There's a lovely new list for me to get my teeth into. Cricket lists are my favourite lists (indeed, when I was little, I owned a book called "The Book of Cricket Lists") and I can think of nothing more riveting than dissecting the details of this one;
https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/the-greatest-cricketers-2000-2025-1510638
25. R Ashwin 24. Stuart Broad 23. Kevin Pietersen 22. Virender Sehwag 21. Mahela Jayawardene 20. Pat Cummins 19. Ben Stokes 18. Chris Gayle 17. Mitchell Starc 16. Kane Williamson 15. Jasprit Bumrah 14. MS Dhoni 13. James Anderson 12. Rahul Dravid 11. Adam Gilchrist 10. Steven Smith 9. Joe Root 8. Dale Steyn 7. Kumar Sangakkara 6. AB de Villiers 5. Ricky Ponting 4. Muthiah Muralidaran 3. Virat Kohli 2. Sachin Tendulkar 1. Jacques Kallis
Cricket is a sport in which statistics are so embedded, so revealing, that it is hard to get a list like this wildly wrong, and this list is not wildly wrong, but there are several points of interest and dissent, nevertheless.
As soon as I saw the title "international cricketers" (as opposed to "test cricketers" or just "cricketers"), I knew that Virat Kohli would be very high, and that that would annoy me. In fact, the three successive superstars of Indian cricket, Sachin Tendulkar, MS Dhoni, Virat Kohli, are all, in my opinion, too high in this list. Such is superstardom.
There are seven Indian cricketers, five Australian, five English, three South African, three Sri Lankan, one New Zealander, one West Indian, no Pakistani, no Bangladeshi, Afghan, Zimbabwean, Irish. Such is the balance of power in cricket - power not being exactly the same as success. One might think India have been the most successful team across the three formats over the last 25 years, but, no, it has very clearly been Australia.
And yet, as I will get to, it is an Indian cricketer whose omission from the 25 is, to me, the most unjust - Ravindra Jadeja, probably my favourite 21st century international cricketer.
So, to start with, I'm going to talk a bit about lists in general. One thing I've learnt from making a lot of lists is that the number of items in the list is a statement in itself, and can make or break its integrity.
For example, the recent travesty that was the New York Times' 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters - the number 30 immediately set alarm bells ringing. Why not a classic list number like 10, 25, 50 or 100? 30 is a very specific number that says "it's these 30 and it would be wrong to have any more or any fewer, we haven't been forced into this number, this is the right number we choose" ... but then you leave out an awful lot of people who plenty of people will think is one of the greatest songwriters, be it Kanye West, Tom Waits, Billy Joel, Madonna, Joanna Newsom or Jeff Tweedy, while also putting in a few randoms. So, it was either clever and knowledgeable people being clever and arch, or it was dweebs thinking they were cleverer than they were, and the youtube round table discussion of the jury revealed, of course, the truth of that matter. But, anyway, let the Americans be.
What I've learnt from making lists of greatest songs is that the worst kind of number you can pick when there are just SO MANY SONGS is something large like 500, which would suggest it might contain all the multitudes required, but does not even scratch the surface. I made my ridiculous list of 2022 Songs, but eventually understood that was not close to containing everything people might think a classic. A list of 10,000 songs would not contain everything everyone thought was a classic. You might as well, rather than that, keep a very tight definition of historic greatness, make a big case, and go for 50, 100 ... or 101, I guess.
But, in general, if you are able to have a number where the constituent members are clearly set apart and there is not an entirely valid case for several others to be within that number, that is best. Perhaps the perfect scenario is a slight trailing off at the end, so a reader might go "aah, i can see that eg 47,48,49, and 50 are all less good than, say, 41 and 42, which are not much less good than eg, 31 and 32."
Another major pitfall of compiling lists is not making your criteria and your parameters clear.
So, in the case of this list of Greatest 21st Century Men's International Cricketers, it gradually dawned on me, as they unveiled the list on the website over the course of a couple of weeks, that the criteria and parameters were such that a handful of the greatest cricketers of all time, who played not a negligible amount of international cricket in the 21st century, would not be included. Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath. Brian Lara.
While some of the greatest cricketers of all time, who played not a negligible amount of international cricket in the 20th century, would. Sachin Tendulkar. Mutiah Muralitharan. Jacques Kallis.
