All greats of the game, hardly good examples.
Has a lot to do with the quality of Australia's teams in those decades. If you look at runs/wicket in FC competitions, or for other teams of the era, they tell a very different story.
Certainly. Pitches in the pre-war days were not covered and batsmen had to have more skill than they do now to make runs at least when the weather was not completely dry. Still, one can observe Nottinghamshire in the early 1930s, when Sam Staples batted at number 11 and had a career average of 17, followed by Harold Larwood and Bill Voce at numbers nine and ten with averages of nineteen. Voce actually reached 1,000 runs in 1933 and Larwood would have done that in 1931 but for a motor accident wiping a quarter of his season.
It’s interesting to note that in the 1935 Test at the Oval against South Africa England fielded two players – Bill Bowes and Holcombe “Hopper” Read – who both had more wickets than runs in their careers. Read in fact has the lowest first-class batting average (3.67) by any Test cricketer since 1877, and in fact scored in merely 22 of his 54 first-class innings in England. During that season, Read was out for a duck seven times in eight innings and zero not out in the other!
I think Siddle is kinda stuck in a bit of a no-mans-land at the moment with respect to the type of batsman he is. He's not your lower-order slogger, and yet he seems to go out early too often. You know when a tail-ender is 'beaten' and we say, "a better batsman would have nicked that" - I think Siddle is that better batsman, ironically. Boy he nicks them a lot, perhaps needs to learn how to leave them a bit better and focus on time out in the middle as opposed to runs until he is more solid.
