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The thought of Adam Voges’ batting average sends me into an irrational rage.
I’m sure he’s a nice bloke. I have nothing against him personally. But his announcement yesterday that he is retiring from international cricket means that he ends his career with the second-highest batting average of all time among batsmen who played a minimum of 20 Tests.
Second. Highest. Of. All. Time.
Voges is a fine batsman, I’m not disputing that, and he took his Test opportunity when it was presented to him, something many fine batsmen before him were not able to do. But the fact that he was selected at all, at the age of 35, says far more about the timidity and hopelessness of the Australian selectors in 2015 than it does about his Voges’ footwork.
Voges belongs in the long list of fine Australian batsman who never got their chance at Test level: Michael Bevan, Matthew Elliott, Jimmy Maher, Stuart Law, David Hussey, Martin Love – or any other of Stoffy18’s Unlucky XI.
Instead, Voges ends his career on a list of some of the greatest batsmen of all time, the most elegant, the most exhilarating, the most breathtakingly perfect strokeplayers the game has ever seen. Batsmen you couldn’t help but applaud, even as they were tearing apart your bowling attack.
Immediately underneath Voges on the list of highest averages across at least 20 Tests are Graeme Pollock, George Headley, Herbert Sutcliffe and Steven Smith. Further down the list are Wally Hammond, Sir Garfield Sobers, Kumar Sangakkara, Jack Hobbs, Len Hutton, Jacques Kallis, Greg Chappell, Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara.
Now, ask yourself. Does Voges really belong on this list – let alone at the top?
Sutcliffe and Hobbs are arguably the greatest opening combination of all time, batting together 38 times for England between 1924-1930, during which they scored 3249 runs at an average of 87.81 – by far the highest average of any opening partnership in history.
And they did that on uncovered wickets, without helmets, against bowlers the calibre of Arthur Mailey, Clarrie Grimmett and Jack Gregory.
Pollock is regarded as the finest South African cricketer of all time, a batsman of extraordinary class who would have broken any number of records had his career not been ended at 26 by the anti-apartheid boycotts against South African sporting teams. He scored his maiden first-class century aged just 16 and he remains the youngest South African to score a Test century (against Australia, in 1964), as well as the youngest South African to score a double century in first-class cricket.
Don Bradman described him, along with Sobers, as the best left-handed batsman he had ever seen play cricket.
Hutton is another great English opening batsman, captain between 1952-1955, who still holds the record for the highest individual score by an English batsman in Tests (364 against Australia in 1938). He averaged 56.67 across 138 innings despite the fact his career was interrupted by World War II and a freak wrist injury that forced him to abandon the hook shot entirely. He was so good that Harold Pinter, one of the great English writers of the 20th century, was moved to an essay about him in 1969, called ‘Hutton and the Past’.
Pinter wrote: “Hutton was never dull. His bat was part of his nervous system. His play was sculptured. His forward defensive stroke was a complete statement.”
OK, that might not be a strong statistical argument, but show me the breathless prose about Voges.
Kallis, Lara, Sangakkara and Tendulkar are modern masters, whom many of us have been lucky enough to watch in their prime; no reminder is needed of their extraordinary play. Suffice to say we will still be speaking in hushed reverence about their batting in decades to come – all deserve consideration as the best ever to play for their countries.
Instead, when we look at this list of the greatest batsmen of all time, it will be forever besmirched by Voges. A statistical anomaly. An asterisk inserted in the post-Michael Clarke, post-Shane Watson, post-Brad Haddin confusion.
This list should remind us of audacious strokeplay, of willow flashing in the sunlight, innings that turned a Test series with their belligerence, that displayed impossible skill against world-class opponents – not some bloke who slapped around an appalling West Indian team three times, then scored a double hundred against New Zealand when he should have been out on seven after shouldering arms to a ball that clean bowled him.
The great American actress Bette Davis once said of Joan Crawford, her fierce rival, “You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good… Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”
Adam Voges is retiring. Good.
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