Almost un-noticed, Paul Harris has sneaked his way into the world’s top ten in the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings for Test bowlers. Helped by his match figures of nine for 161 against Australia at Cape Town this March, he now sits pretty on 669 points – the highest-rated left-arm spinner in the world. He was even higher in May of this year – peaking at seventh place before the resurgence of Mohammad Asif and Shane Bond in the recent series in New Zealand. A veteran of only 24 Tests since his debut in January 2007, he has so far taken 71 wickets, so is still qualifying for a “full” rating.

South Africa has hardly been a hot-bed of spinning talent since their return to the international cricketing fold in 1991. In fact, over that period of time, just 15% of all the Test wickets taken by their bowlers have gone to spinners. In contrast, over the same period of time, spinners for the other Test playing nations have taken 34% of their total wickets – more than twice as many. This is partly due to the lack of high-quality spinners in South Africa, but also due to the exceptionally high standard of the pace-bowling in that country. Allan Donald, Shaun Pollock and Dale Steyn have all spent time at the top of the bowling tree in recent years, Makhaya Ntini reached number 2 and Jacques Kallis and Andre Nel both featured in the world’s top ten at various stages of their careers.

The pickings have been slimmer slow-bowling-wise. In fact, Harris is the first South African spinner to reach the top twenty – let alone the top ten – since their re-admission. Paul Adams and Nicky Boje both played more than forty Tests and took more than a hundred wickets each, but never made a big impact on the rankings. Adams peaked at 588 points and 23rd position while Boje managed 545 points and 22nd position. So – if Harris is unchallenged as the top achieving South African tweaker in recent years, if we push the boundaries back, how does he stack up historically with his fellow countrymen?

Six bowlers from the Rainbow Nation have topped the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings for Test bowlers – the three mentioned above plus Peter Pollock, Aubrey Faulkner (who uniquely topped the batting Rankings too!) and Hugh Tayfield . Tayfield first achieved top spot after the 1955 Oval Test in which he took 8 wickets, and really made his name by bowling a record 137 dot balls in a row to the England batsmen in the Durban Test of January 1957. He ended Read more…

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Virender Sehwag is batting on 284; just 16 runs away from the unthinkable. If he scores those runs, he will become the first batsman in the history of Test cricket to score three triple hundreds.

Mind boggling as the feat would be, let us pause for a moment to ask ourselves a simple question: do we, as cricket lovers, really give him the respect that he deserves?

The write-ups that follow any substantial knock by Sehwag are usually flooded with adjectives such as "explosive," "destructive" and "bludgeoning". But such praise hides an obvious truth that the cricket world finds impossible to utter: that the Nawab of Najafgarh is a genius and, perhaps, the best batsman in the world today.

When Sehwag is at the crease, anything seems possible. Like making Murali look like a club bowler. Like almost scoring 300 runs days in less than a single day's play. Like smashing the first three balls he faces on tour for sixes as he did in New Zealand earlier this year. When he hits the fastest ever ODI century by an Indian, again in Kiwiland, it is almost expected.

But a much larger pool of facts illustrates why he is the world's most feared batter today.

Sehwag is the only current batsman in international cricket with two Test triple tons. Both were scored at breathtaking speed against respectable attacks: Pakistan and South Africa. He is a more prolific "big" innings player than anybody in world cricket. Twelve of his last 13 hundreds have been 150 plus: 284 not out, 131, 201 not out, 319, 151, 180, 254, 201, 173, 164, 155, 309, 195.

Not one of these is against Bangladesh or Zimbabwe.

Barring one, each innings had a strike rate of 70 plus, amazing by Test standards. The 319 against South Africa in Chennai last year had come off just 304 balls - the fastest triple hundred ever scored. In terms of strike rate, not even Sir Donald Bradman had done better.

In his autobiography, All-round View, Pakistan captain Imran Khan said that a batsman must succeed on all kinds of surfaces to be classified as a genuine great. But the reason why he put Vivian Richards ahead of every other batsman in his generation was because he could Read more...

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Until Jonathan Trott plays some more emphatic innings for England, Michael Vaughan’s caustic observations will continue to ring in his ears.

Having revealed that Trott celebrated with the South Africans when they won the Test series in England in 2008, and that “it hit home what English cricket has become like”, Vaughan was having a pop at England’s open-door policy towards overseas opportunists.

He was not the first to cast aspersions on Trott’s patriotism. During Trott’s Test debut at the Oval in August, Ricky Ponting strolled past him and said loudly enough to wicketkeeper Brad Haddin to ensure Trott overheard: “Does he speak like a Pom or a Yarpy?”

Undeterred, Trott contributed a confident 41 in his first Test innings, and that unflappable, Ashes-clinching hundred in his second. What he achieved on such an occasion is a testament to him and the men who chose him and should eclipse any doubts about an expatriate South African’s commitment to the England cause.

