The South African all-rounder syndrome

The good thing about being an all-rounder is that if you are struggling with one aspect of your game, you can always fall back on the other to maintain your place in the side. Take Jacques Kallis for example: he averages just 13.60 with the bat in his last five Tests but has taken 14 wickets at 24.64. Kallis is a special case – he has been rated the world’s top all-rounder for all but eleven weeks of the last seven years – a run only broken by Chris Cairns in 2002 and Andrew Flintoff in 2005 and 2006.

South Africa returned to the international cricket fray on 10 November 1991 when they played India in front of a capacity crowd at Eden Gardens, Kolkata. Since then, there have been a total of 2097 One Day Internationals played, and the Proteas have dominated the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings for ODI all-rounders to a massive degree:

Team	ODIs at #1
South Africa	1,214
India	237
England	232
West Indies	197
Sri Lanka	109
Pakistan	74
New Zealand	27
Australia	7

At first glance, you might think that this might be just down to one outstanding individual. However, in the past sixteen and a half years, no fewer than four South Africans have topped the table, all leading for extended periods of time. Jacques Kallis has been top for 439 matches, Shaun Pollock 331, Hansie Cronje 249, and Lance Klusener 195.

In the Test arena, the South African dominance is even more striking. There have been 707 Test Matches played since South Africa’s return against the West Indies at Bridgetown in early 1992, and only eight different men have topped the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings for Test all-rounders over that time. However, the three longest stints have all belonged to players from the rainbow nation – Jacques Kallis (328 matches), Brian McMillan (110) and Shaun Pollock (104).

Team	Tests at #1
South Africa	542
India	68
New Zealand	54
Australia	20
Pakistan	17
England	6

But what is it about South Africa that keeps producing these world-class all-rounders? Could it be the climate or maybe even the wine? Australia dominated world cricket in both formats of the game over this time period but were without a world-class all-rounder who could both bat and bowl (it could be argued that Adam Gilchrist should be classed as an all-rounder). The only Aussies to have topped the table over this period were the Waugh brothers, but even they would freely admit that they were both batsmen who bowled rather than true all-rounders.

On a final note, perhaps it is unsurprising to discover that the only man to have topped both the Test batting and bowling Rankings is a South African. You need to go back to the early years of the century to find him, but Aubrey Faulkner displaced Jack Hobbs from top place in the batting table for the whole of 1911. Subsequently, when Test cricket resumed after the First World War, Faulkner replaced the now-retired Sydney Barnes as the top rated bowler. With the break in play for nearly seven years due to the fighting, the South African was the top rated all-rounder for an unbroken spell of eleven and a half years, which has only ever been surpassed by Garry Sobers from 1962 to 1974.

Always the bridesmaids

And so Anil Kumble and Sourav Ganguly take their leave from the Test arena after two fantastic careers. One of them departs with more than six hundred wickets and the other with over seven thousand runs. However, despite these two being considered among the greats of the game, they share another trait – neither of them managed to reach number one in the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings for Test cricket.

Kumble can consider himself the more unlucky of the two. His peak in terms of points came relatively early in his career when he reached 859 after helping to bowl India to an innings victory against Sri Lanka on his home ground at Bangalore in January 1994. However, that was only good enough for fourth place as Waqar Younis, Curtly Ambrose and Shane Warne were all near the peak of their powers. The following year he managed to make it all the way to number two, but again found himself behind the West Indian giant.

For Ganguly, his Test career has been steady rather than spectacular. His highest-ever Rating of 713 which he achieved to reach eighth place in late 1999, doesn’t even place him in the top ten Indians of all time. But – as befits a player whose career average never fell below forty, he was a picture of consistency, never dropping out of the world’s top fifty from his debut to his final curtain call at Nagpur. Kumble can at least console himself that in the shorter form of the game, he did reach the top of the pile. He was number one for a period of eleven matches – back in 1996 – a year in which he took 61 wickets in 32 One Day Internationals.

