The men who never made it...

Amidst the Sachin Tendulkar euphoria that has gripped the cricketing world these days, Tamim Iqbal, the flamboyant Bangladesh opener, was chosen by Wisden magazine (rather, the Reporters committee of the Wisden magazine) as Test Cricketer of the year.

It is a great honour for a batsman belonging to one of the lowest ranked Test teams to be chosen for the award, more so because his opponents have invariably been teams that are better ranked than his. Andy Flower from Zimbabwe was one such player from a lowly team who could have walked into any other team of his time.

Since we are on Wisden, Cricinfo ran an interesting article on the men who never made it as Wisden's Cricketer of the Year, despite everything that they had and everything that they did on the field of cricket.

Inzamam Ul Haq, Abdul Qadir, Bishen Bedi, Jeff Thomson and Wes Hall are the superlative but unfortunate 5 who never made it.

Wes Hall, it is said, bowled unchanged for 200 minutes straight without dropping a yard off his speed, on the last day at a Lord's Test, with just 2 hard boiled eggs for breakfast....because that is all he could get after having overslept the night earlier.

Bishen Bedi was Cricket's own personification of "floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee", the quote first attributed to "The Greatest", Muhammad Ali.

Inzamam was, rightly, the century for your life man. Of all modern batsmen scoring over 25 centuries, only Ponting, Steve Waugh and Matthew Hayden have a better percentage of winning centuries than Inzamam.

(In this regard, there is no batsman better than Don Bradman and Steve Waugh. 78% of Waugh's and 79% of Bradman's centuries saw Australia win the Test...which basically meant that 8 times out of 10 when these two made a triple digit score, their team was guaranteed to win the game). 

Of Jeff Thomson, one of the most ferocious beings ever known to take the field, there is enough folklore of opponents getting terrorized at the mere mention of his name. Lance Gibbs, not a batsman by any standard, threatened to hold Ian Chappell responsible for any bodily harm that Jeff Thomson may inflict upon him, regardless of whether Ian was captain or not. Ian Chappell recalls this hilarious conversation between him and Gibbs :

"the West Indian off-spinner Lance Gibbs was no batsman, but before the 1975-76 series he said to me, "I can sort out Lillee, he has a wife and kids like me, but you're responsible for that mad man Thomson. You must convince him not to kill me."

"But Gibbsy," I said, "I'm not captain."

"I don't care," Gibbs responded with his distinctive cackle, "I'm holding you responsible."

Smashin Tendulkar

India's first sweep of Australia (albeit in a ridiculously small Test series).  Surely one to tuck away in the boxes of nostalgia, to feed upon when I'm 70 and have nothing much left to run upon except for grand old memories.

Bangalore belonged to Sachin Tendulkar. The series belonged to Sachin Tendulkar. What a man ! 

I think the overworked statisticians and overwhelmed juries should just give up on this man. Just proclaim him GOD and close the book on him. Let awards, recognition and felicitation be something for the mortal players of the game to play for from now on.

Sachin was the single most important player in nullifying Australia's daunting first innings scores of 400+ in both Tests. Australia is a team not used to losing a Test match after compiling 400+ in the first innings. But Tendulkar, with a few young guns to aid, helped reverse this trend, twice in a row.

Tendulkar was involved in seven 50+ partnerships in these Two tests, mentoring and inspiring youngsters like Raina, Murali Vijay, Pujara to produce worthwhile contributions to the team score. Sachin's ability to big-brother over a youngster is one of his less analyzed and subtle but important skill. Anyone with 14000 runs at the runners end is sure to overwhelm a rookie taking stance, but it is Sachin's special skill to put the Raina's and Pujara's and Vijay's at ease, protect them, cajole them, challenge them without being overbearing in any way and to effectively help them extract their own best from within.

12 matches, 15 innings, 1270 runs, 6 hundreds, 4 fifties (including a 98), average 97.69. That's how Sachin Tendulkar appears to his opponents this year so far. 

With 6 more Tests to go this year (3 against New Zealand at home and 3 at South Africa ), one can  only imagine what a monster year this man of 5'6" is going to have in 2010!

As an end note, I jinxed Sehwag too!! First Gambhir and now Sehwag....both had a wonder run of scoring a 50 in an innings in 11 consecutive Tests before falling to my expectant jinx.

11 down, one more to go...Jai Viru!

Virender Sehwag, with his first innings 59 at Mohali against Australia, equaled a world record.

Vivian Richards, Gautam Gambhir and Virender Sehwag now sit together upon a rather unassuming world record, that of scoring at least a fifty in 11 consecutive Tests matches.

