Twenty-five years since return to Test cricket, Suvajit Mustafi looks at South Africa’s best Test XI since readmission.
No country has produced as many all-time great opening batsmen as England. And some of them were more than a little versatile in the other departments of the game as well.
This time the team is made up of players who have represented Australia after the Packer Circus until the present day.
Having completed the rather difficult task of sifting through the Pre-War greats, let us now turn to our second phase, from 1919 to the appearance of Packer.
To make an insurmountable task easier, we have broken the history of Australian cricket into three different parts. Here is the XI for the Australian team stretching from the beginning of Test cricket in 1877 to the start of the First World War.
As Australia gear up to play their 800th Test match, we face a problem. And it is a problem of plenty. It is customary for CricketCountry to come up with an All Time XI for the cricketing nation when she plays such a landmark Test.
Infixes are different from patronymics, which are appended to names of respective fathers.
Viv Richards. Sachin Tendulkar. Sunil Gavaskar. Brian Lara - None of them make the cut. They just did not have it in them. Virat Kohli. Steven Smith. Kane Williamson - They do not make it either. The bar, unfortunately, is set too high for these wonderful cricketers.
There are several other shrouds of undecipherable facts and questions that dominate the game’s history. Cricket and its story could be the fertile grounds for many a hardboiled detective to pit his wits and try his hand at solving age old puzzlers.
It is improbable to achieve a state wherein all key players pass unscathed through a wearying season.