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The Roar’s editors suggested an interesting challenge for me the other week: to come up with a Test cricket Team of the Decade.
Teams of the Decade are all the rage this month of course, just like Teams of the Century poured out from any possible source this time ten years ago. CricInfo named their Player of Decade – Ricky Ponting – just last week, but are yet to give him ten team-mates.
With a bit of luck, I’ll get my team out first.
So, keen to i) impress the editors, and ii) try and limit myself to a First XI, I took to the challenge with gusto.
Among the first notes I scribbled were “who captains?” and “who ‘keeps?”
Not ten minutes later, I had 33 names. And with 13 or 14 of those names having captained their country at some stage in the last ten years, as well as three wicket-keepers, I was no closer to answering my questions.
Maybe this won’t be as easy as I thought.
The problem with these sorts of discussions and debates (and I’m quite sure there will be debate) is not so much who you pick, but who you left out.
And I can see that is going to be the case here. I mean, pardon the pun, but how’s this lot for openers?
Langer, Hayden, Smith, Strauss, Gibbs, Sehwag, Jayasuriya…
How do you possibly pick just two of them?!
And right there, I’ve just opened myself up to the prospect of objectivity, or even just the perception of it. Is it wrong that the first two openers I’ve named are Australian?
But then again, surely it wouldn’t be unexpected that an Australian, writing for an Australian sports website, might include one or two Australian players?
No, of course it wouldn’t.
Especially when you consider that the decade in question included one complete 16-Test Australian winning streak, and a good chunk of another one. Think of the page reads, Brett, it’ll be fine. Just name the team.
So, a Test cricket team, made up of the best cricketers in the world from 1 January 2000, just after all the Y2K panic fizzled into New Year’s drinks, up until the completion of the 2009 Boxing Day Tests.
How hard can this be?
The openers in contention are already out there, so I might as well knock them out of the way. If I just looked at run aggregates, Matthew Hayden and Graeme Smith are the picks, with Smith a bit over five hundred runs ahead of Justin Langer and, unexpectedly, Chris Gayle.
But it’s just too hard to spilt Hayden and Langer as an opening pair, for mine. As a combination, they run second behind only Greenidge and Haynes in the history of Test cricket as the best pair to ever take on the new ball. They get the nod at the top.
I had a few preconceived ideas about who I wanted in the middle order, to the point where I wasn’t even going to look at the stats. I did eventually, just to confirm my preconceptions, and the top three run aggregates belong to Ricky Ponting, Jacques Kallis, and Rahul Dravid. So in the end, I don’t even need to shift them from that order.
Number 6 in the order is a little more difficult. Mahela Jayawardene, Kumar Sangakkara and Sachin Tendulkar all made within a thousand runs of each other in the ten years, all averaged more than 53, and all made more than 21 Test centuries.
Ultimately, I’ve gone with Sangakkara. In trying to separate the three, I’ve found that of the top fifty scores in the Naughties (from 400no to 222, mind you) Sangakkara has made five of them, against Jayewardene’s four and Tendulkar’s two. Sangakkara also played the least Tests of the three, and what’s more he evens up the number of left- and right-handers in the top six. As a leftie, that sounds fair to me.
Number 7 is probably no surprise. I was kind of joking about wondering who’d ‘keep, and I always assumed it would be Adam Gilchrist. Stats confirm it too; over a thousand runs ahead of Mark Boucher, and 14 more dismissals, though interestingly, Boucher took one more catch. The clincher – if it was ever needed – is that Gilchrist cleared the boundary 99 times in Test cricket over the decade, more than any other player. And really, how could I leave him out?
The bowling wasn’t too difficult in the end either. Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath pick themselves really, and I was pretty happy to let stats determine the last couple of spots.
Muttiah Muralitharan is light years ahead in terms of wickets taken, and so deserves a spot. With Kallis in the side already, and a more than handy seamer in his own right, he allows me to pick a second spinner. Picking Murali does mean McGrath doesn’t bat at No.11 though!
The last spot then, goes to Makhaya Ntini, who took the most wickets in the decade of all the quicks. What did surprise me was that Brett Lee is second on that list, just in front of McGrath. For that, Lee can be the 12th man.
Ricky Ponting is the Captain, and again, that wasn’t too hard a decision from the final eleven.
Notable omissions are obviously Jayawardene, Smith, and Tendulkar as already mentioned. Virender Sehwag would be another, having made three of the top nine scores of the decade. Shaun Pollock was one who I thought might have gone close too.
So there it is, the Team of the Decade done. A team I’d happily pay to watch, too.
But given I’m a selector, I’d like to think I might get a freebie.
The Roar’s Test cricket Team of the Decade: M.Hayden (Aus), J.Langer (Aus), R. Ponting (Aus – Captain), J.Kallis (SA), R.Dravid (Ind), K.Sangakkara (SL), A.Gilchrist (Aus), S.Warne (Aus), G.McGrath (Aus), M.Ntini (SA), M.Muralitharan (SL), B.Lee (Aus – 12th man)