Your All-time Top 5's
 

Top 5 Opening Batsman

1. Matthew Hayden
2. Sunil Gavaskar
3. Sir Len Hutten
4. Hebert Sutcliffe
5. Sir Jack Hobbs

Top 5 Middle-Order Batsman

1. Sir Donald Bradman
2. Sir Vivian Richards
3. Sachin Tendulkar
4. Ricky Ponting
5. Brian Lara

Top 5 Allrounders

1. Sir Garfield Sobers
2. Jacques Kallis
3. Imran Khan
4. Ian Botham
5. Keith Miller

Top 5 Wicketkeeper-Batsman

1. Adam Gilchrist
2. Kumar Sangakkara
3. Alan Knott
4. Alec Stewart
5. Ian Healy

Top 5 Spin Bowlers

1. Shane Warne
2. Muttiah Muralitharan
3. Anil Kumble
4. Jim Laker
5. Saqlain Mushtaq

Top 5 Pace Bowlers

1. Curtly Ambrose
2. Glenn McGrath
3. Wasim Akram
4. Malcom Marshall
5. Sir Richard Hadlee

Top 5 Cricketers

1. Sir Donald Bradman
2. Sir Garfield Sobers
3. Shane Warne
4. Sir Vivian Richards
5. Sachin Tendulkar

I'll put some thought into these and post my own at some point, but welcome to CricketWeb mate - hope you enjoy your time here. :)

Very nice idea for a thread. I'll have to give it some thought too.

Flower?

Should be at 3 for sure. I'd put him above Sanga, simply because of the fact that the latter wasn't able to pull of batting and keeping for a long period.

He was, he just becomes an unbelievably good batsman as opposed to a real quality one when he drops the gloves.

Flower ahead of him anyway.

I was definately comtemplating it. Although, wicketkeeping isn't my strong point and I've heard that Flower's keeping wasn't very good.

Top 5 Opening Batsman

1. Hayden
2. Langer
3. Anwar
4. Kirsten
5. Sehwag

Top 5 Middle-Order Batsman

1. Lara
2. Tendulkar
3. Ponting
4. Dravid
5. Inzamam

Top 5 Allrounders

1. Pollock (S)
2. Kallis
3. Cairns
4. Flintoff
5. Klusener

Top 5 Wicketkeeper-Batsman

1. Adam Gilchrist
2. Kumar Sangakkara
3. Andy Flower
4. Alec Stewart
5. Moin Khan

Top 5 Spin Bowlers

1. Murali
2. Warne
3. Kumble
4. Saqlain
5. Mushtaq

Top 5 Pace Bowlers

1. Ambrose
2. Donald
3. McGrath
4. Akram
5. Younis

Top 5 Cricketers

1. Pollock
2. Kallis
3. Murali
4. Waugh
5. Lara

Beleg, I'm assuming you're only rating the players you've seen there rather than all time?

Yeap, your assumption's correct.

Top 5 Opening Batsman

1. Sir Jack Hobbs
2. Hebert Sutcliffe
3. Sir Len Hutton
4. Mathew Hayden
5. Sunil Gavaskar

Top 5 Middle-Order Batsman

1. Sir Donald Bradman
2. Sir Vivian Richards
3. Ricky Ponting
4. Greg Chappell
5. Wally Hammond

Top 5 Allrounders

1. Keith Miller
2. Imran Khan
3. Jacques Kallis
4. Ian Botham
5. Sir Garfield Sobers

Top 5 Wicketkeeper-Batsman

1. Adam Gilchrist
2. Alan Knott
3. Les Ames
4. Denis Lindsay
5. Kumar Sangakkara

Top 5 Spin Bowlers

1. Shane Warne
2. Muttiah Muralitharan
3. Tiger O'Reilly
4. Clarrie Grimmett
5. Bhagwath Chandrasekhar

Top 5 Pace Bowlers

1. Dennis Lillee
2. Glenn McGrath
3. Malcom Marshall
4. Sir Richard Hadlee
5. Allan Donald

Top 5 Cricketers

1. Sir Donald Bradman
2. Shane Warne
3. Keith Miller
4. Sir Vivian Richards
5. Sir Garfield Sobers

Why do you rate Richards so high, since his record isn't as great as a lot of other players?

His record is as good as the best, depending on when you start viewing him. Richards has a famous decline and was generally pretty good against everybody. What's more with him is he seemed to score runs more when it counted - when the match was in the balance. For his time, his SR is rather awesome, even for now it's very very good. I remember someone doing an estimation of it being around 67-70 (which is about double the speed Gavaskar scores at :p). He also didn't play the minnows of his time (Sri Lanka) and still ended up with a 50+ average despite playing for much longer than he should have.

His genuine challenger is probably Ponting, who has scored almost everywhere and at all times but I feel Richards has a bit of Warne to him, in that he is more a man of the big occasion than Ponting. He's the very first batsman that I saw on TV and got my attention away from the Football(soccer)-fueled family of mine. You could say there is some sentiment there. For me, the current Ponting has a good chance to really show himself, carrying some fledglings to success on his own back will go a long way in highlighting his legacy IMO.

Welcome to CW mate. Hope you enjoy here.

Your lists are all pretty good, but the relative placement of the two bolded players in the bit I quoted here is likely to be fairly strongly disagreed by a lot of people. The general view is, in my experience, that Hobbs was the greatest of openers. Meanwhile, opinion on Hayden is pretty strongly divided in these parts. Many, myself included, rate him very highly, while others feel he wouldn't have had the success he did in another era. Either way, even he fans probably wouldn't place him above the other 4 you've named there.

Actually I just went through the batting records during his career, and removing Sri Lanka so Richards can be on equal footing, there are only 3 other comparable batsman: Border (51.77), Miandad (55.28) and Chappell (54.38). Both Javad and Allen were pretty poor against the best team of their time, West Indies (in fact, Javad isn't too hot against Sri Lanka either and Border with S.Africa) so that leaves Chappell. Who, actually, probably does have a very legimitate claim to being the 2nd best batsman after Bradman. The rest either hadn't batted enough in that period to merit comparison and others (like Gavaskar) averaged below him.

Quite a good list IMO, if some of the player orders were changed around.