This is what I came up with (click on the picture to see a bigger version). I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions about Tendulkar's career and India's cricketing history of the last two decades viewed purely through his hundreds. Of course, not every nuance can be captured in such a visual, but hopefully, it should give some cricket followers something to chew on.
I enjoy trying to visualize data. Here's an attempt to make a visual resume - slightly outdated.
3 comments:
I did some number crunching on cricinfo yesterday after reading some scathing columns in DNA over the last few weeks. My conclusion was that he just has such a large body of work that anyone can slide it in whichever way he wants to, and use it to prop up his stance!
E.g. he has 15 centuries against 'weaker teams' like Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Holland, Kenya and West Indies (I myself am surprised that I included WI in this list but such is life). 34 ODI centuries is still big. DNA claims that his last few hundreds have not resulted in wins - because there's this one against Bangladesh, 1 against England in the WC which was a tie, another one in the WC ( don't remember - SA?) which we lost, 1 in the Test against SA which was a draw and another Test 100 against SA in which we lost. This has to be the most jaundiced manner of looking at stats. This doesn't take into account that only Dilshan scored more runs in the 2011 WC. Similarly, this thing about his 100's not leading to a win - you can't conveniently choose to use numbers when it suits you - the no. may look big but what about the %age of 100s? of course, all this is what a Sachin fan should not be doing - trying to defend him against the baiters. It is just fashionable for most people to do so. (and now hoping these comments actually get published!! - chances of SRT getting his 101st century before that are higher :-))
Agreed - there is no such thing as an objective statistic, everything is coloured (pun intended) by bias!
Someone I know said they shared this feeling about SRT 100s usually being in a losing cause, and seeing this chart to say: well, that's not really so. It's also interesting to see how so many SRT 100s have come in Test wins in the 2nd half of his career - can show how India's own Test character changed in the last 20 yrs.
The fact that he has about 20+ 90s is also quite interesting - IMO, there is nothing so sacrosanct about a ton w.r.t winning, but I'd like to see 85+ zone scores being correlated with wins across ckt; it was probably good enough upto the 90s decade when the record for ODIs was so low.
Great graphic- Tufte would approve
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I can see the appeal of 10x10, but it would be nicer to see this stacked across the years as well.
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