Maybe it's just me, but if you're going to leave Shane Warne off a list of great cricketers, I'm a little surprised you're not saying you're doing that right at the start, just for clarity. Warne took more than 350 test wickets in the 21st century, McGrath 300, Brian Lara scored 6000+ runs at an average of 54. They belong, in at least some sense, to the category of 21st century cricketers, so I'd have thought laying out the reasons for saying they're not among the 25 best would be top of the list for the list not feeling a bit off.
Having looked for but not found the explicit way this decision was made, I'd say there are two likelihoods, both of which are fair enough in and of themselves, for who they have and haven't included. 1) they considered everyone but only for their international play from 2000 onward - as if the years they played before that simply didn't exist. 2) they only considered players at all if more than half of their international career was from 2000 onwards. That applies to Tendulkar, Murali, Kallis, but not Warne, McGrath, Lara. So, ok, both make sense ... it seems more likely they did the former as when writing about Tendulkar, they gave his stats from 2000 onwards, rather than his whole-career stats. But there's a big problem with that, really. Tendulkar being the Number 2 player of the 21st century (and judged the best batsman) - magnificent as he is, it doesn't hold up in and of itself. Others have scored more at a higher or comparable average, captained better, won more. Sachin is one of the great batters, but what lifts him above peers is not average (great, but so are others), not style (beautiful, but so are others), certainly not number of defining backs-to-the-wall knocks (actually, arguably, fewer than some others), it is sheer volume and longevity. But if we're not considering the whole volume, no, I do not put him above Smith, Dravid, Sangakkara, Williamson, Root, Ponting in the 21st century.
And is it really right to leave Warne and McGrath out even if you are just considering the 21st century? No, absolutely not. They were the dominant figures in the most dominant era in the history of test cricket - 7 years of their greatness from 2000 to 2006, when Australia crushed almost all in front of them, was quite enough greatness to make the list. I mean, come on, it feels like a swizz, whatever the criteria.
The list attempts a tricky feat by being about "international cricket" - the three forms - test cricket, ODI and T20I, the latter of which has becoming increasingly prevalent as entertainment and money-spinner in the past 15 years, more at the cost, in some ways, of ODI than tests. It's tricky for various reasons - firstly because of how much weight to assign to each of the three forms. Most still consider tests by far the highest and truest test of greatness, but the gaps are narrowing.
Most of the great cricketers on this list are great in all the forms (while some played the majority of their careers before T20 was quite so widespread), but there is a handful whose placing is more due to white-ball greatness than test greatness. Those would be Chris Gayle, MS Dhoni, AB De Villiers and Virat Kohli. De Villiers was also a great test batter, but I don't think he'd be as high as Number 5 if he wasn't also one of the greatest white-ball batters. Chris Gayle's inclusion is understandable, but rankles a little. Dhoni, I think, is a little high. A superstar, a very good keeper-batsman in tests but not averaging over 40, a very good captain who led India to the 2011 World Cup and transformed their test team, a truly great white-ball finisher. But, I don't know - 4876 runs at 38 in tests ... there are players he's above that he should not be above.
And then, there's Kohli, Kohli at 3 in the list. Kohli is (vynig with De Villiers) the greatest white-ball batter in history, I don't dispute that. He was also a good captain for India, though he didn't quite lead them to the summit as was hoped. He neither led them to the World Test Championship (though they were the Number 1 team in the world for quite a while) or to either a 50-over or 20-over World Cup. But, and I really think it is a more significant than people allow, he failed in test cricket in a way that almost no one else on the list has done. Test cricket ended up defeating him. He started slowly, had a few years of utter magnificence, then lost his form and did not completely regain it. He finished his test career with 9000 runs at 47. There was so much talk of the fab four batters for years (Kohli, Smith, Williamson, Root) but, ultimately, in tests, Kohli is Andy Murray compared to the other three. They've got way more runs, way higher average. Kohli may only be the 20th greatest test batter of the century.
