Apples and Oranges

All things cricketing can not be put into small and neat little boxes. And to try to reduce this grand, dynamic, complex, pulsating and thrilling game of ours to convenient and trite little order and into lists is doomed for failure. Let us see one of the latest attempts to contain this rampaging river in a coffee mug – the Woodcock 100.

Different people approach issues differently. The people who go about trying to rank players do that in one of two manners:

Selective Memory Crystal Ball approach
Calculator Rhapsody approach


Selective Memory Crystal Ball Approach:

Some of these above mentioned people go about their task in a qualitative way – based on sheer opinions and without (m)any facts to disturb their daydreams or their contentions. John Woodcock, the noted scribe just did such an exercise for the Times in a series of articles to come up with the greatest hundred cricketers of all time. The list seems to fulfill the rampaging rage of his to prove all cricketers English to be superior to everyone else, save a Warne perhaps.

You see memory is a trusty old ally. It helps you reminisce. It lets you remember your first test match and in glorious detail lets you savor the heroics of your favorite cricketer in full techni-color. You can see at sixty, in your mind’s eye the steely wrists of a Cowdrey placing the ball meticulously with that short-arm punch shot of his. It is divine … but … but you see the devil is in your memory too. For a lot of what you remember is all the good stuff. A phenomenon called selective recall - the same thing that lets you remember the mole on your old love’s cheek yet totally suppress the memory of the ingenue-noir who dissuaded your advances with such aplomb. You may be fond of a cricketer; he may have scored a hundred at an impressionable age in front of you that you thought was the greatest innings ever played. His legend took root in your head at that time and by all subsequent significant innings, imagined or otherwise, kept growing and growing and eventually became a torrent. You could not conceive of that cricketer having any peers let alone any superiors in the art of cricket. "Who Dat?" You would say, if anyone mentioned another in the same breath as your god, this titan of batsmanship. The reality might have been less kind. The century – that grand innings- you don’t remember was against the most mediocre of bowlers on the fourth day of a test match when everything was decided. The pitch was like the neighbor’s dog: toothless and pliant. In your selective memory drama you had attributed tens of more fours than the batsman ever did strike and then you do not remember the catches that were dropped. The opposition had one and half bowlers and the one was injured. When reminded of all these things, your answer is understandably symptomatic – no way, I saw it myself. The power of your mind is the greatest power on earth. For if it can invent omnipotent gods on cue, then elevation of mere mortals, unimpeded, should be trivial. Thus, anyone can make any list or come up with any conclusion he wants – it is his prerogative.

Calculator Rhapsody Approach:

Meanwhile, there are others who arm themselves with selective statistics that are sympathetic to their theses and try to justify other anomalies, according to them, in the rest’s thinking. Being an engineer by training, far be it for me to try to go against people who deal in numbers and in numbers only but, and this is a big but, anything can be proven with statistics that tell only part of the story.

You see all the numbers in the world can not describe the drama of a battle in the war of the batsmen versus the bowlers. Imagine a fast bowler coming in to bowl after the batsman has just hit his last ball for four and has this butcher-smirk on his face while facing the next ball. The bowler comes in from a longish start, takes his final stride and goes into his motion to bowl a perfect outswinger. This ball at a good pace is bowled from close to the stumps on the off-stick and tempts Mr. Four-hitter to have a go at it again. But being the old pro that he is, he plays the perfect forward defensive shot. The ball is pitched just short of a length and inspite of the foot down the wicket and properly across, the arc of the swing that is in its infancy takes the whisper of an edge from his Duncan Fearnley and sails majestically towards the first slip fielder. The first slip that was just moved a yard up from the previous ball dives to the right and gobbles the ball with hands that are quicker than mercury but softer than dew on rosepetals. Would the score card reading the following dismissal line do justice to the stanza that was played?
Butcher Van Smirk c Buckets b Hurler 4

I do not think so. I can not find any average that will do justice to that or of an infinite other moments that happen as a natural course of action in cricket matches. Nor do numbers calculate the hearts of players, neither their desires. I have the same problem with all these ratings that have become quite the vogue nowadays. Coopers and Lybrands, Wisden, CEAT, onandonandon. What do they all matter? They mean as much as a mole on the back of an ant. The idea that your local accountant is the best judge of cricket and cricketers is the same as that of a window-washer being the most suitable candidate to be the head of the Architectural Commission.

