Sub: Golden era of batting?
Yup i sure feel so...just take a peek back at the 80's how many batsmen were averaging in the 50s consistently .sachin, lara...and nada..nobody else. Take a look now...sachin, dravid, ponting, hayden, gilchrist, kallis, lara, flower to name a few. Batting records are tumbling in a spree..the three fastest double hundreds have been scored..by thorpe, gilchrist and astle, teams are regularly scoring 350plus in day, a first innings score of even 500 is not safe, no target seems safe..the windies hunted down a 430 odd target with some gas still left in the tank. Thats only in tests, in ODI's which by their very nature (and commercial interest..i may add) are heavily tilted towards batsmen.Now days a 300 plus score is par for the day, and even after scoring that you are not safe.

The thing to note is that this golden age of batting has coincided with the stone age for bowlers. Again comparing with the 90s, bowlers like ambrose, walsh, donald, wasim , waqar, were strutting their stuff..nowdays the fast bowlers..dont even measure up to their cuffs..the shoaib's, brett lee's are fast but inaccurate, pollock and mcgrath are long in the tooth and considerably slowed down, bond is too prone to breaking down, and the new class of pathan, zaheer, harmison, sami, tuffey , edwards have still a long way to go. To throw a fly in the soup, presently the spinners are much betterr than in the 90s..only once in a generation can you find spinners of the calibre of warne, murali, kumble, saqlain, vettori, mushtaq, bhaajji operating at the same time. But i firmly believe that great teams are built around destructive fast bowlers and batting strenth, spinners only provide the spice. Look at the great teams of the past, Bradman's Invincibles didnt have any noteworthy spinners, but had that devastating pair of Lindwall and Miller, and even the all conquering Windies team didnt rely on spinners, only on a battery of 4 fast bowlers to pummel their opposition into pulp, and the current Aussie team, is a departure from the fact that Warne has such a significant impact, but his effectiveness would be greatly lessened without gillespie, mcgrath and brett lee having a go first at the batters

To get back to the original topic, we can see that there is a direct relationship between the decline of bowling and the rise of batsmanship. Some of the reason for that could be:

1) Cricket rules and equipment changes have helped batsmen rather than bowlers, the red cherry hasnt changed in 100 years , but batsmen have had heavier , more effective bats, and safer and lighter safety equipment, i wonder how many of todays current batsmen would have fared, facing holding, garner, marshall, lillee, thompson, snow, hadlee, imran without their protective gears. To worsen matters they put in the rules for : the limit of 2 bouncers per over , anything bowled on the leg side is a wide. To counter that when bowlers tried to be more effecitve by innovations like reverse swing by so called "tampering" with the ball , that got banned too. C'mon give the guys a break, what are we reducing bowlers too just a mechanism.

more of that when i get some relief frm work...