One player with a much better test record than Virat Kohli, who does not make the Top 25, is Pakistan's Younis Khan - 10,000 runs at 52. There are no Pakistani players on the list, not one. I'm not saying, apart from Younis, that there necessarily should be, based on statistics. Pakistan cricket has had a long period of decline, only occasionally arrested by brilliance. Without going into all the reasons for that, it's interesting to think of a possible make-up of a list of 25 Greatest International Cricketers 1975-1999. Now, for those years, International Cricketers really were almost entirely defined by their test record, so in some ways the list is easier to make:
Without too much thought, and not in order, it would be somethiing like:
Viv Richards, Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, Sunil Gavaskar, Waqar Younis, Allan Border, Richard Hadlee, Clive Lloyd, Malcolm Marshall, Curtley Ambrose, Kapil Dev, Ian Botham, Brian Lara, Sachin Tendulkar, Javed Miandad, Steve Waugh, Sanath Jayasuriya, Dennis Lillee, Greg Chappell, Michael Holding, Joel Garner, Courtney Walsh, Warne, McGrath, Allan Donald - (on the edge possibly Gower, Gooch, Chris Cairns, Rodney Marsh, Greenidge, Willis, Kumble, Inzamam ...)
so clearly there are fewer Indian players, fewer English, a lot more West Indian, more Pakistani. This is, sadly, where money has talked in cricket. Look at all those great West Indians ...
Another thing to note is that the late 1900s are seen as the age of the all-rounders, and there are not many all-rounders on Cricinfo's 2020s list - there we had Imran, Hadlee, Kapil Dev, Botham, not to mention Wasim, Marshall, the likes of Waugh, Border, Richards, Jayasuriya:
Here there is Kallis, one of two great batting-allrounders in the history of test cricket, and then Stokes as really the only classic all-rounder (with a few like Root, Sachin, Ashwin, Gayle, Starc who are pretty good at the other thing but not all-rounders).
Now this is, I would say, a significant point of dissent for me. The all-rounders have not been fairly served on this list, nor, as it happens, the left-armers. I'm not saying all these should be in the Top 25, but here are some fine 21st century all-round cricketers - Andrew Flintoff, Daniel Vettori, Shakib Al-Hasan, Chaminda Vaas, Jason Holder, Shaun Pollock, Ravindra Jadeja.
I would have considered Shakib Al-Hasan, Bangladesh's best batter and bowler across three formats for a long time, someone, who for all his faults, carried a relatively new international nation to the position they're now at, of solid competitiveness. I would certainly have considered Shaun Pollock, who probably suffers from his career spanning the millennium, but nevertheless a very forgotten and underrated cricketer, with 3500+ test runs at 32 and 400+ test wickets at 23. Pollock was an unspectacularly magnificent cricketer, perhaps in the shade of Kallis and of Donald then Steyn.
Above all, the absence of Jadeja is a serious oversight. Jadeja has always been an underrated cricketer. It is always "he is a canny cricketer" "he is a useful asset" etc whereas the statistics say he is, in fact, one of the greatest cricketers of all time. No one described Imran Khan as merely "a useful asset" and yet Imran is the only all-rounder with a comparable statistical record to Jadeja. Imran - 88 tests, 3807 runs at 37.7, 362 wickets at 22.8. Jadeja - 89 tests, 4095 runs at 38.3, 348 wickets at 25.1. Uncannily similar, and a better all-round ratio than Botham, Kapil, Ashwin, Pollock, Hadlee, Stokes, Flintoff, than almost any other bowling all-rounder in history, in fact.
Put it this way, if someone who had never watched cricket nor engaged in cricket discourse but understood statistics were to look at each player's statistical record in tests from the 21st century, Jadeja would be placed in the Top 5 players without question.
He suffers for being a left-arm spinner and an unspectacular one. Likewise he is an unspectacular batter (ironically, he is a spectacular fielder, probably the finest outfielder of the era).
But, in general, I think the list ill serves all-rounders, and perhaps favours batters over bowlers. Another fairly rank omission is Kagiso Rabada, the magnificent South African paceman who has the best strike rate of ANYONE with over 200 test wickets, and who drove a South African team who had pretty much given up on test cricket a few years ago to winning the World Test Championship. The inclusion of Kevin Pietersen, in particular (whatever his impact), over Rabada feels pointedly off.