But poor old Sourav doesn’t even have that as a consolation prize. Despite scoring more than eleven thousand ODI runs, he never managed to achieve the elusive number one spot. But even with that mountain of runs, he is still not the player who managed to score the most runs in One Day International cricket without reaching the top. That ‘honour’ goes to Inzamam-ul-Haq who scored 11,739 runs peaking at number three in 1995.

So – who are the other unlucky players who have scored the most runs and taken the most wickets without reaching the number one spot in the Rankings?

The top twelve Test run-scorers have all made it to number one at some point or other, which leaves Alec Stewart – with 8,463 Test runs, as the leading run-scorer without that particular claim to fame. Next come Geoff Boycott and Mark Waugh, with Mahela Jayawardena the leading current player in fourth place in this particular list with 7,757.

Kumble is the bowler with the most Test wickets never to have made it to the top of the Test bowling tree, but he is followed by two former holders of the world Test wickets record – Courtney Walsh and Kumble’s former team-mate Kapil Dev. The leading current bowlers are Makhaya Ntini who has 358, followed by Chaminda Vaas on 348.

In One Day cricket, despite taking 416 wickets and terrorising opposition batsmen with his yorkers, Waqar Younis never managed to reach number one. For a lot of his career that top spot was taken by his partner in crime Wasim Akram, but Waqar can be content with the fact that he did make it to the top of the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings for Test cricket.

Cricketing ‘cups of coffee’

A ‘cup of coffee’ is North American sports terminology for a short time spent by a minor league player at the major league level. The idea behind the term is that the player was only in the big leagues long enough to have a cup of coffee before being returned to the minors

Test Cricket history is littered with players who have represented their country just once. These players range from West Indian Andy Ganteaume who scored 112 in his only innings, to Gavin Hamilton who is one of the nine unfortunate players to have made a pair on their only Test appearance.

So – if we know that there are 382 players who have represented their country once in Tests and a further 169 who have played just one ODI, what about those players who made a name for themselves – albeit a fleeting one – at the top of the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings?

In Test cricket three batsmen have topped the charts for just one match. The first was Australian Percy McDonnell, whose fifteen minutes of fame came way back in 1882 when he topped the batting table with a Rating of 472. The next was South African Herbie Taylor who sneaked above Jack Hobbs for one match in February 1923. The third man was West Indies stalwart Rohan Kanhai, who was the only man to break the Garry Sobers / Ken Barrington domination from 1960 to 1969 by edging ahead in January 1966 after Barrington failed at Sydney. However, with 60 and 102 in his next Test, the England batsmen nudged Kanhai back down to number 2.

Interestingly, there are a total of fifteen bowlers who have held the number one spot for just one Test Match in their careers, and some of the all-time greats are among them. Richie Benaud – one of the great leg-spinners - upset the Laker & Lock double-act in February 1959. John Snow was England’s fast-bowling hero of the 1960s and 1970s and ended with 202 Test wickets, but he only reached number one once – during the 1972 Ashes series. Wasim Akram – who took 414 Test wickets – only peaked at the top once – and then albeit joint top with Curtly Ambrose – in December 1997.

The other bowlers to have achieved the feat are: Alfred Shaw (1877), Tom Kendall (1877), Billy Bates (1887), Billy Barnes (1888), Charlie Turner (1892), Tom Richardson (1898), Monty Noble (1902), Jack Saunders (1908), Tibby Cotter (1910), Tich Freeman (1929), Bill Bowes (1946) and Dale Steyn (2008).

In the shorter form of the game, only two men have topped the charts for a solitary match. The first was John Edrich, whose innings of 82 in the first ODI of all enabled him to be top. The other was Mohammad Yousuf, who took Michael Bevan’s place at the top of the tree in October 2003, before a duck in the next match saw the Australian regain top spot.

Finally, in a stark contrast to the Test bowling, only one man has been top of the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings for ODI bowlers for just one match, and for that we need to go back to the first ODI played. Keith Stackpole took three for 40 in that first match at Melbourne to have a bowling Rating of 141 – enough for first place.

A swing to the left?

