New(ish) ICC rankings
Some interesting things to note from the latest ICC rankings:
- The top 3 ODI bowlers are all spinners
- 6 of the top 10 ODI bowlers are spinners
- No Australia or South African batsmen make the top 5 Test batsmen
- The top 2 Test batsmen are both Sri Lankan
- The 5th ranked Test bowler in the world is the forgotten Australian Stuart Clark
From an England point of view James Anderson and Graeme Swann scrape into the top 10 Test bowlers at 9 and 10, and with Stuart Broad at 13 and Graham Onions moving up from nowhere after only a few games, England's Test bowling suddenly seems to look like a decent unit.
Now we just need to get some batsmen into these lists and we could compete! Pietersen and Strauss aren't far off....
3 comments:
I'm a great admirer of Stuart Clark's, but there's sadly no denying that after his elbow injury/operation he has been far from his former, miserly, wicket-taking best self. So I don't know whether 'forgotten' is an entirely accurate description; he's been overlooked/excluded from the Australian XI for a reason.
(Of course, in this week's Sheffield Shield's game, he is, so far, 2-31 ...)
Congratulations on an excellent username bettiwettiwoo!
As an outside observer on Australian cricket, I think things could have been very different for Stuart Clark if Australia had picked him for the first Test of the Ashes and told him he was key to their bowling attack. Instead he's been relegated to a bit part player and his confidence appears to have gone.
The rationale for leaving Clark out of the squad seems to be that he wouldn't play according to this article. The Aussie selectors won't look very clever if a bowler breaks down in the warm up and they have to bring in Clint McKay when they seem to be suggesting that Clark would be the better pick....
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