It has been debated a lot in the recent times if the quality of bowling has come down in international cricket and if batting has become easier than what it was in the nineties or in the early two-thousands.
It’s not easy to answer this question because different people will have different opinion over this. But what we can do is we can have a look at the facts and try and understand what the quality of the bowlers was when Sachin Tendulkar became the no. 1 batsman in the world for the first time.
Sachin topped the ICC rankings in One Day International cricket for the first time in 1999 and the bowlers who were occupying the top 10 positions in the world at that point in time were Shaun Pollock, Glenn McGrath, Shane Warne, Curtly Ambrose, Allan Donald, Azhar Mahmood, Saqlain Mushtaq, Darren Gough, Damien Fleming and Muttiah Muralitharan.
Barring Azhar Mahmood, there is not a single bowler in this list who can’t be termed world class. Maybe you can argue about Damien Fleming as well because he was not a very prominent Test cricketer for Australia and was more of a white ball bowler, but the rest eight dominated the world cricket for a decent period of time and dominated in both red ball and white ball cricket.
Also, all these eight bowlers had different skill-set and they used to pose different challenges to the batsmen. While Shaun Pollock used to nibble the ball both ways, McGrath’s strength was his accuracy. He would hardly err with his length.
Curtly Ambrose was extremely tall and he could generate uncomfortable bounce from good length area. Allan Donald had raw pace, while Darren Gough could swing the ball conventionally early on and he could also reverse-swing it in the death.
The spinners that were there in top 10 in those days were all different kinds of spinners as well.
Shane Warne was a classical leg-spinner with a big spinning stock delivery, but he also had all the other variations in his repertoire. He could bowl the googly with excellent control and could also slip in the flipper from time to time. Warne’s flipper was one of his most potent deliveries.
Muttiah Muralitharan had a unique sort of action. He was not a loopy kind of an off spinner. He would bowl into the pitch most of the time, but without necessarily giving the ball a lot of air, he could spin it both ways.
Saqlain was another off spinner who had a wrong one called “Doosra” in his armory, but Saqlain was also extremely good with his lengths and it was very difficult for a batsman to line him up even when he was bowling in the latter stages of the innings.
To have to face such differently skilled bowlers week-in week-out on pitches which were not necessarily very flat, it can safely be said that batting in the late nineties and early two-thousands was not particularly easy.