A quick glance at the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings for Test cricket shows that Shivnarine Chanderpaul leads the way – albeit narrowly – from Kumar Sangakkara and Michael Hussey. Other than appearing in the current top three of the World Batting Ratings, these batsmen share another characteristic – they are all left-handed.

In fact, there are a total of eleven left-handers in the top thirty batsmen which equates to nearly 37%. If we examine the top thirty in the Rankings at ten-year intervals and analyse how many are right-handed and how many are left-handed, over the past sixty years we obtain the following figures:

Date	RH bat	LH bat	Leftie %	RH bowl	LH bowl	Leftie %
Oct 2008	19	11	36.7	23	7	23.3
Oct 1998	19	11	36.7	24	6	20.0
Oct 1988	23	7	23.3	24	6	20.0
Oct 1978	23	7	23.3	23	7	23.3
Oct 1968	22	8	26.7	21	9	30.0
Oct 1958	24	6	20.0	22	8	26.7
Oct 1948	27	3	10.0	26	4	13.3

Whereas there has been an increase in the proportion of left-handed batsmen playing Test cricket over time, the percentage of left-handed bowlers over time has stayed pretty constant.

In all Test cricket since the Second World War – which equates to the majority of the playing time incorporated in the figures above – left-handed batsmen have had a clear advantage. They average 34.61 whereas their right-handed counterparts average 29.15. Furthermore, 6.1% of all innings played by left-handers over that period of time result in centuries, compared to just 4.6% by right-handers.

So – why the increase in left-handed batsmen performing at the highest level? One possible reason is that having a left-hander and right-hander batting together causes more problems for the bowling team. A typical left-hander would historically have spent most of their time batting in a left-hand / right-hand partnership, whereas right-handers would spend a greater proportion of their time batting with another right-hander.

Of the sixteen batting partnerships who have added the most runs together in Test history, four are all right-handed, one is all left-handed and the remaining eleven all feature one left-hander and one right-hander.

One other possibility is that the natural line of attack for a right-arm over the wicket bowler would make it more difficult for them to achieve LBW decisions against left-hand batsmen, given that a ball which would have hit the stumps will often have pitched outside leg-stump. Without a similar increase in left-handed bowlers utilising their angle of attack to claim more left-handers leg-before, the left-handed batsmen enjoy their slight advantage.

Over the same period, left-arm bowlers average 33.49 runs per wicket with a strike rate of a wicket every 80 deliveries. Their right-arm team-mates average 31.77 with a strike rate of 70, a difference which surely cannot be put down solely to the fact that there have been more right-hand batsmen for their fellow right-hand bowlers to dismiss lbw. So, if any youngsters are reading this and want to reach the top of the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings at some point in the future, it may just be worth your while to train yourself to bat left-handed and bowl with your other arm.

Where have all the great ODI batsmen gone?

There is little doubt that we are currently in the middle of a golden era of Test Match batting, with five batsmen from four different countries all fighting it out for the top spot in the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings. In fact, seven of the top ten current batsmen have reached the magical plateau of 900 points, a level achieved by only twenty-four batsmen in the history of the Test game.

In Test cricket, eight batsmen have reached 900 points in Test cricket since 2000. However, in the shorter form of the game, Michael Bevan's Rating of 880 achieved way back in February 2000 is the highest points total achieved by anyone playing One Day International Cricket over the same time period.

Of other batsmen, only Mike Hussey and Matthew Hayden have even reached 850 over the same period of time.

We can further analyse the Test high-achievers by examining how many matches they have each spent above the 900 point mark since 2000:

Ricky Ponting	17
Kumar Sangakkara	6
Jacques Kallis	6
Mohammad Yousuf	6
Mike Hussey	5
Matthew Hayden	4
Brian Lara	3
Kevin Pietersen	1

That makes a total of 48 matches spent in "world class" territory since the turn of the millennium. Contrast that with a grand total of zero matches spent at the same high level by any of the One Day International players and it appears that the Test batsmen are currently achieving greater things than their ODI counterparts. In fact, the last batsman to achieve 900 points in One Day International cricket was Brian Lara in January 1997.

