He's maintained that average (and that brilliant strike rate too!) for 417 games now.
If he went 40 matches without scoring, he would still have an average over 40, but would you still say he was maintaining his records? Averages and strike rates change over time and the longer a career, the less maintenance is required. If you look at the last 4 years, Ponting stands out as the top runs scorer in major ODIs, but even then, players like Dhoni, Pietersen or Hussey, all of whom have started their careers inside that timeframe, stand out as the star ODI players of recent times.
So I don't really know what people are trying to get out of this discussion. If you want to rank batsmen by runs, well sure, Tendulkar is easily the greatest, but does that mean that Jayasuriya is the second greatest? I'd like to see someone win that argument. On the other hand, saying that a player will be the greatest by the time they have played 400 ODIs... now that's tricky and that's where the shorter term analysis comes in. Who is a gun right now, those are the numbers you can really get an understanding of and to be fair, what a player did back in 1995 doesn't have a hell of a lot of bearing on it.
For the record though, I don't think any ODI player has dominated his peers like Viv Richards. His strike rate of 90 is high even for a modern cricketer and he played in a time when just scoring 50 in 70 balls had you marked as aggressive. Out of players who scored more than 1000 runs during his 16 year career, only Kapil Dev was more destructive, striking at close to a run a ball, but no where near as consistent, averaging more than 20 runs less. He was the ODI aggregate leader during his career and although Haynes eventually overtook him, he had to face 3000 more deliveries to get there. I'd call that easy domination. I don't think anyone in today's cricket is that far ahead.
Funny how all these comments start appearing once players (like Warne and Gilchrist) get to India, and don't say anything once they're out of India.
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