What else? It is a mistake to conflate statistics across the three forms of the game. Classic test match statistics are one thing. They do not tell the whole truth, but they tell most of the whole truth. ODI and particularly T20 statistics are a very different matter. It's like, in football, when goals and assists are put together as "Goal contributions" and that's meant to tell the whole story of a player.
In T20, a player can lose his team a game with a knock of say, 60* in 40 balls, and a player can win his team a game with a quick 20 or with one over at a crucial time which, say, only goes for 8. Also, the reality is - every test match still matters. With ODI and T20i, most of it doesn't really matter in and of itself - most of it is glorified practice building for the tournaments. The numbers work in a different way.
I could go on and on but I think I've said most of what I wanted to say. I've been thinking about the best way to have solved the conundrum of who to include. I think having Murali but not Warne, having Tendulkar but not Lara, whatever the rationale, is a cut too severe. But I also think it would have been too silly to place Warne at, say, 17 on the list, based purely on his 21st century performance.
So, I'm going to do my own list and my criteria will be "Anyone who played at least five years/took 200+ test wickets/scored 5000+ runs in the 21st century, but once they're included, counting their whole international career ...
And, going back to an earlier point, I think 25 was too few, by any measure. There are too many players who have as much justification for being there as some of those included.
Apparently, the list was whittled down from a longer list by a combination of votes from great ex-cricketers and and the Cricinfo editors. I mean, they always are - it's always a bit of voting and a bit of tweaking to suit the agenda. It's not a bad list, it is, as I said, hard to get something like this wildly wrong, and it really depends how much weight you ascribe to white-ball vs red-ball, batting vs bowling, all-round ability, moments vs consistency, being a captain, being a keeper, etc,
but, taking into account that listing the greatest cricketers excludes many of who would be the most valuable cricketers in the modern world, where T20 is everything (Maxwell, Pollard, Suryakumar Yadav, Klaasen etc)
and, admitting that even whittling it down to 50 has been harder than I thought ...
this would be my
50 Greatest 21st Century Men's International Cricketers
OK, actually, before I start, I'm going to mention one other player who doesn't meet the benchmark because he stopped playing tests in 2003, but he's a great of modern cricket. Let's call him ... the 51st Great ... there are no Zimbabweans in the list, but Zimbabwe's greatest player is Andy Flower. First of all, he averaged 51.5, which is more than all the other great keeper-batters. Secondly, he has gone on to be one of the great coaches - leading England to 1 in the world and their first major tournament, winning the IPL more than once etc. Thirdly, his protest at the 2003 World Cup with Henry Olonga was a truly brave and powerful thing, It finished his career, cast him out of his home country, and could have resulted in worse for him. So, he is a notably great 21st century cricketer.
So, saying that, ...
50. Andrew Flintoff (England) Well, obviously, some personal bias will come into my list. Some idea of what I personally thinks constitutes greatness. So I include Flintoff at 50, whereas one should really have found a place for the Australian David Warner, a battering ram across three formats, but all the demerit points he gets, you know .... and, as for Flintoff, I was thinking "well, it's not a about stats with him", and then I looked at his test record again, and it still looks like the record of a very substantial cricketer, even with the slow start and the years of injury. He was the best cricketer in the world for a couple of years, and he changed the whole direction of cricket for a while, so I think he earnes his place.
49. Mitchell Johnson (Australia) I include the likeable Johnson, who had a spat with the unlikeable Warner. Similar to Flintoff, didn't quite have the career he might have had, but was the best player in the world for a while.
48. Misbah-ul-Haq (Pakistan) Rather like Andy Flower, a substantial moral figure in cricket. Having been ignored by Pakistan in tests for most of his career, he was brought in as the one good incorruptible man in his late 30s to sort the whole sorry business out after the matchfixing scandal of 2010. He became Pakistan's most successful test captain, while also having a top-class test batting career into his 40s. While the 2000s are generally seen as a time of decline in Pakistan cricket, Misbah briefly got them back to Number 1 in the world.
47. Chaminda Vaas (Sri Lanka)
46. Daniel Vettori (New Zealand)
45. Mohammad Yousuf (Pakistan)
44. Nathan Lyon (Australia) No Shane Warne, but it may surprise people when Lyon calls it a day that their records end up being not all that dissimilar.