However - it hasn't always been that way. Contrast this current state of affairs with the 1980s. In that decade, only two batsmen managed to reach the 900 point mark in Test cricket - Sunil Gavaskar and Viv Richards. However, in One Day cricket, roles were reversed with six batsmen achieving the feat - Richards, Zaheer Abbas, Greg Chappell. David Gower, Javed Miandad and Desmond Haynes. Which begs the question - why the apparent decline in ODI Batting Ratings since then, given the proliferation of One Day cricket played nowadays in comparison with yesteryear? 516 ODIs were played in the 1980s whereas the 2000s have already seen 1234 matches played.

One possible example is that with the increase in scoring rates from 73.1 in the 1980s to the current level of 81.1 in the 2000s, outstanding batting achievements stood out more in the past. Viv Richards had a strike rate in ODI cricket of 90, which compares exceedingly well with any of the greats playing ODI cricket nowadays, but given his last appearance was back in 1991, it stood out even more given the reduced strike rate in all ODI matches during his career. In Richards case, the difference worked out at over one run per over over the course of his career.

Nowadays, it needs the same sustained level of excellence to reach 900 points in the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings for One Day International cricket, but with a hectic One-Day schedule worldwide, it is that much more difficult to stand out from your peers over such a greatly increased number of matches.

A tribute to the 'big four'

As the Indian ‘big four’ near the end of their Test careers, what can the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings tell us about their contributions to world cricket over the past decade or more?

In the record 76 Tests they have played together in the middle-order, they have totalled more than twenty-one thousand runs with forty-seven centuries. However, Rankings-wise, it could be argued that only two of the four realised their full potential.

One way of comparing the four greats is to calculate their ‘average’ Rating over their careers. However, only when a batsman has played forty Test innings can he obtain a full Rating. Here are the average Ratings of the ‘big four’ since they have achieved their full Ratings – in other words – since they have fully established themselves in the Indian team.

Player	Average Rating
Rahul Dravid	791
Sachin Tendulkar	783
VVS Laxman	659
Sourav Ganguly	592

This gives a ‘Total average Rating’ of 2825 points. We can take it one stage further and analyse at what point the Ratings of the four batsmen totalled the most points. After the Sydney Test of January 2004 when India declared at 705 for seven, the four batsmen had a combined total of 2992 Rating points distributed as follows:

Player	Rating
Rahul Dravid	833
Sachin Tendulkar	781
VVS Laxman	753
Sourav Ganguly	575

For such a potent batting line-up, it is perhaps surprising that only once have all four featured in the top twenty of the world’s batting at the same time and that occurred earlier this year. After the Sydney Test against Australia in January, they were all tightly bunched together from Tendulkar in thirteenth to Laxman in eighteenth.

Sunil Gavaskar remains the only Indian among the 24 batsmen to have reached the magical 900-point mark in the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings, with both Tendulkar and Dravid topping out in the 890s. Back in February 1999, both had Ratings of over 850 with just Steve Waugh preventing an Indian one-two.

It is perhaps Sourav Ganguly who lets the side down a little. In his 76 matches with the others he averages 34.56 with just four centuries. This is reflected in the fact that his highest career Rating was ‘just’ 713 which placed him eighth back in December 1999.

Eighth is also the highest place achieved so far by Laxman – not surprisingly soon after his monumental 281 against Australia at Kolkata in 2001, although he did reach a peak of 753 points three years later after scoring 178 at Sydney.

As good a batting line-up as this Indian one has been over the past decade, in early 2002 the Australians had all their top seven in the top twenty batsmen, surely the greatest display of combined batting strength ever assembled in Test history:

Player	Rating
Matthew Hayden	872
Adam Gilchrist	864
Damien Martyn	805
Steve Waugh	778
Justin Langer	768
Mark Waugh	690
Ricky Ponting	657

A countdown of the top ten one day international bowling performances

Stuart Broad ripped the heart out of the South African batting at Trent Bridge with sensational figures of five for 23 in his ten overs to set up a comprehensive ten-wicket triumph for England. So - having examined the top Test innings, how about giving One-day bowlers their due.

