Last May I watched England score a flood of runs during the Trent Bridge Test against Zimbabwe. The hosts rattled up a gigantic 565/6 declared, made off 96.3 overs. Both openers scored hundreds – Ben Duckett 132 and Zak Crawley 115 while Ollie Pope scored 171. The only batter who could be said to have failed was Joe Root who was dismissed for 32 and captain Ben Stokes who made 28. In this period of Bazball their 5.86 run-rate was not unprecedented, but it was startling just the same and spoke to the ease with which the batters scored.

The following month India arrived on England’s shores to play for the Anderson/Tendulkar trophy staffed with higher quality bowlers. Unsurprisingly, they provided a much sterner examination of the home team’s batters. To anyone who witnessed the two visiting teams in action it was clear that scoring runs against India was much more difficult than scoring runs against Zimbabwe. 

At points during the series Bazball was totally jettisoned, especially in the third Test where there was a spell of 28 dot balls. And so, shouldn’t runs against India be priced higher than runs against Zimbabwe?

https://www.cricketfj.com/p/the-degree-of-difficulty-in-cricket