Choosing all-time teams: why Bradman may always not make it

Does cricket above all sports lend itself most often to such mental exercises as “the greatest Indian team of all time” or, to go one step higher, “the greatest-ever team of all time?”

Even Don Bradman — who is in everybody’s all-time team — couldn’t resist the temptation. In The Art of Cricket he talked about ideal elevens and such things as teams with players’ names beginning with the letter ‘H’ (Hobbs, Hutton, Hammond etc) and other combinations.

That book was published in 1958. In 2001, Bradman’s Best, a book about his all-time team caused as much interest as heartburn. Bradman saw his first Test aged 12; it was an Ashes contest (Australia v England) at Sydney in 1920-21. Bradman thus had an intimate knowledge of 20th century cricket (he died in Feb 2001 aged 92), apart from being deeply involved with it as player, administrator and writer.

Here’s Bradman’s list: Barry Richards, Arthur Morris, Don Bradman, Sachin Tendulkar, Garry Sobers, Don Tallon, Ray Lindwall, Dennis Lillee, Alec Bedser, Bill O’Reilly, Clarrie Grimmett. His great contemporary Wally Hammond was 12th man.

There are seven Australians in the team, and one each from the West Indies, India, England and South Africa. Choosing all-time teams is always fun and frequently contro versial.

Teams have been chosen based on ICC rankings, on ‘all format records’, on being ‘masters of all conditions’. Bradman apart, I would imagine that Garry Sobers would make it to most teams whatever the description. In Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Century, there were no real surprises: Bradman, Sobers, Jack Hobbs, Shane Warne and Viv Richards.

All this talk of all-time teams has been inspired by the Daily Telegraph’s recent choice (made by its readers) of the greatest-ever cricket team. It has both Gavaskar and Tendulkar; Adam Gilchrist is the wicketkeeper.

Most cricket romantics would have picked Victor Trumper from among the list of openers (Jack Hobbs was named as Gavaskar’s partner), although he played his last Test in 1912 and died tragically young at 37 three years later.

Gideon Haigh wrote thus of him, “He formed part of a profound moral and aesthetic revaluation of cricket, an awakening to its potential beauties, an invitation to appreciations deeper than runs and wickets, victory and defeat.”

But how do you choose a team without having watched any of its players perform? Trumper lives on in the writings of his contemporaries, in the story of the leg spinner Arthur Mailey who, upon dismissing him in a match wrote later: “I felt like a boy who had killed a dove”. He lives on in the iconic photograph – “stepping out to drive” by George Beldam, and in such as the Englishman Neville Cardus’s famous prayer: “Please god, let Victor Trumper score a century out of an Australian all-out score of 124.”

It is difficult not to be carried away by the writings of both those who knew and watched Trumper as well as those who didn’t. He played just 48 Tests and averaged 39 with an abandon and joy that communicated itself to the spectators. On bad tracks (wickets were uncovered in his time), he batted with a mastery not approached by anyone else including Bradman.

So would you pick Trumper in your eleven? Sports would be the poorer if greatness were calculated only in numbers. Or if all-time teams were picked based only on statistics. There is a greatness above the easily understood one of efficiency and risk-elimination. Every all-time team deserves players who wouldn’t make it on figures alone.

But it is possible to hold a contradictory thought in your mind (as selector of all-time teams) whereby anyone you pick whom you have not watched play is a form of bad faith.

That’s how you get a greater variety of players in the various all-time teams. Bradman and Sobers might be automatic choices, but how many of us have seen them play? And does that mean that future generations can pick only limited all-time teams?

How’s this twelve from those I have seen in action: Gavaskar, Gordon Greenidge, Javed Miandad, Tendulkar, Richards, Sobers, Ian Botham, Alan Knott, Dale Steyn, Shane Warne, Malcolm Marshall, Erapalli Prasanna.

Ask me next week and I can give you another equally strong side! Therein lies the joy of selecting all-time teams.