70: Alan Davidson

44 matches. 186 wickets @ 20.53. Strike rate: 62.3. 14x 5wi.

11 years. 2x good. 3x excellent. 4x outstanding.

The discussion

Outside of Australia, Alan Davidson was a relatively unknown Australian left-arm medium-fast bowler from the 50s and 60s. Relatively unknown is probably an exaggeration, but I say it because in the lists of ‘best bowling average of all-time’, most cricket fans can easily recall names like Lohmann, Barnes, Garner, McGrath, Holding and Marshall. But Davidson features on this list, too, with a Test average of 20.53, but his name comes up less often than it should.

At this point it’s worth pointing out that Alan Davidson passed away two days before we were scheduled to record our podcast episode to introduce him at number 70 in our Hall of Fame, which makes it doubly important now to pay tribute to the underrated greatness of his career.

Given that Davidson played in the 1950s and 1960s (it is 58 years since he retired from international cricket), again, we ask the question: how do we compare players across eras? If we put Davidson in a time machine and transported him to 1975, 1995, 2015 or even 2021, would his career be the same? Or even better, perhaps?

Often the argument against players of yesteryear when comparing them to those from the modern era goes along the lines of:

“If we put player X in a time machine, and brought him forward to the present day, there’s no way they’d be able to compete with the fitter, faster, stronger, more professional players.”

In my mind, the time-machine theory has a few flaws.

The first of these, in my view, is that players were ‘less fit’ or less athletic in years gone by. The old Latin phrase citius, altius, fortius (faster, higher, stronger) comes immediately to mind, but it may not necessarily be true. Cricketers might bench or squat more today than in 1955, but that is a product of the professional era (i.e. modern training techniques) more than it is their physiology. There are plenty of players from years gone by that possessed physiques that would thrive in the current era of specific weight training and fitness regimes. Modern players might be stronger, but transplant Alan Davidson into 2020, give him a fitness (and nutrition) programme, and within a few weeks, maybe a few months, a player as athletic as Davidson would be on par with his contemporaries.[1] Moreover, in the 1950s, cricketers largely kept fit for cricket by playing cricket. Long tours with many first-class matches were common, and players stayed in shape on their long tour journeys (by ship!) with improvised exercises and games. They might not have been shifting a lot of tin, but they were fit, nonetheless.

Result: No real disadvantage for the player of yesteryear, provided their time machine allows them to lift a few weights in transit and engage in the same modern fitness and nutritional regime.

Let’s talk injuries and sustainability. Yes, modern cricketers play A LOT of cricket, and a lot of that cricket is international cricket, played at a higher intensity. Players in the 1950s played plenty of cricket, too, but the intensity of county cricket or first-class tour matches doesn’t quite equate to an equivalent number of days played in the higher intensity environment of modern-day franchise or international cricket.

Result: Score one for the modern player.

We also know far more about managing (mostly bowler) workloads to stave off injury, and surgical techniques are light years ahead of where they were even 30 years ago, let alone 50 or 60 years ago. A player who suffered from frequent injuries during their career, like Alan Davidson, might be much better managed in this day and age. We can’t be sure, but my hypothesis is that injury-prone players from the past would still be injury prone today, but perhaps not to the same extent. Certainly an ACL tear is now not a career-ending injury, whereas even minor ligament damage could spell the end of a career even as recently as the 1980s or even the 1990s.

Result: A slight discernible advantage to the modern player, from a management and recovery point of view.

One way to tell if a past player could thrive in the modern era of hyper-athletic players is whether they were described as being a dynamic fielder, powerfully built or had the ability to hit the ball hard/long. Davidson, a powerful batter, would benefit from both the short boundaries in white-ball cricket these days, as well as by getting his hands on a larger bat. Given he was an excellent fielder, catcher and thrower[2], and could already hit a long ball with a matchstick 1950s bat, my assessment is that Alan Davidson would fit beautifully in today’s game.

Result: Modern fielding and catching standards are undoubtedly higher across the board. The gap now between the strongest fielder and the weakest fielder in a team is substantially reduced (a case of a rising tide of fielding standards lifting all boats). But we’re talking about the elite of the game here, and more often than not great players in bygone eras were also dynamic fielders and catchers. Again, give them access to high-level coaching, and they fit right in.

Summary: If you transported a random player from 1950 directly into 2021, then yes, there would be a stark difference in fitness, and probably fielding standards, at least initially. However, you give that same player from 1950 (particularly if that player was one of the top players of their time) access to nutrition and fitness programmes, mental and physical health support, as well as modern equipment, and then how would they go? Very well, I think, in most cases among the elite players.

Back to Alan Davidson’s career for a minute.

Davidson’s autobiography is titled 15 Paces and that tells you pretty much everything you need to know. He had a short, economical approach to the crease, followed by a whippy arm action that generated late swing at reasonable pace. While watching grainy footage he reminded me instantly of late-career Wasim Akram. And the Akram comparison continues into the batting department as well. Davidson was an underrated batter. Like Akram, he was a hard-hitting left-hander. In fact, Davidson was the first ever cricketer to score 100 runs and take 10 wickets in a match, when he took 11 wickets to go with 44 and 80 runs in the 1960/61 tied Test in Brisbane — making him close to the best on ground for Australia in that classic match.[3]

Back to that bowling average of 20.53. That number ranks third among qualifying Hall of Fame candidates. Think about that — here’s this guy from the 50s whom very few cricket fans would place in the same tier as great Australian fast bowlers like Lindwall, Miller, Lillee, Thomson, McGrath, Lee, Gillespie or Cummins, but his average eclipses them all. So, what has happened to the context of Alan Davidson’s career that means his average is so often overlooked? And why isn’t he higher on this list?

