Which was the greatest team of all?

SIMON HUGHES: If you staged a five-day match at Lord's between Steve Waugh's Australia and Clive Lloyd's West Indies, who would win? This is the theme of the latest The Analyst: Inside Cricket podcast...

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Watching the pulsating run chase by West Indies in the 1984 Lord’s Test on the BBC last week reminds us all of the dominance and charisma of that great team.

They won that match by nine wickets and went on to claim the series 5-0. It set me wondering... was that West Indies side of the early to mid 1980s the greatest of all time?

Or were Steve Waugh’s Australians marginally better?

If you staged a virtual five-day match at Lord’s between the two teams, who would win?

That is the theme of this week’s The Analyst: Inside Cricket podcast, where Simon Mann and I also ponder whether the Indian team under Virat Kohli’s leadership has the power and resources to be similarly dominant over time.

They were of course the No.1 Test team in the world until deposed by Australia recently, and it is Australia they are due to play next Down Under in the autumn.

Rahul Dravid, now coach of India A, joined us on the podcast to explain the dilemmas facing modern Indian batsmen and the challenges of persuading the younger generation to acquire the skills required for Test cricket.

^{West Indies fielders crowd around Graeme Fowler at Lord's in 1984}

The statistics of the two great teams of modern times give some clues as to their prowess.

In Tests between 1993 and 2006 Australia had a win ratio of 65 per cent. West Indies, in the period between 1979 and 1991, won only 51 per cent of Tests (though they only lost one series in all that time).

Their win ratios in one day-cricket were remarkably similar (67 per cent for Australia, 65 per cent for West indies) so on stats, Australia definitely shade it. And they won more World Cups too.

Shane Warne was probably the difference.

Opponents could to some extent nullify the threat of the four-pronged West Indies attacks by producing grassless, dead tracks. That didn’t work with Warne in the opposition. In fact it often played into his hands.

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Dravid believes that India have got the players and wherewithal to be a long-term superpower in the game, but for the moment he thinks its more likely in white ball cricket than red.

“The IPL bridges the gap between domestic and international cricket for our players and the young players get so much exposure in that so we are always going to be pushing for titles in white ball formats. In red ball cricket the bridge between our domestic game and the international game is quite large. We need to have something similar [to the IPL] if we are going to be consistently successful in the Test format.”

Let us know which side you think would win, and join in our debate about our scariest moments in cricket, by writing to me via email: simon.hughes@thecricketer.com.

We'll get to as many of your letters as possible in next week's show.