Melbourne, Dec 22 (IANS): India's batting great Sachin Tendulkar and not Australian legend Don Bradman is the greatest Test batsman who ever lived, a Gold Coast academic says.

Griffith University researcher Nicholas Rohde said he can prove with statistics that Tendulkar is the greatest. Rohde, however, admitted that if he could go back in time, he would prefer to watch Bradman every time.

Rohde said that by applying economic principles to batting performance, he has been able to rank players back through time.

"People are welcome to disagree and there would be other statistical ways of looking at it which would give you different results," The Daily Telegraph quoted Rohde as saying.

Rohde said his obsession with cricket led him to the idea of coming up with a ranking system, even if it did mean trying to marry sport with economics.

"I don't see it as entirely trivial, but it isn't an indisputable result either; it's somewhere in the middle. My feeling is that devotion to Don Bradman probably robbed India of a national icon a little bit. And if you wanted my personal opinion on who was the better of the two, Bradman or Tendulkar, I would say that it was perhaps too close to call," he said.

As a part of his calculation, Rohde took the total number of runs a batsman has scored in his entire career, and subtracted the number of runs that an average player of the same era would have scored if they'd played the same number of innings. He constantly updates the figures and calculates new ranking tables.

"Bradman has been number one until recently, but Tendulkar for the time being is just a little tiny bit ahead. No ranking system is definitive and people are always free to disagree, although I do feel it's a fairly sensible and intuitive way to rank the players," he said.