| . | Even when the battle
for the world cup was about to begin, many in the cricketing fraternity
were on the look out for the Best Allrounder of the game.Richard Hadley
in an interview was making a point recently that in the 80 s there was
a healthy competition between himself,Kapil Dev,Bothom and Imran Khan for
the honour of being recognized as the best genuine alrounder. Many of the
current generation allrounders have been dubbed "Bits and Pieces Players".The
reason to such a feeling can partly be ascribed to the predominance of
limited over encounters in the current portfolio of the players. This world
cup with the new format was a good time to evaluate the performance of
such allrounders in a tough global competition over a period of one month.
The fact that most of the players would be playing under similar conditions
and against the same opposition, meant that such a level playing field
for evaluation would not be available untill the next worldcup.
The players who were initially weighing for the honour were Jaques Kallis, Lance Klusener,Chris Cairns,Steve Waugh,shaun pollock,and Wasim Akram among others.As the world cup is coming towards the close and at a time when 36 of the 42 matches have been completed, there are some surprises. Lance Klusener and Wasim Akram have ofcourse kept their challenge going.The surprise is however that the supremacy of these high profile majot test playing nations have been effectively challenged by Hamilton of Scotland and Neil Jhonson of Zibabwe. As per the "naavi rating scheme", the
most innovative rating scheme available today,(Details available at http://www.naavi.org/rating.htm),
the star at this juncture is Neil Jhonson of Zimbabwe. He leads the illustrious
list of 180 world class players who are participating in this worldcup
nudging Klusener to the second place.The global standing of some of the
other players is given in table 1 below.
The recognition of a player as a genuine allrounder can be made on the basis of the criteria that a player should have taken a minimum of 33% of his points in both batting and bowling. I suppose all the above satisfy this criteria. Neil Jhonson has emerged to the
top spot with a consistent performance through out the tournament partiularly
against the stronger teams as the following table indicates.
Surely for a member of a lesser recognized team this performance is extremely laudable and has been instrumental in pushing Zimbabwe into the Semi Final stage much against the market expectations before the tournaments.This 29 year old left hand opening bat and right arm medium fast bowler appears to have carved out a special place in the world of Alrounders of the world cup 99. naavi
See the performance evaluation of the Indian team in the World Cup matches here. |
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