It is always more tricky to compare ODI bowling efforts - for instance - how does five for 50 in ten overs compare with none for 20 in the same ten overs. With the help of the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings computer, we can obtain some answers. So - here is a countdown of the top ten One Day international bowling performances

10=

Farveez Maharoof

SL

9-2-14-6

v WI

Mumbai

14/10/2006

Taking advantage of the Brabourne's pitch and some woeful choices of strokes, he cut a swathe through the must-vaunted West Indian batting line-up to rout them for just 80 and set up a nine-wicket triumph.

10=

Andrew Bichel

AUS

10-0-20-7

v ENG

Port Elizabeth

02/03/2003

This was a must-win game for Australia and Bichel's figures stood out like a sore thumb as his colleagues took one for 181 in their forty overs. Not satisfied with that, he then starred made an unbeaten 34 as Australia scraped home by two wickets with two balls to spare.

9

Terry Alderman

AUS

10-2-17-5

v NZ

Wellington

20/02/1982

Better known for his Test exploits, Alderman certainly had his days in the shorter form of the game. New Zealand collapsed to the Aussie pace attack at the Basin Reserve for just 74, with Alderman the pick of the bunch with five top order wickets.

8

Stuart Broad

ENG

10-3-23-5

v SA

Nottingham

26/08/2008

A new entry to the top ten, Broad was helped by four catches by keeper Matt Prior as South Africa were bundled out in just 23 overs - the shortest all-out innings in their ODI history. He removed five of the top seven batsmen as England won with more than 35 overs to spare.

7

Mike Hendrick

ENG

12-6-15-4

v PAK

Leeds

16/06/1979

With a career ODI economy rate of 3.27, Hendrick could certainly bowl a metronomic line and length. With England defending just 165 in this World Cup match, he reduced Pakistan to 34 for six to send England into the semi-finals.

6

Farveez Maharoof

SL

10-5-9-3

v WI

Dambulla

02/08/2005

A second entry for Maharoof, who certainly seems to enjoy bowling against the West Indies. This time his miserly new-ball spell set up a fifty-run victory for Sri Lanka as the tourists never recovered from a number of early setbacks which saw them slump to 39 for five.

5

Chaminda Vaas

SL

9.3-1-14-5

v IND

Sharjah

29/10/2000

Somewhat overshadowed by team-mate Sanath Jayasuriya's innings of 189 which helped set India a daunting target of 300, Vaas set about them immediately with four wickets in his first five overs to hasten them towards their lowest ever ODI total of just 54.

4

Glenn McGrath

AUS

10-4-8-4

v IND

Sydney

14/01/2000

Having won the toss and decided to bat, India would soon be ruing that fact as the King of line-and-length bowled an astonishingly accurate spell removing the big top three of Ganguly, Tendulkar and Laxman before twenty had been posted on the board.

3

Sunil Joshi

IND

10-6-6-5

v SA

Nairobi

26/09/1999

Ironically the only spinner on the list, and who would have picked him? Bowling first-change, he spun a web around the South Africans who were powerless to hit him of the square. They subsided to a mere 117 all out and defeat by eight wickets.

2

Phil Simmons

WI

10-8-3-4

v PAK

Sydney

17/12/1992

Given the new ball ahead of Patrick Patterson and Kenny Benjamin, Simmons did not disappoint as he bowled what is still the most economical ten-over spell in ODI history. Pakistan were only chasing 215, but found Simmons irresistible under the Sydney lights.

1

Gary Gilmour

AUS

12-6-14-6

v ENG

Leeds

18/06/1975

In just the 31st ODI ever played, left-armer Gilmour bowled Australia into the World Cup final with an astonishing spell. England's first six wickets fell for just 36 - all to Gilmour - as they were all out for 93.

So - no Wasim Akram, no Murali, no Waqar Younis and no Shaun Pollock, but can anyone honestly argue with any of the above?