India's little master Sachin Tendulkar, not Sir Donald Bradman, is the greatest Test batsman who ever lived, a Gold Coast academic claims.
A brave assertion, but one Griffith University researcher Dr Nicholas Rohde says he can prove with statistics.
Rohde says by applying economic principles to batting performance, he has been able to rank players back through time.
"People are welcome to disagree and there would be other statistical ways of looking at it which would give you different results," he told AAP.
Rohde said his obsession with cricket led him to the idea of coming up with a ranking system, even if it did mean trying to marry sport with economics.
"No ranking system is definitive so it's halfway between being serious and a bit of fun," he said.
"I don't see it as entirely trivial, but it isn't an indisputable result either; it's somewhere in the middle.
"My feeling is that devotion to Don Bradman probably robbed India of a national icon a little bit. And if you wanted my personal opinion on who was the better of the two, Bradman or Tendulkar, I would say that it was perhaps too close to call."
To work out who should be regarded as the best of all time, Rohde took the total number of runs a batsman has scored in his entire career, and subtracted the number of runs that an average player of the same era would have scored if they'd played the same number of innings.
He constantly updates the figures and calculates new ranking tables.
"Bradman has been number one until recently, but Tendulkar for the time being is just a little tiny bit ahead.
"No ranking system is definitive and people are always free to disagree, although I do feel it's a fairly sensible and intuitive
way to rank the players."
But he said if he could time travel and had the choice of watching Bradman or Tendulkar play a Test, he would go for Bradman
every time.
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