We have been here many times before. There was a vivid irony in the 1890s when KS Ranjitsinjhi, born and raised in India but making mountains of runs for Cambridge University and Sussex, was blocked from England selection by the president of the MCC, Lord Harris, because he said only “native-born” players could be chosen.

Harris, a former England captain, was born in Trinidad. Harris was overruled for the next Test, and Ranji exceeded even Trott’s debut, making 62 and 154 not out.

Ranji never got to play a Test against the country of his birth, and neither did Basil D’Oliveira, Tony Greig or Allan Lamb. But you would never have questioned their resolve against Read more…

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Suresh Raina had scored 14 runs from a Shoaib Malik over, and Pakistan seemed worried about India taking a few giant steps towards Mount 303 on Saturday. That’s when skipper Younus Khan went up to Saeed Ajmal, asking him bowl one of his four remaining overs at the crucial stage of the game.

“Our bowlers were getting hit at that time but I told my captain, ‘why not, I will bowl’. I had a plan for Raina. I wanted to surprise him with a faster ball and it worked perfectly,” Ajmal told The Indian Express on Monday. The dismissal on last ball of the over was the culmination of the trap laid with the three earlier deliveries bowled. Ajmal started with a flat ball, followed by off-spinner, then a top-spinner, and the knock-out blow was provided by his special faster one. “There are two ways in which I bowl the flat ball — one with a regular grip and there is the surprise ball where I use just one finger,” said the 31-year-old.

A late bloomer who made his international debut only last year, Ajmal is one of a long list of Pakistan spinners with magical fingers and sharp cricketing sense. A self-confessed Saqlain Mushtaq fan, during his formative years he endlessly watched the tapes of the offie who invented the doosra. But his initiation to serious cricket had another inspiration.

“After watching Pakistan win the 1992 World Cup, I only wanted to play serious cricket. I went to Imran Khan’s cricket clinic. Later, when I saw Saqlain, I wanted to bowl like him,” said the spinner who had played a big role in Pakistan’s T20 World Championship win. But despite crucial wickets both in England and here in South Africa, he hasn’t stood out in a side that uses the charismatic Shahid Afridi as their main spin option.

Ajmal’s match preparation can be divided in two parts — perfecting his art and reading the mind of the batsman. “Take for example the doosra — it took me a year to perfect it and now I bowl at least 200 balls daily so that I can pitch it wherever I want. I also study where the Read more…

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The ultimate achievement for any international cricketer is to be ranked number one in the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings. Not many have managed it but the upcoming Champions Trophy in South Africa will give viewers the opportunity to watch some of the all-time greats of the game who have dominated over the past decade or more. So here we present the ‘number ones to watch’ – in other words – the players who will be featuring in South Africa who at some stage have topped the ODI batting, bowling or all-rounders table, ranked by the length of time they spent at the number one spot in terms of days:

Batsmen

Ricky Ponting (547 days). He first hit the top spot after his unbeaten 57 against the West Indies at Kingston in May 2003 and fell from the number one place for the last time in March 2008 after three consecutive scores of one in the space of five days against Sri Lanka and India.

MS Dhoni (379 days). He had a one-match stay on top sandwiching Ponting and Adam Gilchrist from 19-22 April 2006 after scoring 59 against Pakistan in Abu Dhabi, but returned to the number one spot in August 2008 with a vengeance and has hardly been bettered since.

Sachin Tendulkar (338 days). He became the youngest player to top the ODI Batting Ratings as a 22-year-old in February 1996, and after a four-year gap managed to return to the top of the tree for five days in March 2008 after scoring 91 against Australia at the Gabba.

Michael Hussey (177 days). Mr Cricket first reached number one in September 2006 when his batting average stood at 81.75! But after a six-month stay on top his form started to dip and he fell behind team-mate Ponting and England’s Kevin Pietersen.

Graeme Smith (168 days). An unbeaten century against Bangladesh in Chittagong in early March 2008 sent the South African powerhouse to number one, and he held the position Read more…

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The long version of the great game faces an uncertain future

Test cricket is one of sport’s most uncompromising spectacles. One game can last five days, thirty hours in total - yet the game is so intricate that one ball can often change the direction of the match. Or it can end in stalemate. It is also ostentatiously traditional, governed by a rule book mostly written in 1744, and overflowing with arcane customs. And, unlike the beautiful simplicity of football or golf, test cricket resembles a complex novel with its constant skirmishes, revolving characters, and interplay of cruelty, irony, ambiguity and glory. The late playwright Harold Pinter once wrote : ‘I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing God ever created on earth – certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either.’

Cricket writer Richard Boock suggests that test cricket “is a bit of anachronism in today’s world – a sports event that goes for five days and might end in a draw. I think that is one of the beauties of it too,
in this instant gratification kind of lifetime we’re living in, where everyone wants an instant result and things have to happen quickly. It is really charming to get away to a test match and go through the rituals and routines and traditions of something that was basically happening the same way a hundred and thirty years ago.”

