the ball from the footmarks, there's no real reason a fielder should ever be standing in that zone.
I often use a blade of grass for my guard marker. I stand outside leg so I know no one else will stand on it. I would be seriously pissed off if someone came and just kicked it away for no reason.
On top of that - there are rules against causing 'avoidable' damage to the wicket.
Unless you're batting, don't ever touch the crease.
DRS woes
If you agree to play a game by a particular set of rules, then guess what? It's kind of tough shit when those rules go against you. That's kind of how life works.
Getting angry at a computer projection is just.... Well think about it for a second.
Vihari and Ashwin should have taken more runs when they were available
Why? I would argue that they took way more runs than they needed to. I don't know why they ever ran at all.
Vihari was injured. I've batted with a pulled hamstring before - there's no shot you can play that doesn't stretch it. It's horrible. The fact that he could bat at all is amazing.
There is no obligation for the players to actually entertain the fans. The players can be as boring as they like.
Jadeja shouldn't have been ready to come out and risk further injury
Well yes, but try telling a professional sportsman not to go back out and keep playing. It really doesn't work that way.
"[INSERT PLAYER HERE] is shit"
I have addressed this before. There's not a single person that has ever played test cricket who has been shit at the sport. Yes, you can be bad in a certain context - Rohit averaging 26 away from home for example. Or Wade averaging 30 as a full time batsman. But I would give my life to be able to average 30 in test. Fuck I can't even average 30 in my local 4th grade most years. My criticisms of these men are weak at best.
If you still wanted to blame someone, it would be the selectors. Not the players. Joe Burns getting selected was sad for me. If you're truly out of form, you're fucked. He hadn't scored a run in months, and then got selected anyway. It's not really like a player can just decline a selection - you'll never play again if you do.
And surprise surprise, we confirmed that yep, he's still definitely out of form. Bye bye Joe. Hope you enjoyed the experience on worldwide TV.
No one is bad on purpose. If they were, that's called match fixing and is illegal.

• And some final words:

These are just regular men. They happen to be very good at a sport. So good in fact that other people willingly pay to watch them be that good.
That's all cricket really is. Some of the fans are more serious about it than the players themselves.
You don't need to do that.

My call is Billy Stanlake. I found his stats since his under 12 days yet his highest score in all cricket is 22 (in a club game 3 years ago)

Iyer - 54 matches (92 innings), 4592 runs at avg of 52.18 and SR of 81.54. 23 fifties and 12 hundreds
Pandey - 91 matches (142 innings), 6389 runs at an avg of 51.11 and SR of 65.58. 29 fifties and 19 hundreds
These are very respectable stats, and totally worthy of a Test selection. Why aren't they even a regular name in the Test squad? T20 isn't their best format, but why aren't they getting utlilised in what they know best? If not a first choice in the XI, then they should definitely go to Australia as backup batsmens.