Year in Review: Flop ODI XI of year 2013

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and not reflective of the website as a whole.

Newton’s third law states- ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction’. Gary Zukav expounded the theory further by stating, ‘You receive from the world what you give to the world’.

Both of them couldn’t have been more accurate in their summation, especially when it comes to some of the most spine-chillingly numb performances that we witnessed this year.

For every good and deserving performance in 2013, there were counter-performances bordering on mediocrity and haplessness. So, for every Virat Kohli century, there was a Kamran Akmal etching out painstaking zeroes; for every pace bowler trying to keep the art alive, there was an Ishant Sharma proliferating runs for an Australian lower-order batsman; and for every Misbah innings that saved his team from a certain disaster, there was a Matthew Wade imploding his way into obscurity.

Going by Zukav’s theory, it then also gives us the right to ridicule and give them back on the basis of the cricketing rubbish that was dished to us. On that note, I thought I would create a list of such super-human performances and make the best out them – a flop ODI XI of the year. The minimum criteria for a player to be selected is to have played at least 7 ODIs in the calendar year and to have produced at least one performance which single-handedly led to his team’s devastation.

Also, players are picked spot-wise in the team, so even though there were 3 pathetically gruesome openers this year, we could select only two (really a pity). And like every time, the more known a player is, the more chances of him being featured here.

Here we go then.

1) Chris Gayle

Chris Gayle

(Matches – 16, Runs – 311, Average – 19.43, HS – 109, 100s – 1, 50s – 0)

For all the sixes that he hit in the IPL for his beloved RCB, his performances for West Indies were not exactly the over-abundantly clichéd and the over-extensively used ‘Gaylestorm‘ material.

It was as if there were two Gayles, one that did extremely well for his IPL team and the other which failed consistently for his national team, much like Rohit Sharma, before he found his mojo or so he would like us to believe.

Gayle’s only 50+ knock in this time-frame came against Sri Lanka in the tri-series also involving India, where West Indies failed to make it to the final. Out of the 16 innings that he batted in, he had 7 single digit scores and his next-best score was a 39 against Pakistan.

The year was perfectly summed up for him against India in the 1st ODI when while attempting a run, he fell down in a bizarre fashion and got himself injured for the rest of the year. Needless to say, he was run-out.

2) Gautam Gambhir

Gautam Gambhir

(Matches – 7, Runs – 153, Average – 21.8, HS – 52, 100s – 0, 50s – 1)

It was no surprise that Gambhir’s highest knock of the season came at Rajkot, a place where (i) bowlers have been known to be traumatized to such a level where they feel afraid to even pick up the ball, (ii) ball-boys are actually part of the fielding team and also (iii) the only place in the world where Mitchell Johnson and Vinay Kumar are held in the same light. Leaving that knock aside, Gambhir averaged a meagre 16.83 in rest of the 6 matches that he played in and with Rohit Sharma and Shikhar Dhawan both having solidified their ODI positions since then, a comeback for him in the ODI team looks as unlikely as Suresh Raina scoring a century at Gabba.

3) Asad Shafiq

Asad Shafiq

(Matches- 11, Runs- 166, Average- 15.09, HS- 84, 100s-0, 50s-1)

Asad Shafiq embodies everything that is Pakistani cricket. Supremely talented, gritty, dominating, flamboyant, exasperating, excruciating and inconsistent. He had 7 single-digit scores in 2013 and his highest score of 84 came against Ireland, a far cry from a player who scored 111 runs against an attack comprising the likes of Steyn, Philander and Morkel on a lively Cape Town track after Pakistan were reduced to 33-4. Disappointing.

4) Kevin Pietersen

Kevin Pietersen

(Matches- 9, Runs- 256, Average- 28.44, HS- 76, 100s-0, 50s-2)

For a man who is perennially on the brink of scoring the greatest Test innings ever (as proclaimed by the British media), his ODI performances cropped a shocker in 2013. He got decent starts in most of the games but the moment he realised that he was wearing the garish red version of England’s jersey and not the white one, he threw his wicket, almost in self-pity. For in England, reputation is always judged by one’s Test records which in turn has made sure that no England player has ever been proclaimed as a great in the ODI format, not since Dean Headley and Sajid Mahmood plied their trade for them.

5) Yuvraj Singh

Yuvraj Singh

(Matches-18, Runs- 276, Batting Average- 19.71, HS- 61, 100s-0, 50s-2, Wickets- 2, Bowling Average- 72.50, BBI- 2/34)

For all his efforts to make another comeback to the Indian national team, his batting average this season was poorer to, a) Robin Peterson, b) Kyle Mills and c) Shahid Afridi. His highest score in the year was 61 against England at bowlers-hate-this-highway, co-incidentally also the last time Gambhir scored a half-century for India. He made 4 ducks in the same calendar year , a record which was not surpassed even by the likes of Mohammad Irfan, Lonwabo Tsotsobe, Ishant Sharma and Junaid Khan. It was painful to see him struggle, especially after all his heroics to make a comeback but just one look at the gap between his bat and pad was enough for my brain to shut my heart up. His well-spent time at France made him look like an Yuvraj of 2008 but batting-wise turned him into a Mongia (Dinesh, that is) of 2004.

