From Alan and Philip Sutherland, Australia

A great bowler, a fine batsman, an inspirational captain © PA Photos

The recent Test series between Sri Lanka and Australia has illustrated the important role of all-rounders in the game. Although Australia’s vice-captain Shane Watson failed with the bat, he took important wickets with his medium-pace. By contrast, Sri Lanka’s vice-captain, Angelo Mathews performed well with the bat, but was unfortunately unable to bowl due to injury. All-rounders (other than wicketkeepers) are expected to bowl.

So, who what are some of the indicators used to define an allrounder? A usual one is the figure of 1000 runs and 100 wickets. This, however, is a little vague as it includes a useful number No.8 (such as Shane Warne) whilst excluding the greatest leg-spinning batsman of all time, Aubrey Faulkner, who only represented South Africa 25 times in the early 20th century. Ideally, allrounders should take at least about one wicket per match. Australia’s Steve Waugh started his career bowling medium pace, but hardly bowled during the bulk of his career, thus not achieving this mark. Another Australian captain, Greg Chappell, finished with a similar record.

One who came very close was the great English batsman, Sir Walter Hammond. With 83 wickets in 85 matches and a glowing report on his wicket-taking ability from none other than his fellow knight, Sir Donald Bradman, Hammond should perhaps have bowled more often. Crucially, Hammond’s batting average is above his bowling average (over 20 runs above to be precise), which is another oft-used criterion for an allrounder status and one that his compatriot Andrew Flintoff couldn’t quite achieve for his entire career.

Sir Richard Hadlee is a prime example of one who could achieve such a feat. Although Hadlee was arguably not as good with the bat as Flintoff was to be later, New Zealand’s greatest player certainly never tired of taking wickets. Indeed, Hadlee took a tick over five wickets per Test.

The only allrounder to surpass this feat was South Africa’s Mike Procter, albeit in an official Test career of just seven matches. Few allrounders take more than three-and-a-half wickets per Test. Two who achieved this feat include Chris Cairns and Jack Gregory. Cairns’ father Lance was a fine swing bowler who often operated first change in the same New Zealand team as Hadlee. Lance swung the bat equally fiercely at No.8 or 9. However, his son, Chris, took his batting to a different level (averaging over 33) whilst remaining effective with the ball.

Like Chris Cairns, Jack Gregory’s abilities made him arguably the second-best non-keeping allrounder his country has ever produced. Long before the Waughs and the Chappells, the Gregory clan was synonymous with Australian cricket. Time, however, has seen Jack and his relations somewhat forgotten. After all, “Kangaroo Jack” Gregory played in the same team as the Chappell’s grandfather, Victor Richardson, who himself was something of an all-round sportsman and fielder if not a Test allrounder.

One whose fielding ability was never in question (nor his batting or bowling) was Sir Garfield Sobers. Many would rate Sobers as the greatest allrounder (indeed, the greatest cricketer) to ever play the game. With two-and-a-half-wickets per match and a batting average over twenty runs higher than his bowling average, it is easy to agree.

However, there is one other allrounder who deserves such lofty consideration – Imran Khan. Not only a great bowler and a fine batsman (achieving the double of 1000 runs and 100 wickets in just 30 matches), Imran’s captaincy record for Pakistan is also noteworthy. Needless to say, Sri Lanka have obviously earmarked Mathews as a future captain. Equally, they need him fit to bowl more, thus enabling greater flexibility in picking two specialist spinners. It is probably unlikely that Mathews will ever achieve the status of a great allrounder. Yet, for the sake of the team, he must aim for a Hammond-like one wicket per match.

Given the two criteria of a higher batting than bowling average combined with an emphasis on wickets per match, there have been many who rate a mention. A top thirty could be:
Imran Khan, Garry Sobers, Aub Faulkner, Mike Procter, Shaun Pollock, Richard Hadlee, Keith Miller, Jacques Kallis, Jack Gregory, Ian Botham, Chris Cairns, Trevor Goddard, Alan Davidson, Tony Greig, Giff Vivian, Colin McCool, Allan Steel, Frank Foster, Kapil Dev, Monty Noble, Roy Kilner, Charles Kelleway, Brian McMillan, Bob Cowper, Frank Worrell, Shane Watson, Wally Hammond, Stanley Jackson, Ed Barlow and Warwick Armstrong.

