Mark Richardson on Jacques Kallis

First topic message reminder :

Pretty good opinion piece by Rigor.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/cricket/news/article.cfm?c_id=29&objectid=10788045

A fellow South African, welcome Protea my ou maat. I have been fighting the good fight, but alas, when enough people say no, the others all believe it.

biltongbek wrote:A fellow South African, welcome Protea my ou maat. I have been fighting the good fight, but alas, when enough people say no, the others all
believe it.

You have big old shoulders, biltong

Might be true, Stella, but the weight of the world does weigh heavily upon them.

biltongbek wrote:A fellow South African, welcome Protea my ou maat. I have been fighting the good fight, but alas, when enough people say no, the others all believe it.

Lol - Got to stick up for one of Cape Towns finest sons

If you want a player to watch you pick sobers, richards etc. If you want a player you can always rely on - you pick Kallis dravid, Walsh etc etc etc. Like young flintoff - excellent to watch but probably the most overated player i've ever seen apart from afridi. Kallis is the opposite - usually quite a bore to watch and quite probably the most underappreciated player. I imagine he'll get his plaudits post career when South african batting lineup starts looking flimsy for a bit. My favourite Kallis moment - when he overran the ball and twist-dived backwards about 7 oclock and caught out afridi. Greatest catch i've ever seen.

Biltong / Protea

It's a fair point that some players are hyped more heavily because of their nationality - the Aussies for one are good at talking up their players. Others, such as South Africa (and New Zealand) don't have quite the same profile.

Kallis has been one of the best 4 or 5 batsmen over the last 15 years, but along with Dravid, his style and profile have been somewhat out-shone by more high-profile but not necessarily more effective contemporaries. Of course, you also need to add in the fact that for most of his career he was good enough to act as the third seamer for SA, and was ranked in the top 10 of bowlers in Tests. Because of this, and his quality as a slip fielder, he's been the finest all-round cricketer of the recent past and right up there along with the legend that is Sobers as a batting all rounder.

I can accept that dummy_half.

But sadly, after that build up, he's just been dismissed for 6....

I still got that bloody curse on me. Sorry Saffers but Kallis is the crappest player i've ever seen, cant bat, cant bowl cant field.

ShahenshahG wrote:I still got that bloody curse on me. Sorry Saffers but Kallis is the crappest player i've ever seen, cant bat, cant bowl cant field.

Kallis's bowling being missed

Hello everyone. Just dropping by on 606v2 to give my thoughts...

Biltong I have to admit that I've overlooked Kallis quite a lot as well. So I thought I'd do some digging to see why.

Kallis has scored 42 Test hundreds. He twice scored two hundreds in a match, meaning that there were 40 Tests in which he scored a hundred.

Only 4 of them were against Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, so you can't really accuse him of getting easy runs.

In terms of big scores, he passed 150 13 times and has only twice gone on to double centuries - so there's a possibility that most of the hundreds weren't "memorable".

I know that for a lot of his career, his strike-rate didn't make much news to most, but quite frankly, this is Test cricket we're talking about. Innings shouldn't have to be sprints.

But I did find a good reason why his rating hasn't been higher - in 28 Tests he scored 28 of those 42 hundreds when someone else on his team ALSO scored a hundred. And in the bulk of cases, the teammate actually made a higher score than Kallis.

So I think this is why I never put Kallis in with the all-time greats - until the last couple of years, very few of his hundreds stood out in the innings or match. Most of the time, when he has scored a hundred, it's been part of a great team effort to get a high team score.

Good work, Bulioli, I wasn't aware of the scoring hundreds when teammates have stat.

Bulioli, thanks for the feed back mate.

Duty281 wrote:

Stella wrote:

Duty281 wrote:Can I just point something out:

Kallis Batting Average in Tests is 57.01
Tendulkar Batting Average in Tests is 55.44

Put simply, I rate Kallis as a better batsmen than the very very overrated Tendulkar.

Is that based on your observations rather than an average?

Yes. Tendulkar plays the majority of his tests on the Subcontinent where it's flat as a pancake and Kallis simply doesn't.

The same tracks where batsmen from outside Asia struggle most of the times?

Kallis actually averages more in India than he does overall.

His stats in India:
15 innings
760 runs
average 58,46
centuries 3
fifties 2

And I didn't talk about just Kallis in India though I know that he averages only about 35 in SL. I was just thinking about pitches being talked as flat in subcontinent.

His stats in Pakistan

9 innings
582 runs
average 83
centuries 3
fifties 2

His stats in the UAE
4 innings
323 runs
average 107.66
2 centuries
1 fifty

His stats in sri Lanka
10 innings
318 runs
average 35.33
fifties 3

If it wasn't for Sri Lanka I would have called him a flat trck bully myself.

So is Kallis the only player to have played in Asia? It is like saying Tendulkar is a flat track bully as he has done well on so called bowler friendly tracks of OZ and England.

Cricketfan, I think what Duty aims at, is if Kallies played more tests in Asia, based on his sucesses there his record would have been all the more impressive.

You can't argue with 38 innings, 8 centuries and 8 fifties, it is quite impressive.

He was also saying that in general tracks in the subcontinent are flat. It depends on the player as some may like those slow tracks and for some it may not suit them.

If Dravid or Mark Waugh had played more in England they would have had a higher average but that doesn't make all tracks in England flat.

There are always two sides to a coin, Kallis in most cases never gets the accolades he deserves, so if Duty (currently my personal hero) decides Kallis is in his opinion better than Tendulkar I am all for it.

It is only an opinion after all.

I didn't get into this Kallis v Tendulkar debate but just the generalization of every track in Asia being flat.

cricketfn, it is merely a perception built by media hype and continuous crititcism due to lower percentages of result tests.

In a sense it is true in comparison to other continents.

The same goes for a player is built up or brought down by media and that perception sticks around.

I'm not sure as in SL I believe more than 60% of the matches ends in a result. Pakistan may have flat tracks but not sure about SL.

It is a gerenal perception Cricketfan, often far removed from fact.

The reality is there isn't much you can do about it, unless you start your own media company to address these perceptions.