The Top Performers Of The ICC World T20 - I

There is one thing common to every sport: results matter. Standout individual performances are truly counted as great when they come at crucial times and they swing the fortunes of their teams favorably. Though this may be unfair for some, the best performers will always be chosen from the teams that succeeded in making it to the very end. This is not meant to devalue the achievements of those who shone in lost causes (such as Kevin Pietersen in this world cup), rather it is simply a way of acknowledging those performers who carried their form all the way through a long distance, or found their best when it mattered the most – at the very end. So, here is a pick of the best performers, all chosen from the four teams who made it to the semi-finals.

Shahid Afridi

He was the standout performer of the tournament – the man who made the maximum impact. Although Tilekratne Dilshan bagged the Man Of the Tournament award for the sheer weight of the number of runs he plundered (317 runs), it is Afridi’s heroics in the last two matches that will go down in T20 world cup lore as the stuff of legends. In the semi-finals against South Africa, it was his belligerent fifty that propelled the score to 149 (without which Pakistan would almost certainly have lost), and then the confounding variations of his leg-spin bowling that started the destruction of the South African batsmen. He outplayed the South Africans, and his team simply had to back his performances, which they did splendidly.

Then, once inspired, there was no hating his charge. He was the most economical bowler in the final, going for just 20 of his 4 overs, and then sealed the game with another brutal fifty.

In fact, to understand Afridi’s impact fully, one has to look beyond the numbers. He has always been a scary proposition for opponents as a batsman, when on song, but he has been around forever and leading up to this tournament, some teams may have justifiably thought of him as a stale, overused and, in the current scenario, ineffective weapon. No one would have been losing sleep over him – after all, he hadn’t grown and matured like some of the others who had started with and even after him. But he had been in the shadows for a while, and no one really knew enough to back their outdated assumptions. By the time he came to the semi-finals, his credibility as a leg-spin bowler had gone up several fold, and from a ‘somewhat dangerous middle over bowler’, he had been elevated to ‘sub-continent magician.’ His batting, though, had still failed to impress.

In that context, and since he carries a well-earned reputation of losing his head at crucial times and playing suicidal strokes, what he achieved was staggering. He actually played two carefully planned, controlled innings that ended up being virtuoso blends of aggression and caution. However many outlandish possibilities one may have considered in recent years of cricket, ascribing such a performance to Afridi could not have been one of them. And that he chose the crunch of the world cup as the stage for perhaps the finest achievement of his career, only lifts his performance up a few notches.

Tilakaratne Dilshan

Dilshan has undoubtedly been the revelation of the season. Although he has been around for ten years now, the talent of this 32 year old never really took off on the kind of wheels that his contemporaries Jayawardene and Sangakkara found. He has been shoved up and down the batting line-up, pushed in and out of the squad, and at best been a quiet accumulator over the years. Not many, except ardent Sri Lankan fans, would even know that he has played 52 tests and 160 ODIs. The limelight never seemed destined to be his, till IPL 2009 came along. Now, 3 months later, he is the batting sensation everyone is talking about. He followed up a tremendous IPL, where he was one of the top run-getters, with a sensational world cup campaign. He ended up with 317 runs, more than 80 runs clear of Jacques Kallis at second place. Out of all these, his most imposing innings would have to be his merciless, single handed destruction of the West Indies in the semi-finals. He scored 96 (57) out of a team total of 158, and amassed a strike rate of 168.42 even as everyone else struggled to find the boundaries and push the scoring.

One wonders whether he is still ruing his fifth ball duck in the final. There could not have been a more dramatic anti-climax.

Ajantha Mendis

After he had a relatively quiet IPL, many observers might have thought that Ajantha Mendis’ honeymoon period was over, and opposing players were beginning to unravel his mysteries. However, that observation was blasted. Batting aggressively, preserving their wickets and understanding Mendis’ mysteries proved to be too steep an ask for most batsmen, and they simply buckled under the pressure. 12 wickets resulted at a miserly economy rate of 5.50

Lasith Malinga

Second in the deadly Lankan trio of unorthodox Ms (Mendis and Murali complete the list), Malinga may have lost the novelty factor with his strange round arm action, but he has picked up variations that have made him a genuine wicket taking bowler with established class. Apart from the fact that he is genuinely fast and can bowl scorching yorkers, he has also developed a slower full toss and slower bouncer, that proved to be equally lethal weapons. He too ended up with 12 wickets, at an impressive economy rate of 7.14

Muralitharan

Murali completes the list of Ms for the Sri Lankans, and the reason for their extra-ordinary success. Not much needs to be said about this master’s cricketing skills. He has been around for close to 20 years now, and he could probably play on for another 20 years without becoming an easier proposition for batsmen. Although he was not the most successful in the wickets column, his 9 came at a stifling economy rate of 5.85.

If you combine the achievements of the three Lankan bowlers, it makes for stunning figures: between them, they picked up 33 wickets in 7 matches, and their combined economy rates mean that their 12 overs cost no more than 73 runs at an average. So, opposing teams were generally 73-5 in these 12 overs! Do you need to look any further to understand why Sri Lanka achieved such stupendous success?