Ten Things #31

1/ What was one-day international cricket? The question arises with the induction of Michael Bevan in the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame.

In the decade or so I was an ACHOF selector, a twenty-Test minimum was part of the criteria for male players; this has since been waived, and while Bevan played only eighteen Tests for modest returns [see above] he appeared in no fewer than 232 one-day internationals. That is a staggering number given that his career spanned less than a decade, and also locates him quite precisely in history, before T20 loomed in imagination and on the calendar. Eighty-four players have collected two-hundred or more ODI caps, but only four of them (Kohli, Rohit, Shakib and Angelo Matthews) are still going round. It is hard to see Steve Smith (165 games) achieving the milestone; Pat Cummins (90 games) certainly won’t; T20, domestic and international, will preclude it. In some ways, the peak popularity of the fifty-over format is harder to explain now than Test cricket. How to describe to a generation born into a guaranteed drizzle of maximums how Bevo excelled at a format in which he struck at less than 75 runs per hundred balls in the middle order, and hit a six only once in every 443 balls? His ACHOF induction feels like an art gallery staging a silhouette exhibition or a music hall of fame inducting a virtuoso of the vest frottoir.