I have spent a lot of time of late pondering the career of Jacques Kallis and his place in the game.  There has been much made of the retirement of him and Tendulkar this year and much said in the media, both formal and social, of which of the two of them is the second best player after the great Sir Donald Bradman.

If I have said it once I have said it a thousand times: it is impossible to compare players from this generation with those who played in the 1930s and earlier and that premise probably extends right up to the 80s.  It is equally difficult to compare the records of the other “great” players of Kallis’ generation with his record because of his sustained excellence across both key forms of play: batting and bowling.

Thinking about it though, if one makes an assumption that a five wicket all by a bowler is akin to a batter scoring a hundred then there is a mathematical way to compare the careers of say Tendulkar and Muralitharan to Kallis simply by adding the amount of runs scored by the respective players to number of wickets taken by each player multiplied by 20 (on my hypothesis a wicket is equal to 20 runs).  I have taken the top 5 run scorers and top 5 wicket takers in the game (noting that they are all players of the modern age given the amount of test played when compared to 80s and before) and come up with the following table:

It is pretty clear from this mathematic approach to considering the greats of the modern game that Kallis is head and shoulders above the rest. I apologise to all Tendulkar fans for saying this but when you look at his overall contribution across both key aspects of the game but Kallis hits him out of the park.  Indeed Tendulkar is not, statistically, even the second best of the modern generation of players.  Both of Muralitharan and Warne best him based on a combined consideration of the player’s contribution to both key skills of the game.

Having established who is the mathematically superior player between Kallis and Tendulkar it got me thinking about coming up with a way of measuring the efforts of the previous all-round greats who have preceded Kallis.  Because of the lack of test matches played during the period from the 1950s through 1980s (when the great all-rounders were playing) the methodology for comparison of the players has been necessarily tweaked to consider each players average contribution to each game in which the played.  I have not considered any player that pre-dates 1950 for this analysis and have come up with this list of all-rounders: Kallis, Sobers, Hadlee, Dev, Botham, Khan and Benaud.  I am sure I have missed some from this analysis (be happy to hear your thoughts on who).

Most pundits of late seem to box Sobers and Kallis together and then the rest in a contest to determine who the best all-rounder to play the game is.  Based on the mathematical approach I have outlined, that position seems to be short sited.  Here are the results of applying a statistical analysis to foregoing list of all-rounders:

This analysis shows that Sobers contributed most, statistically, to each game he played when compared to each of the other “great’ all-rounders.  Unsurprisingly, when you consider his bowling strike rate, Hadlee comes in a close second and, frankly, a long way back, Kallis comes in fifth.

This analysis is, of course, necessarily predicated on the pure numbers each player has “put up” and does not account, at all, for the intangibles each brings to the game.  That said, I am absolutely comfortable with the outcome of the analysis: it strikes me that Kallis is the leader of the pack when it comes to the modern greats of the game because he was a true double threat (and that is forgetting his acumen in the slips) and, as such, was constantly involved in the game.  Tendulkar, by comparison, oft spent his time in the field stationed at mid off and did not have anywhere near the work load of Kallis.

I did not have the pleasure of watching Gary Sobers play but those who did always bracket him at the second greatest player to play the game after Bradman.  I mentioned in the preamble that it is really impossible to compare players for different eras.  That said, I am prepared to conclude that Sobers must be considered in any consideration of the player next after Bradman.  The player though that sticks out for me as having been missed out in a lot of consideration of the “great” players of the game is Sir Richard Hadlee.  His contribution to each game is only minimally lower than that of Sobers and, it must be remembered, he was regularly playing a team that was a losing rather than winning.

All of this number crunching proves one thing really: Kallis has had an unbelievable career of excellence at the top level of the game for a long time.  I, for one, believe he gets the short shrift from many in comparison to Tendulkar which is just statistically wrong.

With no active player in the top 10 players I have noted above of the modern, I am left to wonder who the next “modern great” will be.  One suspects he will come from Kallis’ own team or that of Tendulkar but only time will tell.