…. of who was cricket’s greatest ever allrounder

By The Bug’s long-time senior cricket writer Don Gordon-Brown*, considered by many to have been very unlucky not to have played more Tests for Australia.

Met Sir Garfield Sobers once. And I’ll freely admit I was shocked by the scrawny, wasted hand and the trembling fingers that were thrust forward for a handshake. His were no better.

But that meeting was fondly remembered on hearing on Nine News Queensland last night that this amazing West Indian cricketer had left the sheds for good at 89. But what I might take exception to is the bulletin’s claim that Gazza – I think I got away with that when we met – was, in newsreader Wendy Kingston’s spiel at 6pm: “Also tonight, cricket farewells the game’s greatest all-round player”.

As you can see at top, the image created by the station’s graphic artist ignored the “all-rounder” tag.

Fast forward to her introduction to the segment and Wendy was a little less generous, saying Sobers was “widely regarded as the game’s best allrounder.”

And let’s leave alone her comment that he was “our favourite cricketers’ favourite cricketer” for the nonsense it is. Who puts this shit in a poor lass’s mouth?

My immediate reaction on hearing all this was simple: what about Jacques Kallis? I can’t remember if I ever faced him in a game or how he handled my own balls but let’s compare the pair. And trust me: I knew a lot about pairs.

Kallis’s record is pretty damn impressive: 166 Tests at an average of 55.37 and 292 wickets at 32.85. Gazza’s was fairly similar: 93 Tests at an average of 57.78 and 235 poles at 34.03. So each was better than the other at one of these two statistics.

But here’s my thinking. I’m pretty sure Sobers played the game at the highest level when tradition called for batsmen to be given the benefit of the doubt. Not that I ever was! I lost count of the times given out when the ball clearly would have missed leg stump but might have hit the others. I haven’t been able to extract how much of Kallis’s Test career was played when some DRS umpire and their seeing-eye dog in a booth somewhere sent a batsmen on their way when they really were out, the occasional missed no-ball aside.

Unless Sobers played in the era of uncovered pitches – and who could be bothered with doing that research given how much I’m paid for these columns – Kallis’s much longer career should make his 55.37 more than comparable with Sobers’ haul that’s only slightly better.

And what about Graeme Pollock whose Test career was curtailed by South Africa’s isolation in the 1960s? In 23Tests, he averaged 60.97! Way above Sobers and Kallis! Add that to his bowling average of four at 51 ,,, oh, okay, let’s forget Pollock. What about Beefy Botham?

When he was not busting bed springs, in 102 tests he took 383 wickets at 28.4 and averaged 33.5 as a batsmen. No?

That’s all I’ve got then!

* Editor’s note: Not only was our senior cricket writer born with the same initials as Donald George Bradman, he too like The Don could score effortlessly and fluently for hours at a time without making a single mistake that called for the use of a rubber.

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