The first test match was in 1877 between Australia and England. The latest test match (at the time of writing) was also a test match between Australia and England. In the middle of that there have been moments and figures which have entered sporting folklore. When an English team happened to snatch defeat in the face of victory in 1882, a fake obituary declared English cricket to be dead. “Poor” Fred Tate, Bodyline, Bradman, Warne’s ‘ball of the century’, Muralitharan’s bent arm, India’s win after the Mumbai attacks in 2008, the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket Read more…

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Andrew Flintoff rides off into the sunset — at least so far as Test cricket is concerned — with a cacophony of non-plaudits ringing in his ears. Good but not great, they’re all saying. A national hero, but a cricketer who fell short of the highest standards. A talisman, not a great man.

This assessment has been so universal that Flintoff went along with it himself. Never a great cricketer, he said, just one of the lads who did his best. Fair enough, it’s for others to say, after all. But let’s make a sober judgment on this. Let us assess the question of Flintoff’s greatness, not by means of a sentimental journey by pedalo or by a forensic examination of statistics. Let us make a serious exploration of greatness in sport.

Mike Atherton, chief cricket correspondent of this newspaper, has led the charge for the non-greatness cavalry. The principal reasons for Flintoff’s shortfall, he says, come down to statistics and longevity. This is a very cricket view of sport. If we could widen our vision, we would set Flintoff in the context not of cricket but of sport. And that changes everything.

Cricket is notoriously obsessed by statistics and, certainly, Flintoff’s don’t stack up like, to name the most obvious example, Ian Botham’s. No argument here. But how much do statistics reveal about a career? The very existence of statistics distorts our view. I say that they can Read more…

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One day, your son or daughter might pull a copy of Wisden from the bookshelf, or more likely magic Andrew Flintoff’s stats on to a computer screen, and ask the killer question: “Was he really that good?”

And you’ll sigh and chuckle, having recalled ‘that’ over at Edgbaston back in 2005, or his five-for at Lord’s in 2009, or his 167 against West Indies in Birmingham in 2004. And you’ll find yourself saying, rather patronisingly, “you’ll never really understand”.

The record books will tell future generations that Flintoff wasn’t even the best all-rounder of his time. South Africa’s Jacques Kallis, with his 10,000-plus runs, his 31 Test centuries, his 258 wickets, rather swamps Flintoff in terms of cold statistics.

Chris Cairns of New Zealand, in a career blighted by injury, averaged higher with bat and lower with ball. Another Kiwi, Daniel Vettori, runs Flintoff close on batting stats and has taken 18 five-fors to the Lancastrian’s three and three 10-wicket matches to Flintoff’s none.

But then the English have never really dealt in cold statistics when it comes to choosing their heroes. Most will take the maverick James Hunt over the monochrome Nigel Mansell; the lavishly gifted but fatally flawed Jimmy White over Steve Davis, the cold-blooded winner; “daft as a brush” Gazza over Brand Beckham.

Indeed, Seve Ballesteros, the winner of five majors, elicits more love from the English public than Nick Faldo, winner of six majors and arguably his country’s greatest ever individual Read more…

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Sports may specialize in tales of the improbable, but there are still some things you just don’t expect to see happen. On Wednesday, Shahid Afridi will captain Pakistan’s cricketers in a Twenty20 international against Sri Lanka in Colombo.

Think Michael Vick becoming president of the Humane Society of the United States, or Manchester United’s manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, being awarded the Freedom of Liverpool.

Of course not all national cricket captains are straight arrows like England’s Andrew Strauss. Should Afridi last very long in his new role, there is a good chance he will find himself tossing for innings with Ricky Ponting of Australia, whose issues with alcohol and betting once threatened to capsize his career.

Afridi, 29, has had a career whose colorfulness is eclipsed among current players only by his turbulent erstwhile Pakistan teammate Shoaib Akhtar. Afridi’s extensive rap sheet includes a four-match ban for insulting opponents and a match umpire; a dressing room dispute with his captain and vice captain over his place in Pakistan’s batting order; sanctions after a girl was found in his room — his explanation that she was seeking his autograph was not accepted — and being fingered as the provocateur two years ago when Akhtar finally lost it and struck Read more…

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It’s been a week since the spectacular IPL final and the not so spectacular closing ceremony. You don’t need to be very smart to know that Deccan Chargers won a taut final after facing the ignominy of being the winners of the wooden spoon last year.

The runner-up was Royal Challengers, a team that was perhaps rightly branded last year as a test team and had finished seventh. They were not much different this year as the highly valued Kevin Pietersen, who was supposed to give momentum to the side as captain and key batsman, nearly derailed the challenge till Anil Kumble, the former test captain, stepped in to show the way with a little help from Ross Taylor to end up a close second. Read more…

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