More on Selective Memory Crystal Ball Approach:

Getting back to the darts in the dark. John Woodcock, utilizing the eight blind men and an elephant approach, came up with the following list of the top 100 cricketers of all time. He could not let this be the top hundred cricketers in alphabetic order but he magnified his endeavor in arranging all these cricketers in a neat little order of merit, to boot. To understand the task, imagine a list of all your loved ones, how would you rank them? Or consider the task of ranking in precise detail all the authors (you may or may not have read them) that have ever lived? Or of all the masters of the paintbrush? All sculptors? All scientists? How do you ever try to rank them? Why would you ever try? For what? How could you ever decide between a Matisse and a Chagall?

The intent of the exercise seems to be to do some sort of exorcism of demons. Is England so bad a cricket team nowadays that all the purveyors of the game have to find justifications of the past glories and buttress their unnecessary haughty attitude? Surely these are the shadows of a malaise that is far more pervasive, and not only in cricket, than heretofore thought. Next comes the list. Perhaps this list is for the express usage of a rank novice. One who had never seen cricket, so that he can know in seconds (the time it takes to read a list of 100 people – in order no less) all there is to know about cricket or has ever been in its two-hundred year history. How cute and how utterly bombastic and egotistical. Let us first see the so-called gem in its entirety and then we will try to make sense of it.

