ICC Cricket, Cricket Live Scores, Latest Sports News, Rumors, Fantasy Games, and more

Without recourse to valour or drama, with no shades of character, no tales of stirring deeds, no room for circumstance, numbers end up telling the story of a cricketer pretty well. A player might have had his fifteen minutes of fame, and words can do justice to the deed, but over a lengthy career, good players produce good numbers. And so it is with numbers that one must judge Andrew Flintoff for those will not change even as legend grows.

Occasionally numbers might falter but they rarely fail if you are comparing like for like. Batsmen who played on uncovered pitches might have lesser numbers than those that played on pitches that were tended to with the kind of love afforded to spoilt children. Opening batsmen who played in the glory days of fast bowling might want to look at numbers a bit differently from those that play in the one bouncer per over era where anything over 140 kmph is considered fast. That is why it is often best to assess players in the milieu they played in. And that is why Flintoff must be compared to his peers, not to the Bothams or Imrans whose class he probably wasn't in anyway.

In terms of respect among peers, always worthwhile to know, Flintoff rated as high as anyone of his era. When he was in form it seemed his averages belonged to someone else, when he steamed in and landed a fit ankle onto the turf, he could lay claim to being the world's best on most days. But the truly great sustain performances, they routinely challenge perceptions, they battle poor form and ride the days when things go right. Flintoff will be remembered in Test cricket, since he will still remain a limited overs cricketer, as someone who had his moments, as someone who could be a match winner but who didn't always deliver. Certainly by numbers alone, he wasn't the leading all-rounder of his era. That role must belong to two South Africans, the only country in modern times that has consistently thrown up players with multiple skills.

If you are looking at a batting all-rounder, which is what Flintoff said he would have liked to be, then you cannot look beyond Jacques Kallis who has 10,277 runs from 131 Tests at 54.66 and with thirty-one centuries. He qualifies as one of the great batsmen of our time but to that he adds 258 wickets at 31.08, numbers that are not too different from those that belong to the mighty Sir Garfield Sobers, with five five-wicket hauls, three more than Flintoff managed.

If you look at Flintoff as a bowling all-rounder, which is what dispassionate supporters in distant lands always thought he was, then you must look at the pre-eminent player of this era, Shaun Pollock who took 421 wickets from 108 games at 23.11 and hit five wickets in an innings 16 times. Could he bat? 3781 runs at 32.31 which gives him a very healthy difference of nine between his batting and bowling averages. By contrast Flintoff managed 31.69 with the bat and 32.51 with the ball.

There is one other set of numbers we need to look at. Chris Cairns was, like Flintoff, a charismatic cricketer, an impact player, who got the crowd buzzing when on song. Like with Flintoff, injury shadowed him like an unwelcome friend; his career too was like the Mumbai traffic, by the time it got going it was time to pause again. Cairns played 62 Tests, 14 fewer than Flintoff, made 3320 runs at 33.53 (versus 3708 @ 31.69) and, this will hurt Flintoff fans, took 218 wickets @ 29.4 with 13 five-wicket hauls (Flintoff: 219 @ 32.51 with 2 five-wicket hauls).

So why is it then that each one of us who saw Flintoff play would be happy to rank him among the very best in spite of possessing numbers that aren't the most dramatic? Maybe it is to do with the drama of sport where you remember a scene here, a piece of theatre there, remember moments that changed the course of a game, endowed it with a little tinge of magic. So was Flintoff a scene stealer, an actor capable of playing great character roles but never really the lead man?

Let's just say that when Flintoff charged in to bowl, you saw a moment not a career; you saw a scene not a full-length feature. Oh, and by the way, if his numbers are being looked at a little more critically it is only because the finest players are condemned to be dissected differently! Flintoff was a mighty fine player and hopefully in the smaller format he will find that, free from the need to constantly overcome injury, he will really come into his own.