6) Kieron Pollard

Kieron Pollard

(Matches- 17, Runs- 322, Batting Average- 21.46, HS- 109*, 100s- 1, 50s- 0, Wickets- 6, Bowling Average- 47.16, BBI- 1/21)

‘It is not the 7 Indians who will lend a hand but the 1 West Indian who will win you the IPL tournament’.

It is a well-known and a god-approved theory that the USP of any IPL team is the performance of the West Indian in it e.g.- Narine for KKR, Gayle for RCB, Pollard and Smith for MI, Sammy for SRH. If a team has a proven West Indian performer then only will it have a shot at the IPL. Except, of course, when they play for West Indies, a T20 World Cup win you may say is good enough but with such talent in store, their inability to reciprocate their skills in the ODI format is bewildering.

Pollard is one prime example of ‘The Great IPL West Indian degenerate’, the moment he puts on a Mumbai Indians jersey he becomes one of the most destructive all-rounders of all time and the moment he removes it, he scores 6 ducks in a single calendar year. Yes, he scored 6 blobs this year, the most by any batsman, bowler, tail-ender in the year 2013.

The only player to share his sentiment has long since retired for India and was last seen leaving a match midway before retiring altogether from the Mumbai Ranji team. The only way Pollard can be presentable in the ODI team is if he bowled and somehow used his height advantage to double up as the batsman on the other side of the pitch, his records then, would soon attain statistical nirvana, at least from one end.

7) Luke Ronchi

Luke Ronchi

(Matches- 11, Runs- 139, Average- 15.44, HS-49,100s-0, 50s-0)

Frustrated at not being able to play for Australia, more so because even a player of Matthew Wade’s calibre got around 20-25 games to prove his inadequacy, Ronchi made the switch to Australia’s trans-Tasman rival around an year back in order to play international cricket.

The biggest winner? The Australian selectors.

Ronchi’s selection in the New Zealand team showed what exactly the Australian team didn’t miss and going by his recent form, he will soon be part of just a trivia question of players having represented dual countries in their career. Pity, he wasn’t born in South Africa.

8) Stuart Broad

Stuart Broad

(Matches- 9, Wickets- 12, Average- 35.16, BBI- 3/50)

England’s hero in the last Ashes campaign had an exceptional 2013 in Test cricket but was dreadfully docile in the shorter version of the game. There were other bowlers in 2013 who fared worse than him but Broad gets the nod because he played all the 9 matches in bowler-friendly conditions and also because he happens to be Stuart Broad.

9) Xavier Doherty

Xavier Doherty

(Matches- 14, Wickets- 7, Average- 65.57, BBI- 3-21)

You know as a cricket fan that Xavier Doherty is never going to win a match for any international nation single-handedly, let alone Australia. To put it bluntly, he is just not good enough. You can excuse him by saying that he bowls in Australian conditions which are harsh for finger-spinners but the fact is that out of these 14 matches, he played 7 of them in India. He was expected to play a greater role, he was expected to pick wickets but his performances were staggeringly shoddy. He picked up only 2 wickets in the entire series and both of them came in the same innings. His spinning variations came only through uneven cracks, something which he had no control on and he was easily the worst thing to happen to Australian cricket rivalled only by Michael Beer ‘s Ashes debut back in 2011.

10) Wahab Riaz

Wahab Riaz

(Matches- 14, Wickets- 8, Average- 66.50, BBI- 2-42)

Part I: Wahab Riaz in 2013 was everything that a bowler shouldn’t be. He ran in hard and bowled utter nonsense in that ridiculous slinging action of his. Like most Pakistani bowlers, his bowling promise was visible only when he played against India but unlike other Pakistani bowlers, he was dropped from the team purely because of cricketing reasons. Out of the 14 matches that he played in, he went wicketless in 8 of them and in the momentary instances when he did pick wickets, this is what happened to him. Profligacy at its best.

Part II: Bowlers who had a better bowling average than Wahab Riaz in 2013, i) Hamilton Masakadza, ii) Suresh Raina and iii) Xavier Doherty.

11) Vinay Kumar

Vinay Kumar

(Matches- 9, Wickets- 5, Average- 49.80, BBI- 2/50)

Vinay Kumar is anti-excitement. He is the poster boy of Indian medium-fast bowling going wrong and it is completely unnatural and unbelievable to believe that he has 279 first-class wickets at a bowling average of 24.84. Besides being completely Vinay Kumar in his approach in 2013, he bowled the 5th worst bowling figures in the history of ODI cricket and the worst by an Indian when he went for 102 runs off his 9 overs against Australia at Bangalore in a match India luckily went on to win. Probability wise, he had a 0.001 % chance (out of 3450 ODI matches) of bowling such a spell and being so appalling but Vinay Kumar made sure he bagged it. If Vinay Kumar can be the fast bowler of India, anyone can, just about anyone.

Notable exceptions: Graeme Smith, Younis Khan, Umar Amin, Tim Bresnan, Nathan McCullum, Jeevan Mendis, Kamran Akmal, Matthew Wade.

Worst team of the year: West Indies (Played- 24, Won- 9, Lost- 13, Tied- 2, W/L ratio- 0.69)

If you feel any other player should have made the cut/drop, feel free to post it in the comments section.