It's not like Indian domestics is anything special either which is my point; you'd be correct if Easwaran was from the Anglosphere (and he'd have been picked a fair bit earlier then ), but for the gap between India and SL domestic cricket to be that big SL domestics would have to be worse quality than say Dutch domestics. Which seems a stretch.
PS: the big match to drag that average up was against Bangladesh A. Which is probably a pretty bad bowling attack in fairness.
Haha Bangladesh A's attack is probably rated even worse than Ireland A's but at least it was in Asia which would've fixed that to an extent. I was looking forward to you telling me that Larkin's game wasn't FC so I could ask you if you really thought an attack of Hatcher, Sams, Stobo, Bills, Manenti and Nair was really worse than the twelfth best team in Colombo club cricket or Ireland A, but you didn't bite.
Yeah I knew it was Futures League lol. Honestly Larkin's tricky to rate because IIRC he has done so well at non-FC cricket that the database considers. Only so much you can do to knock down a guy who dominates crap cricket. Which I guess was my logic re: picking Nissanka to some extent (that and not really rating the top order depth left over)
I'm committed to not many spoilers but Larkin and Nissanka are rated in the same ballpark. Larkin's standardised average in "Second Class" cricket is 65 though. So if he kept just exclusively playing that and somehow did just as well as he had, he'd be the second best batsman in the database. In saying that though I think probably only Smith or Kohli (and I assume that's not too big of a spoiler...) could actually do that sort of nonsense for the number of innings required to not be n00b0wned, so I'm happy with my process there. He's averaging like 200 in it over the last 3 years or something, it's stupid.
The other thing to remember with Larkin is that his early FC cricket was seriously shit. So his standardised average in FC cricket, remembering that it's recency-weighted, is probably higher than you'd expect from someone averaging ~30 in domestic cricket as well.
He played a LOT of A cricket vs good opposition, India are also the best batting team in the world while Sri Lanka arent. Indias domestic average is almost certainly lower than Sri Lankas too, and also Indias domestic setup has the India Red vs Green stuff too. Waaaay better pick than the spud you tricked yourself into falling for.
Yeah, not really true barring last season. Last 5 seasons in Ranji: 2014/15 28.78 2015/16 28.10 2016/17 29.39 2017/18 31.76 2018/19 26.94 Last 5 season in whatever they call the major Sri Lankan domestic competition: 2014/15 26.54 2015/16 28.91 2016/17 27.44 2017/18 26.29 2018/19 33.66 Now admittedly the gap between the 2018/19 seasons is pretty huge (and might make your point more valid - especially given that the main appeal with Easwaran is his awesome 2018/19), but before that Ranji was generally flatter than Sri Lanka. India do have plenty of good bats out of the Test team and they do seem to play a heap of quality A-team stuff but the way you're talking about the two it sounds like Nissanka's a worse batsman than Weatherald, lol.
This season and late season Plate League is a bit stupid due to the government, better off just carving it off when doing stats on the Ranji
I'm just mad because Morgie rates one of his own picks that was as poor as my Vijay pick. It's not disastrous, but it was definitely on the list of worst picks of the round.
Wow thanks guys, was feeling pretty down about the Vijay pick but you’ve really turned me round on it
