Top batsman in test cricket today
Top batsman in test cricket today

So much of sport is conjecture and opinion, with ideas on who are the best athletes in the world formed by biases and past histories.

But the beauty of cricket is that measures of greatness are quantifiable, and anybody with access to a search engine can hunt down thousands of different data points for batting, bowling, fielding, and a combination of all three. And so questions of brilliance and who may just be the best can actually be answered with relative authority. Fire up the ICC test rankings for batting and you will note an anomaly that might just surprise a few.

Virat Kohli has been usurped as the best batsman in the world, according to their model, with Steve Smith taking over in the top spot and Marnus Labuschagne – after a stellar 2019 – up to third behind the Indian captain.

On the face of it, it’s hard to argue with that viewpoint given the incredible Ashes summer that Smith enjoyed with the bat, while Labushagne’s first full year as a test batsman could not have gone any better – he was the only player to top 1000 runs in the longer format in 2019.

But as is often the case, context is key. Labuschagne played 17 test innings last year, Smith 13 and Kohli just eleven. So do the stats lie here, and was Kohli simply a victim of circumstance that he was rested for parts of the season.

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As we know, there are many different ways to measure a batsman’s effectiveness, so let’s dig a little bit deeper into the numbers and see if we can unearth who really is the best willow wielder on the planet right now.

Under the Microscope

While the sheer weight of runs a player scores is often an eye-catching statistic, the time-honoured method of measuring efficiency is via the batting average.

If we take players that only had ten innings or more in test cricket in 2019, we note that Steve Smith topped the pile with an average of 74.23, closely followed by a couple of surprise entrants in Ajinkya Rahane (71.33), Mayank Agarwal (68.54) and Babar Azam (68.44). Indeed, Kohli (68.00) and Labuschagne (64.94) trailed Smith by a considerable margin.

And, as history tells us, not all test runs are born equal. Australia, for example, had a tough five-match series in England, but otherwise, it was an agreeable time for them with home series’ against Sri Lanka, Pakistan and New Zealand – all contests they were the considerable favorites for with the best cricket betting sites.

India, meanwhile, played just eight test matches in 2019 – the curtain-closer against Australia in January, the two-game series in the Caribbean, the three-game contest with South Africa and a pair of outings against Bangladesh. In the end, Kohli batted just eleven times, making two half-centuries and going on to pass 100 twice.

You could make an argument that suggests that the Aussies had the tougher calendar, and thus Smith’s runs were ‘harder’ than those made by Kohli and co. in what was a pretty comfortable schedule.

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The ICC World Test Championship will continue into 2021, and by the end of the competition – and the larger sample it will offer – we will have a better idea of who is the best test batsman in the world.

Right now, and sorry Indian cricket fans, but it is hard to argue against Steve Smith being considered the cream of the crop.