The Woodcock 100

100. J.R.Reid

99. P.A. De Silva

98. S.J. McCabe

97. A.A. Donald

96. H.W.Taylor

95. S.R. Waugh

94. J.M. Gregory

93. H. Larwood

92. M. H. Mankad

91. W.W. Hall

90. L. Gibbs

89. S.T. Ramadhin

88. D.L. Underwood

87. W.W. Armstrong

86. R.G.D. Willis

85. F.S. Jackson

84. Hanif Mohammad

83. W.H. Ponsford

82. Fazal Mahmood

81. C.E.L. Ambrose

80. R.B. Simpson

79. C.G.McCartney

78. V.A.P.Van Der Bijl

77. J.B. Statham

76. A. Shaw

75. G.L. Jessop

74. A.C. McLaren

73. C.T.B. Turner

72. D. Gower

71. Waqar Younis

70. J.C. Laker

69. M.D. Marshall

68. C.V. Grimmett

67. C.H. Lloyd

66. L. Constantine

65. M.A. Holding

64. T.G. Evans

63. A.G. Steele

62. G. Boycott

61. J. Small

60. Wasim Akram

59. I Chappell

58. Javed Miandad

57. K.F. Barrington

56. A.K. Davidson

55. A.P.E. Knott

54. C.B. Fry

53. G.A. Gooch

52. R.B. Kanhai

51. R.H. Harvey

50. B.S. Bedi

49. Kapil Dev

48. M.C. Cowdrey

47. T. Richrdson

46. H.J. Tayfield

45. F.S. Trueman

44. G.S Chappell

43. M.J. Proctor

42. H. Sutcliffe

41. G.H. Hirst

40. G. Lohmann

39. W. Beldham

38. C.L. Walcott

37. A.R. Border

36. F.W. Worrell

35. K.S. Ranjitsinhji

34. W. Rhodes

33. P.B.H. May

32. F.R. Spofforth

31. A. Shrewsbury

30. R.G. Pollock

29. R.J. Hadlee

28. B.C. Lara

27. E. de C Weekes

26. W.J. O’Reilly

25. S.R. Tendulkar

24. E.R. Dexter

23. S.M. Gavaskar

22. R.R. Lindwall

21. G.A. Headley

20. A. Bedser

19. D.K. Lillee

18. R. Benaud

17. K. Miller

16. Imran Khan

15. B.A. Richards

14. V. Trumper

13. S. Warne

12. F. Woolley

11. L. Hutton

10. D. Compton

9. I.T. Botham

8. I. V. A. Richards

7. W. Hammond

6. S.F. Barnes

5. J. B. Hobbs

4. A. Mynn

3. G. S. Sobers

2. D.G. Bradman

1. W.G. Grace


With bats, stumps and bails made of wood a cricket lover could always ask the following question: How much wood would a woodcock chuck if a woodcock would chuck wood? There is a whole bunch of woodchucking going on here. This list is as pure a bunch of hokum as you will ever see. Even if there were no name attached to this list, I would have deemed the author a couple of biscuits short of a picnic.

Since I am writing for a pre-dominantly Pakistani audience I will use Pakistani cricketers for comparison but you could just as well use West Indians or Indians or to a lesser extent Australians or South Africans in their places. You might as well have put all the names in a random number generator and put the weightings in this manner as to the people’s relative ranking versus reality: England 10, Australia, 7, South Africa 6, West Indies 5, India, 4, Pakistan 2, Rest 1. You’d be surprised at actually how close you would come to this list.

Seven count them, seven Englishmen in the top TEN. W.G. Grace with his 32.1 average and 1098 runs as the greatest cricketer of all time. Is Alec Bedser 40 spots better than Wasim Akram or, better yet, 51 spots better than Waqar Younis? Is Frank Woolley or even Ian Botham a better all-rounder than Imran Khan is? Is Shane Warne with his 253 wickets at 24.5, 47 places better than Wasim Akram with 311 @22.68 and a test 257*? I know a number of the members of the press certainly go overboard in their liking of certain players and try to make them appear better than they are. This is more so if the player is from England or Australia because of the sheer press coverage. The perfect example in today’s game is Shane Warne. He is a fantastic cricketer no doubt, but he is sort of a manufactured cricketer in a lot of ways too. What with Nike and IMG and any number of beer companies trying to have their marketing departments doing their level best for our hero, he has to come out looking like the greatest thing since sliced bread. I like my bread too much to agree in this or many other cases like Shaquille O’ Neil’s and Michael Johnson’s in basketball and track respectively.

Now anyone who just believes the hype of any cricketer without grounding this in reality is going to be astray. I could go on and on about the list. Miandad at 58 is 48 places adrift of Compton. Is Barry Richards with a pound of first class runs better than Zaheer who has a ton of test runs and a ton more of better first class runs than Barry but is not even in the 100? What did Salim Malik do to deserve being left out of the 100 when people like Alfred Mynn with no records could make it? Majid, Mushtaq and Asif seemed fairly good cricketers to us but are not worthy – AG Steel makes it above both Fazal and Hanif – that is very comforting. Apparently One-Day cricket does not exist and people like Saeed Anwar and Inzamam do not matter. The list could have been totally reversed and Mr. Woodcock could still justly have defended it based on "qualitative" factors.

A thousand people could make the "reminisce" list of the top hundred cricketers of all time and there may be a thousand different outcomes. That is not to throw up the hands and give the task up for impossible but to state that the task is froth with danger and injustice if done in this manner.

The thing that gets left out of all of this bellyaching is the number of great players. All these players, some that are on the list and many that are not, that it has been our privilege to have seen play and the amount of joy that they have given us by their poetry on cricketing fields all over the world – whatever their imaginary rank may be. How can you put into numbers the pride and fighting spirit displayed by a Javed Miandad every time he stepped onto the field? How could you ever hope to rank the majesty that was Majid tearing pace attacks to smithereens? How would you confine the sheer brilliance of a Richards to a number? Why wouldn’t Bradman rank ahead of all other batsmen? How can you rank Imran behind any other all-rounder in history? Indeed, why wouldn’t you rank the best all-rounders ahead of most pure batsmen or bowlers? On and on and on we can go, but isn’t that the greatest gift and indeed the charm of the game. Lists like these detract us from celebrating all the players who play (ed) this wondrous game. A game that is so elusive yet crystal clear.