Warnie's final googly !!!

The irresistible Shane Warne has done it again. After getting 708 victims on the field with that mesmerizing mix of flippers, googlies and leg breaks, he has now delivered yet another googly that has left many stumped. And he might have got a few ‘wickets’ in the process as well. His list of Top 50 cricketers (cleverly executed as a daily countdown of 10 each) was bound to raise some eyebrows and, of course, a lot of controversy.

I see no reason why any rankings/ratings/list should generate any controversy. But cricket has a history of having too many such ratings and, not surprisingly, lots of controversies to go along with. Remember the Wisdens top 5 players of the century and how we were shocked at seeing Sachin out ?. Ratings and lists are no more than opinions of either individuals or panels, who are helped by their own vast experiences of playing, commentating or writing about the game and also by the enormous statistics available at their disposal. But finally, they are still opinions and therefore, bound to vary. But in Shane Warne’s case, what is very obvious is that he has allowed ‘non-cricketing’ issues to creep in his judgement of his Top 50. I wonder what Steve Waugh will tell Warne the next time they meet. Waugh at No. 26 cannot be a pure cricketing opinion. Warne defends the rating on two counts: a). Waugh being a match-saver than a match-winner b). he being handed a great time by Mark Taylor. Somehow, I find it hard to buy that. While the second argument might be true, and Taylor also was a better captain that Steve, it was under Steve that the Aussies developed that ruthless streak of winning matches (remember that 16-Test winning streak ?). Therefore, to brand Steve Waugh as a defensive captain is baffling. He might not have been one of the greats entertainers as a batsman and that might be where Warne is coming from. But, all said and done, Waugh at 26 is too hard to digest. And yes, there have been enough theories going around in the past few days to account for that, which I find hard to shun.

Some other Australians also seem to have got the advantage of being part of a great team. Brett Lee ahead of Donald and Pollock seems too biased. So does Darren Lehmann. Six Indians find a place in the 50 (most after Aussies and English), which is testimony to the hard-fought Indo-Aussie rivalry over the past decade or so. But even there, Laxman has reason to feel aggrieved, having tackled Warne with almost as much distinction as Sachin and Lara. And Dilip Vengsarkar, though a very fine player overall, finds a place even though he would have faced Warne in only 2 tests on that 1991-92 tour, where neither performed with much distinction.

Finally, as one of the letters in the English newspapers said, Shane Warne has a right to name his own children, so why not his Top 50 ? All we need to acknowledge that these are no more than opinions of one man and live with the baggage of non-objectivity that comes along with it. Read it, chuckle and forget it rather than spending hours debating on captaincy rifts.

PS: Here is a good article by Tim De Lisle on the selection