Why Laker, Prasanna remain better off-spinners than Murali, Bhajji
by S Giridhar and VJ Raghunath
Mid-wicket Tales Aug 31, 2012 14:04 IST
.......Over the years, tons of wickets have been taken by the off-spinners. There are at this moment in August 2012, 35 off-spinners who have taken at least 50 Test wickets. All of them have been valiant servants of the game, and the spectrum ranges from the wide eyed Muralitharan on a summit of 800 wickets that no bowler will ever surpass (the cliché that records are meant to be broken will not apply here) to W Bates who took 50 wickets more than 125 years ago, surely forgotten even in his own homeland but whom Wisden in its almanac describes with a lot of respect for exceptional ability.
If we were to poll cricketers and knowledgeable cricket followers to rank these 35 off-spinners, there will never be any kind of agreement. And yet, cricket statistics has its own fatal charm, seducing the keen follower of the game to try and stack cricketers on some key statistical parameters. We were no exceptions. We created a composite effectiveness index using five parameters — Number of Wickets, Strike Rate, Bowling Average, 5 and 10 Wicket hauls, and proportion of wickets taken away from home — and ranked all the 35 off-spinners with over 50 Test wickets.
Based on this composite effectiveness index the top 20 off-spinners were: Muralitharan, Jim Laker, Harbhajan Singh, Hugh Trumble, William Bates, Graeme Swann, Saqlain Mushtaq, Lance Gibbs, Tayfield, EAS Prasanna, GE Palmer, Saeed Ajmal, Ashley Mallett, IWG Johnson, Fred Titmus, DA Allen, Roy Tattersall, Shivlal Yadav, Venkataraghavan and Tauseef Ahmed. All too predictably, while we agreed with some of the rankings our statistical massaging threw up, we vehemently disagreed with others.
We realised that we must stick our neck out and make our own subjective but informed estimates of quality. While facts and figures were at the back of our mind we brought in our own assessment of factors such as guile, the beauty of their bowling action and so on. To begin with we agreed that the three spinners of the long ago generation — Trumble, Bates and Palmer — would be included in the top-20 but will not be ranked, for we were in a no position to argue one way or the other about their place. But for the remaining 17 we would rank them.
And so we arrived at our own list of the 17 greatest off spinners of all time:
01. Jim Laker
02. Erapalli Prasanna
03. Lance Gibbs
04. Muttiah Muralitharan
05. Hugh Tayfield
06. Saqlain Mushtaq
07. Harbhajan Singh
08. Graeme Swann
09. Venkataraghavan
10. Saeed Ajmal
11. Ashley Mallett
12. Fred Titmus
13. Ghulam Ahmed
14. David Allen
15. Roy Tattasall
16. Ray Illingworth
17. Ian Johnson
.......Murali on sheer numbers is so far and above the rest that he can sit on the summit impervious to anything that people might say about his bowling. The interesting thing is that Murali was probably as much a wrist spinner as a finger spinner which is why he could spin the ball on a marble top. Harbhajan, second in the wicket list enjoyed his greatest moments when he single-handedly bowled India to a series win against Australia in 2001. Harbhajan relies greatly on bounce, not so much on drift. If he gets a wicket early he is terror but if denied a wicket early, he gets fretful.
As purists, both of us, give a lot of emphasis to the purity of action and on that count alone we are unable to rate both these giants above Laker and Prasanna.
Why Laker, Prasanna remain better off-spinners than Murali, Bhajji - Firstpost
