who is the KING OF TEST CRICKET

The other day, my friend Balaji casually asked me to take a guess on the Man of the Match Awards won by Sachin Tendulkar in Test Cricket.

Considering Tendulkar played about 200 matches, I took a guess of 25 MoM awards, assuming he would have been instrumental the least 40% of India Draws and Victories. Although, inside my heart I felt 25 is a very humble number.

My friend replied “You would be stumped to know the results”.

Are you already taking a guess on the Man of the Match awards won by Sachin Tendulkar in Test Cricket?

As he mentioned, I was totally stumped to know the result. The result actually lured us to analyze, the number of MoM awards won by Tendulkar's contemporaries in Indian Cricket and World Cricket. Here is the look at the stats.

Sachin Tendulkar has won only 14 MoM awards in 188 Test matches. Out of which only 5 were on the winning cause. Anyways, the idea is not prove Tendulkar any inferior, but only to emphasize Man of Match Awards are very difficult to earn in Test Cricket. By the way, Tendulkar has 63 MoM awards in ODI’s.

Again, we were totally surprised to see not a single cricketer has managed more than 25 MoM awards in Test Cricket yet. With the exception of Kallis, MoM awards were predominantly dominated by Bowlers (rightfully).

It is also interesting to see all MoM’s won by Ambrose, Steve Waugh and Sehwag resulted in the Team winning the match. While, Warne, Murali and Kumble’s MoM performances resulted largely on the winning side (above 85%).

On the contrary the two greats, Lara and Tendulkar’s Man of the Match Awards mostly resulted in draws compared to winning causes.

Don’t read too much into it. Stats is a B&$@H. It can be manipulated the way we want.

But in this case, it did prove a point. Kallis is the King of Cricket. By the way, Kallis scored his last century in England in Test Cricket only 14 years ago.

Dinesh

Cricket Lover