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To celebrate their 150th anniversary, Wisden Cricketer’s Almanac has selected an all-time cricket XI. Here is the team:
WG Grace (England)
Jack Hobbs (England)
Don Bradman (Australia)
Sachin Tendulkar (India)
Viv Richards (West Indies)
Gary Sobers (West Indies)
Alan Knott (England) (wkt)
Wasim Akram (Pakistan)
Shane Warne (Australia)
Malcom Marshall (West Indies)
Sydney Barnes (England)
I had two immediate thoughts on the selections:
1. It is a mighty fine team. Mighty fine indeed. Whether it is really, really the best XI is open to keen debate. But it’s a grand team all the same.
2. It is also politically correct, the players having appeared in almost every decade between them and coming from five of the traditional eight cricket playing nations.
So I have no problems with the selections overall, although I might quibble about two or three of them here or there.
It would take a mighty good team to beat them, so then I thought, if this is the best XI of cricket over 150 years of Wisden, what might be the next best XI?
This is what I came up with:
Sunil Gavaskar (India)
Barry Richards (South Africa)
George Headley (West Indies)
Wally Hammond (England)
Graeme Pollock (South Africa)
Jacques Kallis (South Africa)
Adam Gilchrist (Australia) (wkt)
Imran Khan (Pakistan)
Richard Hadlee (New Zealand)
Dennis Lillee (Australia)
Mutiah Muralitharan (Sri Lanka)
But we have just scratched the surface here. No room for Hutton and Sutcliffe of England: or the three W’s – Walcott, Weekes and Worrell – of the West Indies; no Ponting, or Chappell, or Border, or Waugh from Australia.
No modern masters like Lara or West Indies or Sangakkara of Sri Lanka; no Ambrose or Garner from West Indies, or McGrath, Miller, Lindwall and Davidson from Australia; no Larwood or Trueman from England.
None of the Indian spin quartet from the 60/70s – Bedi, Chandrasekhar, Prasanna or Venkataraghaven; no Gibbs of West Indies, or Taylforth of South Africa, or Laker and Rhodes of England, or an Australian spin quartet of Benaud, Grimmett. O’Reilly and Trumble.
And many, many more.
It would be cricket heaven to witness these 22 cricketers face off against each other, all of them in their prime. What a mighty contest it would be, whether they played a five day Test or a 50 overs one day international.
What do other cricket fans out there think of Wisden’s 150th anniversary cricket XI?
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