Test cricket is the most romantic form of sport or art. We have a natural inclination towards a comparison of batsmen of all time although it is difficult to compare batsmen of different generations.During the last two decades, we have seen many great batsmen to adorn the white clothes. There is a great debate over who is the greatest batsman of all last two decades, today we will focus on Sachin, Lara, Dravid, and Ponting. Throughout the analysis, we have excluded Zimbabwe and Bangladesh. We consider two scenarios one Asian pitches and other fast bowling friendly(FBF) conditions* i.e Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and England. We all know among all the four Lara is the best player of spin bowling. The statistics also support the argument as in Asia Lara’s avg of 58.84 is best whereas Ponting’s record is dismal with avg of 39.48. At FBF conditions Punter with an avg of 52.78 is at top closely followed by Sachin whose avg is 51.10, here Lara’s avg of 44.26 is least. If one looks at the table below then one thing is quite clear, Sachin has the least fluctuation, and also he is the only one to average above 50 in both the conditions.

Now, let’s look in a different manner that is how closely team performance is related to their individual performances. All though win, loss and draw in a test match depends mainly on bowling lineup. But we have to take this into account while comparing different batsmen. If we use most rational(it is subjective although) weights 4/7 for the win,2/7 for a Draw and 1/7 for loss, then calculate average called CA(combined avg Asia) and CF(combined avg fast bowling friendly conditions).CP(Contributing parameter of batsman) is equal to the diff of CF and CA.

The large value of CP for Dravid is a clear reflection that India’s success or failure was greatly affected by his batting. Lara has the least CP value and the major factor which is responsible for this is that West Indies never had reliable bowling lineup in his era and Chanderpaul’s performance form the center stage. Sachin and Ponting are almost the same in this index.

The most important aspect of batsmanship is to score on difficult tracks i.e on turning tracks and fast and bouncy pitches. In Asian pitches batting on the fourth day is the most challenging task similarly first-day pitch on a fast and bouncy track(or in other words FBF). We will define a parameter called Inning parameter(IP) which is the arithmetic mean of first inning average in FBF conditions and fourth inning average in Asian conditions.

Looking at the above table it is absolutely clear that little master is way ahead than others moreover Ponting’s poor technique against spin bowling has skewed his average.

The other parameter which we consider is the ability to play long innings i.e more than 100 runs in an inning. From the table below we see apart from Dravid, others score a century after every seven innings with Lara the quickest.The remarkable aspect is that despite having a long and illustrious career Tendulkar’s appetite for runs has never subdued. If you consider marathon innings that are double, triple, quadruple century then Lara wins this battle hands down.

Finally, we can conclude that Sachin is the most complete batsman, Lara great player of spin bowling, Ponting one of the great against fast bowling, Dravid is Mr. Reliable.