From Apoorv Tiwari, India

Virender Sehwag ensures there is never a dull moment when he is at the crease © AFP

The game of cricket, one could easily be led to believe, is at a crossroads. The longest format of the game, once unparalleled in its ability to blend finesse with brashness, gentility with hostility, seems to be losing its aura. While it remains a format dearest to most cricketers, it just does not seem as captivating as it used to be. The other, diametrically opposite format, while exhilarating at times, will always be viewed with skepticism because it seems to summarily negate the importance of traditional cricketing attributes.

The ODI format, which could have been a convenient middle path, has instead been thwarted by the other two formats. It is shorter than Test cricket, but too long for a day. It’s a better test of skill and character than Twenty20, but simply no match to the travails of Test cricket. Even a commercially successful World Cup hasn’t put to rest speculations on the future of ODIs. What then does cricket need to rediscover itself?

The game today appears to be suffering from a malaise that transcends format. Any sport, be it an individual or a team sport, owes its greatness to the personality of the individuals who play it. We've grown up hearing commentators hailing qualities such as gamesmanship, "team before self", "playing to win", which go on to ensure that the "game is the ultimate winner". While these may seem like overhyped platitudes in an increasingly competitive sporting environment, the truth is that anyone watching the game would always appreciate these attributes in players. No one would cease to follow the game if Sachin Tendulkar stops scoring hundreds, they would be disappointed every time he misses out, but would always tune in next time in the hope that he would succeed. On the contrary, a hundred like the one Angelo Matthews scored in the third Test against Australia would always do a disservice to the game, and even to the most ardent of Angelo's cricket fans.

Maybe the modern obsession with, and accessibility to, statistics is a factor, but modern cricketers seem a little too bothered about centuries, bans, fines, none of which serves to further the team's cause. Ricky Ponting's tactics on the fourth day of the final Test in Nagpur 2008, where he let India off the hook with some confounding bowling changes, are a case in point. MS Dhoni's decision to abandon the pursuit of a more-than-achievable target in Dominica and Dinesh Chandimal's century against England in an ODI recently are also recent examples of poor advertisements of the game.

Another issue that seems to be plaguing the game is the frequency of cricket matches. Today, cricket matches are played by fatigued players, and watched, if at all, by a fatigued audience. A direct, albeit lesser obvious, consequence of this fatigue has been the visible lack of variety in cricketing talent, as well as characters. The whole experience of watching cricket today is far more mechanical, far less poetic. Even so, honourable exceptions do exist, such as Virender Sehwag. His style of cricket may seem exasperating and unfulfilling to some, but no one can deny the fact that he embodies several qualities that make him unique and endearing. He might not be a natural athlete, but don’t we have enough of those already? He never slows down in the 90s, enjoys the success of his team-mates, is jovial, and most importantly, always seems to be playing to win.

One can be fairly certain that Sehwag would have certainly attempted to chase down the target in Dominica. Some would argue that it is the only way Sehwag can be successful, but even if that were true, it does not undermine the fact that he is a rare breed in modern cricket. Amid the increasing dullness around him, Sehwag ensures there is never a dull moment while he occupies the crease. It’s his approach to the game that makes him so watchable. Everyone, of course, cannot be a Sehwag. But the game today could do with some spice and colour. Not in a perfunctory manner from IPL cheerleaders, but from people who play the game.

From Alan and Philip Sutherland, Australia

Glenn McGrath: Not quite a transformation but there was some consistency in scoring © Getty Images

Often it is said that necessity is the progenitor of invention. Equally, it could be said to be the mother of re-invention. When medium-fast bowler James Franklin debuted for New Zealand in January, 2001, few would have predicted that he would rise to occupy No.5 or 6 in New Zealand’s batting line-up. Indeed, the idea that some New Zealanders would be calling for his retention in the national contract system ten years later due to his batting capabilities would have been beyond belief. However, it merely proves another old adage: with consistent and creative practice, one’s skill level can markedly improve, even if it appears that one has no skill what-so-ever.