43. Inzamam-ul-Haq (Pakistan)
42. Chris Gayle (West Indies) The biggest drop from the Cricinfo list, just not a cricketer I liked. Not really fair to him, it felt at the time like he was undermining test cricket in a way that countless people have done since. Mega-talented, applied most of that talent to white ball cricket.
41. Jason Holder (West Indies) Whereas Holder made the best attempt anyone's made to take West Indies cricket on his broad shoulders and arrest the decline. Really a fine cricketer, making big money in the franchises now, but one can't begrudge him.
40. Kevin Pietersen (England) Again, perhaps a bit lower than he ought to be, as he really affected cricket in a big way, but, you know, this guy ...
39. Alastair Cook (England) I don't love this guy either, but I'd place him above Pietersen for a few reasons and 4000 test runs.
38. Mahela Jayawardene (Sri Lanka)
37. Rohit Sharma (India) One of the all-time great white-ball batters, and a good captain.
36. Anil Kumble (India)
35. Matthew Hayden (Australia)
34. Michael Clarke (Australia)
33. Shivnarine Chanderpaul (West Indies)
32. Graeme Smith (South Africa) Now a bit underrated, I think, and could be higher. Has more wins as a captain than anyone else in test cricket history. Has an average of 48 as an opener. Never scored an aethetically pleasing run, though.
31. Mitchell Starc (Australia)
30. MS Dhoni (India)
29. Rashid Khan (Afghanistan) All formats, close to being the best bowler in the world over the last decade. And, obviously, has had a huge impact on the game.
28. Younis Khan (Pakistan)
27. Shakib Al Hasan (Bangladesh)
26. Ben Stokes (England) The vicissitudes of form, fate and the public mood mean Stokes might well have been 10 places higher at the end of last summer, and might be again if he has a great summer in 2026. But, right now, it feels like he's not quite everything like people always thought. Not quite. Tough gig.
25. Stuart Broad (England)
24. Adam Gilchrist (Australia)
23. Kagiso Rabada (South Africa)
22. Jasprit Bumrah (India)
21. Virender Sehwag (India)
20. Pat Cummins (Australia)
19. Ravichandran Ashwin (India)
18. Shaun Pollock (South Africa)
17. Rahul Dravid (India)
16. AB De Villiers (South Africa)
15. Dale Steyn (South Africa)
14. Virat Kohli (India)
13. Brian Lara (West Indies) In the same way as Warne is somehow just the best bowler, the true wizard, even though the numbers don't quite back that up, Lara is, for me, the true batting wizard - the most magical, the most brilliant, the one with the highest ceiling. But he didn't achieve everything Warne achieved in the game, so I can't put him too high.
12. Ravindra Jadeja (India)
11. James Anderson (England) Putting Anderson above Steyn is a tricky one, but correct. Seen as the two top seam bowlers for a while, Steyn had a substantially better record than Anderson whilst they were in sync, but, the point is, the second half of Anderson's career was as good as the whole of Steyn's career. 400 wickets at 23. So even though Anderson ends with the higher average overall, he had a whole equivalent era of being as effective a bowler as Steyn, not to mention another era as a very good but slightly less effective bowler.
10. Steve Smith (Australia)
9. Joe Root (England) I do put Root just above Smith though Smith has an average a fair bit higher because a) volume b) most catches in tests c) better bowler d) 51 for England when no one else has got above 48 for England in 50 years ...
8. Glenn McGrath (Australia)
7. Ricky Ponting (Australia)
6. Kane Williamson (New Zealand) I think Williamson is substantially too low in the Cricinfo list. As good a batter as Smith, and one of the best test captains, who captained the smallest test nation to the first WTC, to a World Cup final they really deserved to win. So great you barely even notice him.
5. Kumar Sangakkara (Sri Lanka)
4. Sachin Tendulkar (India)
3. Muttiah Muralitharan (Sri Lanka)
2. Shane Warne (Australia) Still, though Murali took more wickets at a better rate, that certain something makes Warne the greater cricketer. Maybe it's just that he was a much better batter. But, you know, also, it's just Shane Warne.
1. Jacques Kallis (South Africa) Without question.
There are a handful of others who also really merit a place in the Top 50 - you're never going to get the number just right. Anyway, this has been a highly WORTHWHILE EXERCISE for me, so there we go.