The Average Above Replacement Player metric puts this into context a little. This metric measures Davidson’s average against the bowling averages of his peers over the course of his career[4], which tells us a little about how he compared to the other players in his era. We know batting averages dipped in the 1950s, so we expect bowling averages of the elite bowlers of that era to dip too. Davidson’s AARP is +7.51, which ranks 15th among Hall of Fame candidates. Let’s have a look at some modern-day lefties to see how their averages and AARP are calculated:

AARP is useful for placing averages into context, because it tells us both about how much better (or worse) a player was against their peers, but it also gives us a clue about how the ‘replacement player’ average changes over time. Eleven of the 20 lowest comparison averages of Hall of Fame candidate bowlers belong to players who played in the same era as Davidson. Thus, we would expect his average to be lower than, say, Mitchell Johnson, the player with the highest comparison average of any Hall of Fame candidate, had everything else in their careers been equal. But despite his ‘replacement player’ having the lowest average, Davidson’s average is so low that his AARP still ranks 15th, eclipsing all the modern-day great lefties. Again, the comparison with Wasim Akram is apt: among all Hall of Fame candidates, Davidson’s AARP ranks 15th, Akram’s is 16th.

The verdict

Why are some players from the pre-war and post-war eras so drastically underrated compared to their modern contemporaries? After all, Davidson has a better average, AARP, 5wi per 100 innings and 10wm per 100 innings than Wasim Akram, who is higher in this list than Alan Davidson. Is it recency bias? Ignorance? Are they discredited because of the time-machine theory? What is it?

What is comes down to in this Hall of Fame is the balance or weighting of the pure counting numbers like wickets, 10wm, etc., which are directly dependent on the number of matches played, versus measures like average, strike rate and rate of 5wi per 100 innings, etc., which are not.

In the first iteration of the Hall of Fame, each of these criteria were given equal weighting when considering the total StatRank for a player — a key component of my analysis. Looking at Alan Davidson, I feel like his resume in particular is a strong argument for the counting stats having too much of a weighting in Version 1.0 of my algorithm. While not on its own being a case for re-evaluating the whole list, this could be a catalyst for a tweak to the weightings to give slightly less credit to the counting stats, or slightly more weighting to stats not directly dependent on number of matches played. After all, modern players, and especially players from the ‘Big Three’ Test nations benefit most from this weighting and are therefore well represented (people like Stu might argue over-represented) in this Hall of Fame. I don’t want to penalise Wasim Akram for having played more Tests, and taken more wickets, but sometimes it seems as though Alan Davidson suffers too much in a direct comparison of the two players. But there’s also no getting past the fact that Davidson has only 186 Test wickets — an incredibly impressive number for a mere mortal, but a relatively low one in comparison with the rest of the Hall of Fame candidates.

So is Davidson underrated, overrated or properly rated? After much analysis, I am left with the feeling that he is underrated, both by me, and by the cricket community in general. If I’m honest, 70th in the Hall of Fame doesn’t match what the numbers tell me about his career. I’m not going to throw the baby out with the bath water, but Alan Davidson is definitely on my list of players who might need a ‘correction’ in a future version of the Hall of Fame.

In one word

Modern

Notes

[1] I think this is true of a lot of cricketers, but not all cricketers. There are some modern cricketers that have Adonis-like figures (Marcus Stoinis, Chris Gayle and Jofra Archer among others), and some who look like regular people but are still successful domestic or international cricketers. I won’t name names here, but three international players and a very successful Australian domestic player come immediately to mind. On the flipside of the coin, there were a few clearly ripped cricketers in the pre-war and post-war eras, as well as a few players for whom fitness wasn’t at the top of their agenda. Again, not naming names, but when your official nickname is ‘The Big Ship’ and you’re captaining your country at cricket then there was clearly room for plus-sized athletes in that era. Beach muscles don’t necessarily make a player a better performer, but they do help in the ‘clear the boundary’ era of white-ball cricket.

[2] Davidson’s close-in catching was so exemplary that he earned the nickname ‘The Claw’. I’d never heard this used in relation to catching prowess, but I love it as a nickname.

[3] Annoyingly, after I had written this paragraph, I made the fatal mistake of checking Alan Davidson’s Wikipedia page. I never do this, but I thought I’d check what other people were saying about Davidson. The comparison was right there in the first paragraph — Davidson and Akram. Dammit. Now that cheapens my analysis somewhat. I swear I made that comparison without reference to Wikipedia.

[4] In this case, bowlers who bowled in 30 or more innings, and averaged under 40 during the period of Alan Davidson’s career between 11 June 1953 and 20 Feb 1963.

Bio

Record

Source: ESPN CricInfo

career peak

Source: ESPN CricInfo