This was surely the case with the batting of the metronomic maestro, Glenn McGrath. When McGrath donned a baggygreen cap for the first of his 124 Test matches, his batting style was best described as that of a total ferret. However, with time, application and more than a bit of help and encouragement, he re-invented himself as merely a genuine bunny. Or maybe even a No.10, a position McGrath briefly occupied above legspinning team-mate Stuart MacGill. The difference between McGrath’s willow-wielding capabilities at the end of his long career is in stark contrast to its beginning. The span of his first 18 completed Test innings - 1993-1996 - yielded just 38 runs for an average of 2.11, including ten ducks. The span of his final 18 completed Test innings brought, however, a massive 191 runs at an average of 10.61 from mid-2004 to 2007. This included a run of four unbeaten innings, yielding a combined 36 runs, and his only international half-century (61 against New Zealand in Brisbane in 2004). McGrath was still making ducks, almost as many as he did at the beginning, but in between these he was doing something extraordinary; he was actually scoring in some sort of consistent fashion.

The rise of McGrath’s batting, however, was nothing compared to that of slow-left armer, Wilfred Rhodes. Rhodes began his long county career with Yorkshire in 1898, holding up the order at No.11. One year later, he was batting at 10 or 11 for England. By 1909, Rhodes however, was opening the batting with Sir Jack Hobbs. Admittedly, he had shown some aptitude down the order. Assisted by a number of not outs, his first eleven innings (batting at 10 and 11) saw him with a slightly higher average than when he completed his Test career. However, it must be said that a different price may be placed on openers’ runs as opposed to cameos by tail-end-Charlies, no matter how valuable they may be in the short-term scheme of things. Rhodes opened the batting with patience and tenacity. Although only scoring two Test centuries, he made a further 56 hundreds in other first-class matches, proving to be a genuine allrounder and easily one of the best that England has seen.

While Rhodes started as a spinner and developed his batting, Michael Bevan’s Test career for Australia went the other way. Long touted as a long-form batting prospect, Bevan had built a one-day international career on his sublime finishing skills. He failed, however, to fully transfer this to the Test arena. He did, however, take ten wickets in a match, bowling left-arm chinamen against the West Indies in Adelaide in 1997. Unlike Rhodes’, though, Bevan’s re-invention was not entirely to his satisfaction and his Test career unfortunately fizzled out.

The career of Imran Khan, by contrast, kept burning brightly. He started as a genuine fast bowler who could certainly bat. Yet, his batting average from his first 22 Tests was just 23.75 (760 runs in all), hardly a recipe for greatness. The haul from his last 22 tests was a far healthier 1218 runs at an average of 58. An ageing body was partly responsible for this change of emphasis, as was the emergence of Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis as an opening bowling pair. In Abdul Qadir and Mushtaq Ahmed, Pakistan possessed a couple of fine spinners as well, so Imran’s bowling was no longer indispensible.

This, perhaps, illustrates one rule of cricketing re-invention that circumstances make possible and, therefore it follows, at times, they might also render it impossible. To believe success is impossible, however, is to never truly attempt it. Even a prime candidate for the greatest ferret of all time, New Zealand’s one-and-only Chris Martin, is apparently improving what appeared to be a non-existent batting ability. Martin began his Test batting career with 7, an unbeaten 5 and seven ducks in a row split by a nought not out. An average of 2.2 after an initial 10 completed innings, however, is comparatively dwarfed by Martin’s return of 33 runs (at an average of 3.3) from his last few short sojourns to the crease.

Perhaps even more unlikely is Malaysian-born Somerset player Arul Suppiah’s newly-achieved world record for T20 bowling. Previously a right-hand batsman who tweaked the occasional left-arm orthodox deliveries, Suppiah can now boast a best bowling of six wickets for five runs against Glamorgan. His victims included former Test representatives in Robert Croft and Simon Jones. Admittedly, neither of these two can be regarded as front-line batsmen, but such trifling matters are rarely included in the record books. Long may cricketing re-invention continue!