I'm curious as to what would be demonstrated were you to compare batsmen with similar "styles" within the same generation. I'm not a cricket connoisseur but in football, in terms of a market-driven analysis, you would take players of roughly very similar qualities and place them head to head.
I think you may really mean similar roles. It seems to me that roles and styles are more tightly-coupled in football than in cricket. For instance Viv Richards and Brian Lara had different styles but they had the same role. (I also think that by its very nature cricket will be more stable in the different main roles that players have from one era to the next. Or alternatively, football will be more dynamic.)
I'm hesitant to engage in head-to-head comparisons. Anything more than simply juxtaposing the counting statistics of the respective players is probably more effort than I can allocate as a hobbyist. As a cricket fan, I would have opinions but articulating methodology is a different matter.
I was thinking of the comparison vertically rather than horizontally. As you suggest there is nuance as to the interrelating factors. For instance, place in the batting order would be a relevant variable in cricket that might have some interplay with positional location in a football system of play and who Player X is surrounded with, that may or may not lack the same implications in terms of dynamic consequences (let's say, format of the match and batting partnerships combined, adding to or detracting from the dynamic-static picture).
For sure, looking at performance historically, for whatever it presents retrospectively versus looking at past performance as a predictor of future performance versus looking at today's performance for immediate inferences about this week's activities, differ from each other. All fascinating depending on one's vantage point.
If you get bored on the day job, I think you should plug ahead.
