Shocking revelations: Look who the most successful batsmen were against the dreaded WI pacemen!

The list is headed and by a long, long way by the largely unfancied Wasim Raja. It was no fluke performance by the attractive left-handed stroke-player. His runs were gathered uniformly over two series against high-class bowling, home and abroad.

Along with him, unsung, some perhaps unknown, but brave soldiers like Bruce Laird and Alec Stewart also emerge from the numbers.

Of all the names we discussed earlier, Boycott and Gavaskar do make the list, but only just.

We find the Indian opener low down, with just three hundreds and an average that just manages to creep over 40. Great and courageous though he was as a batsman, we tend to overlook that as many as e8 of his 13 hundreds against the West Indies came against relatively weak attack of 1970-71 and Kallicharran s side in 1978-79, whose pace power was nowhere near the feared combination that dominated world cricket.

During the 1975-76 tour he scored 2 centuries as well, but they came in separate Tests at Port-of-Spain, on tracks more suited for spin. The last hundred in fact was scored with Clive Lloyd playing the role of the third seamer and 88 overs being shared by spinners Raphick Jumadeen and Albert Padmore.

Miandad fared worse, with 834 runs in this period at 29.78. And although Mohinder Amarnath did have high returns in the West Indies, his figures at home against the fast men are atrocious 57 runs in 11 innings giving him an overall aggregate of 754 runs at 34.27.

Greg Chappell had a superb tour in 1972-73 and an extraordinary home series as both batsman and captain in 1975-76, but he scored just 356 runs in 6 Tests at 29.67 when the West Indies pace-men operated in fiery groups of four.

On West Indian pitches during this era the list is headed by Steve Waugh.

Batsmen averaging 40+ in West Indies during pace dominance (at least 300 runs)*

Batsman	T	Runs	Avge	100s	50s
Steve Waugh	6	461	76.83	1	3
Mohinder Amarnath	6	697	63.36	2	5
Wasim Raja	5	517	57.44	1	5
Mike Atherton	5	510	56.66	2	2
Allan Border	10	796	53.06	1	5
Majid Khan	5	530	53.00	1	3
Mark Waugh	9	607	50.58	2	3
David Gower	9	746	43.88	1	4
Graham Gooch	11	864	41.14	2	6
Alec Stewart	9	647	40.43	2	2

Again, the absence of Gavaskar may surprise many since the Caribbean islands have gone down in history as the happy hunting grounds of the legend. But, the master scored just 308 runs at 30.80 on those pitches during the heydays of Windies dominance, with one solitary hundred the century coming in an inconsequential Georgetown Test, largely washed out by rain.

In fact, the Indian name that follows Amarnath in the averages list will come as a real shocker Ravi Shastri with 406 runs at 33.83 and 2 hundreds.

Of the modern greats, only Sachin Tendulkar made his debut before the West Indian dominance had ended. He played just one series against the West Indies while they were still at the peak at home in 1994-95 and managed 402 runs in 3 Tests at an average of 67 with a highest of 179. The figures are superb, but the bowling Walsh, Kenny Benjamin, Cameron Cuffy and Anderson Cummins was perhaps not the best West Indies combination.

The occupational hazard

The job of a historian is sometimes fraught with associated hazards, especially when he digs out facts that jar discordantly with long held perceptions.

When this writer argued that sticky wickets and inadequate protection against fast bowling did not make a lot of difference in the Don Bradman era, many concluded it as direct disrespect to Bradman the batsman. Let me add that nowhere in the article was the Don s supremacy as a batsman questioned.

Cricket breeds religious fervour uniformly across Kolkata, Mumbai and Sydney.

And this analysis has all the ingredients of a long-drawn out 'skull-cap and floppy hat versus helmet duel.

Let me point out in advance that the numbers are scripted by the cricketers themselves down the years. The historian has little to do with the data.

The least we can do is to delve into the numerical footprints and form an accurate picture of history.

* The period considered for analysis is April 21, 1976 to April 29, 1995 apart from 11 Tests played by a depleted side between March 3, 1978 and February 2, 1979.

(Arunabha Sengupta is a cricket historian and Chief Cricket Writer at CricketCountry. He writes about the history and the romance of the game, punctuated often by opinions about modern day cricket, while his post-graduate degree in statistics peeps through in occasional analytical pieces. The author of three novels, he can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/senantix)