Matt79
Global Moderator
For the sake of amusement/discussion, I thought it would be interesting to pick a team of players from the era before ODIs were played that you'd think would be a good outfit, ie. of players who, despite never having had the opportunity to play one day cricket, would be natural ODI players. I'd define this as players whose careers finished around 1970 - I'm including Garry Sobers, and he'd be about the latest player I'm including.
I'll preface this by saying that I recognise that any attempt to compare across such different eras is of necessity highly speculative, and that obviously very few of us on this site would ever have seen any of the players involved live - so there's no need to post to point that out!
After a little thought, I'd have:
Trumper
Hammond
Bradman
Sobers
Constantine
Miller
Walcott +
Benaud
Davidson
Lindwall
O'Reilly
A preponderance of Australians with a decent splash of West Indies style verve and sparkle. Sobers' allround skills makes him the first name on the list. Hammond and Trumper's ability to play shots gets them the "pinch-hitting" openers role, while Bradman's quick scoring in Tests (plus overall ability) suggests he'd be well-suited to the short-form. Walcott's in as keeper as he showed he could do it, and his ability to hit the ball with great power suits him to the lower order role of coming in and smacking it about - a role where hopefully he would be spared too big a workload as in his test career, keeping definitely affected his batting. Miller as a bowler of great variety, and a shot-making batsman is a natural. Lindwall sounds to me to have been a natural one-day bowler, with a lethal yorker, the ability to move the ball, and what Plum Warner described as the best range of slower balls he had seen. O'Reilly again kept batsmen guessing with changes of speed etc, and even Bradman found him hard to hit away, so he's a good fit too I guess.
Do people have variations, suggestions?
I'll preface this by saying that I recognise that any attempt to compare across such different eras is of necessity highly speculative, and that obviously very few of us on this site would ever have seen any of the players involved live - so there's no need to post to point that out!
After a little thought, I'd have:
Trumper
Hammond
Bradman
Sobers
Constantine
Miller
Walcott +
Benaud
Davidson
Lindwall
O'Reilly
A preponderance of Australians with a decent splash of West Indies style verve and sparkle. Sobers' allround skills makes him the first name on the list. Hammond and Trumper's ability to play shots gets them the "pinch-hitting" openers role, while Bradman's quick scoring in Tests (plus overall ability) suggests he'd be well-suited to the short-form. Walcott's in as keeper as he showed he could do it, and his ability to hit the ball with great power suits him to the lower order role of coming in and smacking it about - a role where hopefully he would be spared too big a workload as in his test career, keeping definitely affected his batting. Miller as a bowler of great variety, and a shot-making batsman is a natural. Lindwall sounds to me to have been a natural one-day bowler, with a lethal yorker, the ability to move the ball, and what Plum Warner described as the best range of slower balls he had seen. O'Reilly again kept batsmen guessing with changes of speed etc, and even Bradman found him hard to hit away, so he's a good fit too I guess.
Do people have variations, suggestions?