Sehwag's run started about a year ago in November 2009 against Sri Lanka, and since then not a single Test has passed without him scoring a 50 or more in an innings. His run looks like this:
51 -- 131 -- 293 -- 52+45 -- 56+0 -- 109+16 -- 165 -- 109+31  -- 99 -- 109+0 -- 59+17.

That converts to  1342 runs at 83 per innings, at a strike rate of 94! May have gone in as one of the reasons for him being chosen Test cricketer of the year at the ICC 2010 awards today.


I touched on Gambhir's record in one of my past posts on this very record. (Past lookup-->  http://a-test-of-balls.blogspot.com/2010/01/run-gautam-run.html#links )

I hope I do not jinx Sehwag with this post, and he goes on to break this record in the Bangalore Test coming up. But then JINX himself steers clear of cavaliers like Sehwag who simply do not care :)

Rajnikanth, Hanuman and the ultimate God of Batting win. India returns rich

Brendon McCullum won the ICC's T20 performance of the year award, for his Rajnikanth style batting at Christchurch this past February against a completely nonplussed Australian side.

Scoresheet: http://www.cricinfo.com/ci/engine/match/423788.html

Incidentally, I had referred to this innings in one of my previous blog postings because of its sheer unreal nature.... loopback here -->.  http://a-test-of-balls.blogspot.com/2010/03/rajinikanth-of-t-20.html#links

As more or less expected, Virender Sehwag, the modern day Hanuman of cricket, won the Test player of the year award at the 2010 ICC felicitations. More than the number of runs he accumulated, or the lightening quick rate at which he did, it was for his dominance over the bowlers that he deserved this award. 6 centuries in 16 Test innings; a batting average of 87 that piled up about 1300 blindingly fast runs scored at an unheard strike rate of 97 were enough to put Sehwag up for the award.


Sachin Tendulkar, the man beyond awards or adjectives, got the coveted Overall Cricketer of the Year, and deservedly so. This man was prodigious over both forms of cricket.  Over a thousand runs in 10 Tests at an average of 80 with 6 centuries, AND, about a 900 ODI runs with 3 centuries in just 17 games at  65 runs per innings, at 98 runs per 100 balls.....What else is necessary to define a complete batsman? 


More so, why in the name of God do they even consider Tendulkar for awards any more ? If at age 38 someone could not just get the best cricketer of the year award but also be nominated in all the other major categories too, I think there is no award worthy of such a player. The ICC should just give him one final, ultimate, supreme, zenith award called "The Untouchable" and let him be. I'm beginning to fear for another tennis elbow for the poor guy, from just collecting and holding trophies !

Once Upon a Time in Mohali

Every once a while comes a Test match that makes you feel good about the Indian cricket team.

As a viewer, there is a special pleasure in seeing the tough Australians get knocked over. And I say this with an acknowledging tone, not a slurred one. It is wholesomely fulfilling to see your team beat a team that is 'the' team to beat.

Never before had India beaten another team by 1 wicket in a Test match. A paisa vasool match (and perhaps not for the bookies this time because even they would not have dared bet on the outcome looking at the way it went in the last session).

Sachin paved the way to nullify the Australian total in the first innings. In the second Laxman pulled off one that even the King of stone cold, Steve Waugh, would have been proud of. Zaheer squeezed juice from the ball. However, the man who stands tallest among them and deserves the champagne is Ishant Sharma...who as batsman #10 who may have produced as thrilling a ride back from hell as Quentin Tarantino's hero would in reel life. The score-sheet tells it all.

http://www.cricinfo.com/india-v-australia-2010/engine/current/match/464526.html 

V.V.S. Laxman, in the past 18 months has become India's second innings backbone, back ache or not. His amazing string of scores in the past 18 months and past 5 series, playing in the 3rd or 4th innings of a Test match is  now 73*, 103*, 69*, 69, 51*, 61* and 124*. That is 550 runs with 2 centuries and 5 fifties in 7 innings. 

All said and done, Test is the Best, and shall always be.

To quote my favorite cricket writer Peter Roebuck in today's Syndney Morning Herald: "it was a triumph for Test cricket. The thrill-a-minute versions of the game were put in their place by this slow-burning contest. "

A passing tidbit. The Indian batting lineup has been extremely productive in the past 2 years. With Sachin Tendulkar at the helm, there are 6 batsmen who have aggregated well into 4 figures. 

In the past 700 days of cricket, the Indian super-six of Tendulkar-Sehwag-Gambhir-Laxman-Dravid-Dhoni, have together piled up 9855 runs in 185 innings at a collective average of 60 runs per batsman per innings. This includes 34 centuries and 49 fifties ! We may have quite likely experienced the most productive phase of batsmanship in the history of Indian cricket.