The great debate

Even as Ricky Ponting hangs up his baggy green, and Sachin Tendulkar struggles to accept a seemingly irreversible decline,  heralding the end of one of Test cricket’s greatest generations of batsmen may seem a little premature. After all, age would appear to be having few ill affects on Jacques Kallis. But the ongoing Test series’ featuring India and England, Australia and South Africa, do have a distinct feeling of the changing of the guard about them. Once immortals have become weak links, and with every Ponting poke outside off-stump or Sachin cloth to the man in the deep the realisation that their glittering careers are staggering to a close has become ever more apparent. Thus, now would seem the perfect moment to engage in one of modern cricket’s big debates – of all the wonderful batsmen of the past twenty years or more, who is the greatest?

One of the things which has made Test cricket such a joy to watch over the past generation is the huge variety of styles exhibited by the top batsmen. Compare the enticing majesty of Tendulkar, with Rahul Dravid’s unrelenting determination. Then take Brian Lara’s bludgeoning blade and ability to score the same number of runs in a day than many can muster in months. Finally, contrast that with Ponting’s competitiveness and Kallis’s versatily. The easiest conclusion to reach is that all are legends in their own ways, and leave it at that. But that wouldn’t be much fun on a cold December evening in London.

Pure statistics rarely tell the full story, and it must be said they give us few clues as we seek to differentiate between these six bona fide greats: Tendulkar has the most hundreds; Kallis the best average. Lara has the highest score; Dravid the fewest ducks.What is striking, however, is that they fill the first five slots on the Test runscoring charts. Some might say that this is the result of more Tests being played, and of course that comes into it. But the fitness involved in remaining at world class standard for the best part of 200 Tests, as Tendulkar has done, is an incredible achievement itself. Particularly when you add in all the one-dayers and most recently IPL that the modern cricketer has to fit into their schedule.

Enough fence sitting. Time to establish who the greatest of the great is. To do so I’ll assess each of the five legends mentioned above individually, before coming to a conclusion.

My instincts tell me that Dravid is the best defensive player of the lot - he wasn’t called ‘The Wall’ for nothing, after all. Although his castle was in fact knocked down more times than anybody else in Test cricket, he was more adept at squeezing out runs for India in challenging circumstances than any of his illustrious colleagues, Tendulkar included. The best example of this was the last tour of England where India were woeful but Dravid sublime, in spite of advancing age and a top class bowling attack to cope with. Aggressive strokes are not the enduring image of Dravid, and a possible weakness is that, unlike many of his contemporaries, he was never satisfactorily able to find an extra gear when his team really needed it. A further weakness is his record against the Australians, by far the best team of his era: against them he scored just 2 of his Test hundreds and averaged below 40. But one of those was perhaps his greatest innings - 233 at Adelaide in late 2003 which set up a rare victory for India down under.

Jacques Kallis is often spoken of as perhaps the greatest all-rounder of all time, but by my criteria his place in the batting pantheon is more secure. Not only does he have a phenomenal average, but he’s still going strong, and if anything improving his game. A few years ago, he’d have been very much a junior member of this club, but right now he has a strong case to be at the top of the pile. One by one he’s dismissed almost everything which people used to see as a weakness: the lack of a double-hundred, a perhaps selfish reluctance to expand his game, and a poor record in England. If any nagging doubt remains, it is over the fact that he’s often the supporting member of a partnership rather than the enforcer. Whilst Lara, Ponting and Tendulkar take it upon themselves to take the game away from you, Kallis has often sat at the other end, accumulating centuries in the company of Gary Kirsten, Graeme Smith or Hashim Amla. Compared to the others, defining moments also fail to spring to mind: four hundreds in successive Tests against West Indies was a mighty achievement, but he’s rarely been the only man to score runs at the difficult moments.

So to the man of the moment - Ricky Ponting. Us English have a love/hate relationship with him. The way he was booed to and from the crease in England reflects how he’s respected as a batsman, but also weaknesses of character which perhaps don’t endear him to the neutral. Compared to the unflappable Tendulkar, Dravid or Kallis, Ponting has been involved in his fair share of controversial moments. Who could forget him swearing at Duncan Fletcher about England’s use of substitute fielders after being run out by Gary Pratt at Trent Bridge, or elbowing Mohammad Amir, or wagging his finger at the umpires at the MCG. As a batsman, Ponting was also the most competitive of the quintet: when in full flow, as in his match-saving knock at Old Trafford in 2005, you could see the passion for his team in every perfectly timed hook shot. But he was not without weakness. Early on his innings teams reckoned that he fell across his stumps, and he often did. Its hard to identify such a regular manner of dismissal amongst the others. But he made sure he got in and made it count when it mattered. He’s the only one of the five to have scored a World Cup final century, and he’s made England hurt on the field countless times.

Ask most England players of the last twenty years for their take on the debate and they’ll say Lara. That might have been influenced by time spent watching him compile 775 runs over two innings in 1994 and 2004 - Nasser Hussain was on the field throughout both. But Lara undoubtedly had a destructive quality perhaps absent from any of the other stars of this generations: whilst you feel you can at least contain Kallis, Dravid, and even Ponting and Tendulkar, it would seem there was no way to contain an in form Lara. But he also appeared to be less consistent than the others and in some ways it could be said he cared less. As a captain he wasn’t particularly inspirational or at all successful, and he sometimes gave his wicket away when his team needed him to score tough runs.

The four listed above are all greats, but this writer thinks that one stands out above the rest. Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. Did Tendulkar have any weaknesses? At his best, I’d argue he didn’t, other that perhaps occasionally getting trapped lbw swinging one into his pads early on. He had a majesty about him which made a Tendulkar ton easier on the eye than any of his contemporaries. And then there is the longevity. To play Test cricket for at least 23 years is an incredible achievement in itself - to put that into context England captain, Andrew Strauss, who retired after 100 Tests, did not make his debut until Tendulkar has been playing Tests for the best part of 15 years. But to play Test cricket for that long and average in the mid-50s is simply incredible. He’s also produced countless match-changing contributions - the most memorable was perhaps the to ton he scored to win the Test against England in Chennai four years ago, just weeks after the devastating bombs in his hometown of Mumbai.

Overall, I feel that in their respective primes Tendulkar was harder to contain than Kallis, more composed than Ponting, more dynamic than Dravid and more consistent than Lara. Having said that it would be easy to argue for any one of these, whose names will surely endure like those of Hobbs, Bradman, Hammond and Sobers. As the changing of the guard continues, we should also look to the future: another generation of batsmen are fast producing fantastic figures. But they will have done incredibly well to match the one which is entering its final act.