As 2013 comes to a close, what strikes the cricket lover most is how this year will always be remembered as the one which marked the end of an era and the beginning of another. With Jacques Kallis calling it quits a few days back, a log of nearly 43000 Test runs stopped counting, thanks to Sachin Tendulkar and Ricky Ponting who retired before him. That is in addition to Rahul Dravid and Andrew Strauss who stepped down last year, and Michael Hussey (who has quite a few Test runs himself, mind you), Tillakaratne Dilshan and Graeme Swann, all of whom quit Test cricket this year. (Jonathan Trott hasn't really retired, but he's quite on the edge, they say.) And with the Ashes far from over, half the England team are writing their wills too.
All these retirements make me feel old. When was the last time we saw so many cricketers - legends and below - retire together in the same year? There's little doubt that cricket, through the 1990s and beyond the turn of the millennium, saw many a great legend make and break records. When folks like Tendulkar and Kallis were on, records used to fall almost every game. In fact, save for Allan Border, every single batsman in the top 10 run-getters in Test cricket history played beyond the year 2000. Whether that was because teams began playing more Test cricket in recent times or because batsmanship has evolved to attain greater glory, it's hard to tell. But there's little doubt that the likes of Tendulkar, Kallis, Lara, Ponting and Dravid each revolutionized the game in their own little ways. Now if you want to feel a little older than you already do, considering that the New Year is only a few hours away, hear this - none of the top 5 run-scorers in Test history play any longer. And Shiv Chanderpaul is the only man in the top 8 who still plays - even he, clearly, at the twilight of his long and interesting career.
But all this is not to tell a sob story to the world of cricket. To be sure, all those legends of yore have made way to likely legends of tomorrow. Men like Virat Kohli, Alastair Cook (hoping he survives to live a post-Ashes life), Joe Root and Cheteshwar Pujara are looking good to take the game forward, breaking newer barriers and perhaps even surpassing the grand heights that their predecessors had scaled. With batsmanship seemingly getting better with each passing day and T20 cricket adding a new dimension to how younger kids play, the top 5 batsmen we know today might be sitting a little lower tomorrow. There seems a definite sense of inspiration in the present crop of batsmen, taken from the men of old - Pujara from Dravid, Root from Boycott, Cook from Gooch, perhaps everyone from Tendulkar. So there seems a good possibility that the records we know today might well be broken tomorrow - including even Sachin Tendulkar's. After all, one would recall that back in the 1990s, Sunil Gavaskar and Allan Border seemed humanly impossible to surpass!
But what the cricketing world is likely to miss is someone who can score over 13000 Test runs while taking nearly 300 wickets with the ball - something that Jacques Henry Kallis actually managed to do. As Shaun Pollock mentioned during the recent Test match while on air, "You can find very good batsmen and you can find very good bowlers, but rarely can you find both of those in one man." Indeed, Jacques Kallis will be missed now more than anyone else in the game and the jury's out on whether modern day cricket can ever throw up such an extraordinary talent again. In fact, when you talk of Kallis, you're talking of not one legend, but two. And if you count his fielding skills in the slip cordon, make that three. But for all that he's worth, one often gets the feeling that Kallis, partly by his own good conduct as well as the team he was a part of, was downplayed as a great man all through his career. Would Kallis have been hailed as greater than Tendulkar if he were in the Indian team? One wonders.
With Kallis' Test career coming to an end, an era in international cricket has drawn to a close. Through 2012-2013, the world bid farewell to some enormous names and one wonders how many more are left to leave. But this is not all about nostalgia; there's a great deal of excitement in the new batch of cricketers coming through too!
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| Colossus: Kallis marks the end of a great era of batsmen |
But all this is not to tell a sob story to the world of cricket. To be sure, all those legends of yore have made way to likely legends of tomorrow. Men like Virat Kohli, Alastair Cook (hoping he survives to live a post-Ashes life), Joe Root and Cheteshwar Pujara are looking good to take the game forward, breaking newer barriers and perhaps even surpassing the grand heights that their predecessors had scaled. With batsmanship seemingly getting better with each passing day and T20 cricket adding a new dimension to how younger kids play, the top 5 batsmen we know today might be sitting a little lower tomorrow. There seems a definite sense of inspiration in the present crop of batsmen, taken from the men of old - Pujara from Dravid, Root from Boycott, Cook from Gooch, perhaps everyone from Tendulkar. So there seems a good possibility that the records we know today might well be broken tomorrow - including even Sachin Tendulkar's. After all, one would recall that back in the 1990s, Sunil Gavaskar and Allan Border seemed humanly impossible to surpass!
But what the cricketing world is likely to miss is someone who can score over 13000 Test runs while taking nearly 300 wickets with the ball - something that Jacques Henry Kallis actually managed to do. As Shaun Pollock mentioned during the recent Test match while on air, "You can find very good batsmen and you can find very good bowlers, but rarely can you find both of those in one man." Indeed, Jacques Kallis will be missed now more than anyone else in the game and the jury's out on whether modern day cricket can ever throw up such an extraordinary talent again. In fact, when you talk of Kallis, you're talking of not one legend, but two. And if you count his fielding skills in the slip cordon, make that three. But for all that he's worth, one often gets the feeling that Kallis, partly by his own good conduct as well as the team he was a part of, was downplayed as a great man all through his career. Would Kallis have been hailed as greater than Tendulkar if he were in the Indian team? One wonders.
With Kallis' Test career coming to an end, an era in international cricket has drawn to a close. Through 2012-2013, the world bid farewell to some enormous names and one wonders how many more are left to leave. But this is not all about nostalgia; there's a great deal of excitement in the new batch of cricketers coming through too!
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