The greatest ODI XI of all time

#2 Hashim Amla:

The mighty Hash – Beard like Grace, bats with grace.

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A contemporary great, Amla’s selection will raise a few eyebrows among readers. Firstly, he has just played 137 ODI innings and never seem to be in the limelight. He calmly goes on about doing his job which is to score runs, and he has scored a truckload of them.

Mat	Inns	NO	Runs	HS	Ave	BF	SR	100	50	4s	6s
137	134	10	6445	159	51.97	7238	89.04	23	30	646	41

Amla is a classy player, great timer of the ball, a wristy player who is pleasing on the eye and seldom slogs the ball which makes him a purist’s delight. When he made his test debut in 2004, not many would have backed him to become the ODI player that he is today, mainly because of his playing style which is text-book style orthodox.

Amla has the best stats for opening batsmen who have opened in 50 innings, as shown in the table below. His career batting average is close to 52 and the most astounding piece of stat associated with Amla is his strike rate of 89. To shed some light on that, Chris Gayle and Matthew Hayden who are perceived to be destructive openers have a strike rate of 86 and 79 respectively.

Player	Inns	Runs	Average	SR	100s	Inngs Per 100
Hashim Amla	120	5978	53.37	89.73	21	5.71
Rohit Sharma	59	2771	52.28	88.10	7	8.43
Sachin Tendulkar	340	15,310	48.29	88.05	45	7.56
Tillakaratne Dilshan	173	7293	46.45	89.29	21	8.24
Brian Lara	52	2166	46.08	74.71	5	10.40

Viv Richards had set the records for fastest to 3000, 4000, 5000 and 6000 runs in ODI cricket. AB De Villiers broke a few of those and then came Kohli who eclipsed Richards’s achievements. However, Hashim Amla has rewritten every single record. Now he holds the record for the fastest to reach multiples of 1000 ODI runs (2000 – 6000) runs.

He has scored 23 ODI centuries in just 134 innings. One innings which aptly summarizes Amla’s ODI career is the 153* he scored against the West Indies at the Wanderers, a match more vividly remembered for AB’s blitzkrieg of 149(44). He never seems to be the main man, but inexorably he makes tonnes of runs.

Contenders: Adam Gilchrist, Virender Sehwag, Sanath Jayasuriya, Chris Gayle and Mathew Hayden.