Jack Hobbs deserves his ranking considering his brilliant consistency,scoring over half his first class Centuries after the age of 40.

I was impressed with the choice of Rohan Kanhai, ,who to me was the most consummate batsmen of all,scoring a fifty every 3 innings.Clive Lloyd was a more consistent batsman after gaining captaincy,being a champion in a crisis.

Overall,I feel Geoff Boycott,should have atleast been in the top dozen for his remarkable consistency all over the world,including the Carribean .

Rahul Dravid should have atleast made the top dozen,considering his overseas record,while Steve Waugh and Javed Miandad were the best batsman in their day in a crisis-the ultimate batsman to bat for your life.I would place them above Mark Waugh.

To me Gavaskar and Hutton should have been ranked much higher as well as Sachin Tendulkar.Imagine Sachin retaining a 55+average after crossing 13000 test runs!Gavaskar faced the best bowling of all and broke batting records.

I find it hard to understand the omission of Javed Miandad,Everton Weekes,George Headley and Geoff Boycott.

No opener was more difficult to dismiss than Boycott who very rarely lost his form and dispalyed consistency all over the world,particularly in the West Indies,standing up against the graet battery of pacemen.

Javed Miandad was brilliantly consistent at home and in his peak was more conistent than any Pakistani batsman away like in 1987-1988 in England,India and West Indies.He was neck to neck with Allan Border when the chips were down-perhaps the best batsman in a crisis.

Everton Weekes in his era played more like Sir Don than any batsman at one stage scoring 5 consecutive hundreds!His test scores at his peak were like a Black Bradman batting.

Mark Waugh ,no doubt a class act on his day and posessing talent in the Lara class was nowhere as consistent as his brother Steve.

George Headley was an epitome of consistency-Imagine Bradman was called the White Headley!

Jack Hobbs deservingly wins his place because of his outstanding consistency.No batsman displayed such consistency in such a long period-Imagine scoring more than half of his first-class centuries after the first World War!Another deserving selection is Rohan Kanhai,perhaps the most complete batsman of all,who has often not been given his true worth.Clive Lloyd,considering the great consistency he displayed after becong skipper deserves his ranking.Considering they opened the batting Len Hutton and Gavaskar should have even been ranked ahead,close to Sir Jack Hobbs. However it is ridiculous that batsman like Rahul Dravid and Steve Waugh are ranked so low in consistency.Both batsman were champions in a crisis and rarely were out of form.Sachin Tendulkar,should atleast have made the top dozen.Imagine retaining a 54+average crossing 13000 runs!Infact Brian Lara,in comparison suffered from bouts of loss of form. Modern day greats played much more cricket than yesteryear players.

I like the spirit of the analysis. However, the CL number proposed here is meaningless.If we were to come up with a number indepepndent of pitch and weather conditions then I would consider suggestions by TomC and Koos van Zyl above as serious suggestions. Personally average only plays role defining whether batsman is recognized specialist or not. I could settle for a simpler critereasuch as shown below:

consistency index = [number of times a batsman crosses a scorde of 40] / [total innings played]

I am ssunming tht a recognized btsman should at least cross a score of 40 to be considered s a recognized batsman.

I like the spirit of the analysis. However, the CL number proposed here is meaningless.If we were to come up with a number indepepndent of pitch and weather conditions then I would consider suggestions by TomC and Koos van Zyl above as serious suggestions. Personally average only plays role defining whether batsman is recognized specialist or not. I could settle for a simpler critereasuch as shown below:

consistency index = [number of times a batsman crosses a scorde of 40] / [total innings played]

I am ssunming tht a recognized btsman should at least cross a score of 40 to be considered s a recognized batsman.

Mark "Audi" Waugh ranked consistent despite the Sri Lanka debacle, but Attapattu has not been able to shrug off his horror start. Presumably he's middling consistency once he actually got going.

This tends to punish batsmen for going on with big scores - MEWaugh never made the massive scores that drag down Bradman to only 2nd place.

Maybe too technical, but how would a "semi-variance" measure go, penalising only for downside scores below the average?

Two surprising omissions from the least consistent (1000 run minimum) table are Ken Rutherford (NZ) and Bill Edrich (England), both of whom had Atapattu-like horror starts to their careers.

Ric's comment: Edrich had an index of 1.18, reasonably high, and Rutherford only 1.06. The latter scored quite consistently in the second half of his career, and with only 3 centuries, had little at the top end to stretch his standard deviation.

Doug Walters on the list of consistent batsmen surprised me; and as much as I loved to watch Doug bat, consistency was not one of the traits he was known for. Therefore, I think some of the criticism regarding exactly what is being measured here needs a look at.

good analysis but i have a few queries regarding it. firstly, i believe notout innings must be excluded. even if a batsman made a unbeaten innings of 50 last time,he does not start his next innings on 50 but on a fresh zero the batting conditions and opposition bowling also vary. further this method punishes those who have streak of notouts & hence notouts should be excluded.admittedly leaving notouts will reduce the avg. as well but as we are measuring consistency it shouldn't make a difference. secondly as has been noted in the very first comment, the CI tends to rise with the no. of innings played or no. of dissmissals. i believe it is easier to maintain consistency over say 50 innings or dismissals than over 200. so to correct this error the consistency index as obtained by you should be further divided by square root of the no. of dissmissals. (i think this is how variance is measured in stats) this will allow fair comparison of all players irrespective of no. of innings played

Ric's comment: I did actually do it ignoring incompleted innings - Hobbs was still top of the 5000+ group, but Bradman dropped, Clive Lloyd was second - Laird dropped to 3rd in the 1000+ group, David Hookes was top - Tendulkar and Gavskar came down to equal Ponting, Lara was still high in the 10000+ group, Kallis was even lower. But I question the validity of doing this - whole slabs of players' careers are ignored, and anyway, does not the common old batting average measure the runs scored between dismissals, rather than in each innings? Given that, I still reckon the way I presented it is the best methodology. Thanks for your input, Keyur!

Interesting analysis, though I do not agree with the procedure. If I were to analyze consistency, I would have used the following formula:

C(X)=Percent of times a batsman scores less than X% of his average.

As you might have noticed, this formula allows for a lot of different standards of consistency measurements. For example, one can measure the C(50) consistency of all batsman, which would be calculating the percent of times each batsman scores less than half of his average. I have not been able to figure out what will be a good value of X for the most objective analysis and I believe this will remain subjective. What I like most about this formula is that it doesn't punish the batsman for scoring big in a few innings. It also doesn't punish the batsman within a few runs of his average, and is universal enough to compare most batsman in a single statistics pool.

Can you please do an analysis based on this formula and share the results.

Ric's comment: I've quickly used your method to determine the percentage of scores below 50% of the Test averages of Ranatunga (consistent in my analysis) and Attapattu (inconsistent), two player who had similar overall averages and aggregates. Ranatunga had 39% of his scores below 50% of his average, while Atapattu had 53%. I suppose this means (on the basis of a very small sample!) that both methods are going to produce more or less the same outcome. With my method though, every single score counts, whereas with yours, all scores below 50% of the average carry the same weight (eg, a duck carries the same weight as a score of 18) while those above it are not taken into account at all. I think your method if applied to all players would produce an interesting point of discussion, but I'm not sure it is as effective in determining overall consistency. Thanks for your input.