Cricinfo have selected their all-time world XI. A jury of 12 good men and true have put Barry Richards in the seconds. Hobbs and Hutton made the cut above Bad Bas and Sunil Gavaskar for some reason or other.
The jury must be forgetting though that Bas don't play in no seconds...
NB: A certain gentleman whose picture appears at the top of this column didn't even make the twos... Do you want to tell him or should I?
Wot, no Michael Vaughan?
ReplyDeleteThis a rarity in terms of taking pub twaddle about sport, where cricket usually rules, but football is more interesting for this game because you can put together a moulded 'team', whereas cricket is simplified by the availability of stats and a much more uniform consensus about the great players.
For example, you could justify a football XI without Pele, but you couldn't justify a cricket XI without Bradman.
Unless I missed him, WG didn't even get nominated for the England XI. Stanley Jackson was, so it's not like they ignored the 19th century entirely. I guess Grace just wasn't as good as Tony Greig....
ReplyDeleteWG Grace is the greatest of all cricketers.
ReplyDeleteEqually, to a lot of late twentieth-century sorts, he's a sort of avuncular figure not to be taken seriously.
It's a pity that he's never mentioned alongside Bradman and Sobers. Test match statistics don't tell anything of the impact Grace had upon the game. To judge him only on those is to assume that he was merely another cricketer who came to a fully-formed game and added nothing to it.
I guess no one since CLR James (except you, OB) has got Grace: "Bradman piled up centuries. WG built a social organisation."
how you doing,
ReplyDeleteenjoying you blog , and added you to my roll
www.behindsquare.wordpress.com
go ahead and add me back if you like
cricket was the winner on the day
Ding
Brit, yes, too true, although it would be funny to choose one without him for once and watch Australia explode... As for no WG... there are no words...
ReplyDeleteding, have added you!
Didn't some numpty recently say that Ricky Ponting was the best skipper and batsman that Australia have ever had?
ReplyDeleteOh yes, it was Michael Clarke!