🏏 My father and I can't agree on the greatest cricketer

Last Thursday my father and I argued about the greatest cricketer ever for almost 2 hours. It started with a small comment about a highlights clip on the TV in the hall. My mother had put out dinner and we both ignored it until the rice went cold. She finally said, either eat or take it outside, and we took it out to the balcony. My father picks a player from his own college days. He saw him play on a small black and white TV. He still talks about one match like he was sitting in the stands, and I let him. I pick someone much newer. I showed him numbers on my phone and he just waved at the screen. He said numbers don't tell you who walked out when the whole ground was nervous. I didn't have a good answer to that, which annoyed me. So I said the game is faster now. He said the helmets are better now too, and the pitches are covered, and the food is better. Fair points, all of them. I still think my pick would have been great in any decade. We kept going until the watchman knocked to ask if everything was okay, because we were that loud. Nobody won. My father went to bed saying I'd understand when I'm 60, which is his answer to most things. I lay awake wondering why I care this much. Neither of us even plays anymore. Now the argument is on a break until the next match day, when it'll start again over tea. Who would you pick if you had to choose one, and does your family fight about it too?

Numbers alone rarely settle it for me, conditions and the quality of opposition faced matter just as much as any final tally sitting quietly in a record book somewhere. My uncle disagrees loudly every single time this comes up at dinner, insists stats are the only honest measure that matters, and we have simply agreed to keep disagreeing about it loudly every single year without any real resolution.

Grew up watching one player and my father swore by an entirely different one from his own era, and neither of us has ever budged an inch in twenty years of the same argument repeating itself at every single family function without fail.