5 Most Selfish Innings In The History Of ODI Cricket: Cricket is not an individual sport, but cricketers, at times, play in a certain way to get to personal milestones, while undermining the fact their approach might hurt the team in the longer run.
Here are five such innings which can be termed a little bit “unselfish” considering the way they were played:
David Warner (CB series final, 2012)
Warner, otherwise, is a very fluent player and scores at a brisk pace, but in this particular match against Sri Lanka, he took 140 deliveries to complete his hundred which was very surprising.
It can, at times, happen that even fluent players score slow, but that generally happens when the pitch is tough for batting. However, on the same pitch, the Australian captain Michael Clarke scored 117 off just 91 balls. So, Warner’s approach was hard to understand.
Michael Vandort (VB Series, 2006)
This was the first and last game of Michael Vandort’s One Day International career and the way he played, nobody was shocked that he was never picked to play for Sri Lanka again.
Sri Lanka was chasing down a huge target of 319 runs against Australia and Vandort batted at a strike rate of less than 50. His 48 off 117 balls went a long way in ensuring that Sri Lanka didn’t get anywhere close to Australia’s total.
Jacques Kallis (ODI World Cup, 2007)
Jacques Kallis was someone who was the sheet-anchor in the South African batting line-up, but when South Africa was chasing 378 against Australia in a match of the 2007 World Cup, Kallis was expected to score at a quicker rate.
Kallis, however, batted pretty slow during that chase as well and scored just 48 runs off 63 balls. As it turned out eventually, South Africa couldn’t even cross 300.
Sunil Gavaskar (ODI World Cup, 1975)
This was probably the most bizarre knock in the history of ODI cricket. It was the first-ever ODI World Cup and India were chasing a target of 335 runs in 60 overs in a match against West Indies.
But never at any stage did India even attempt to win the match. Not only Gavaskar batted at an incredibly slow rate, but the whole team also adopted the same approach.
India scored 132 runs in 60 overs at the loss of 3 wickets, while Gavaskar remained not out on 36 runs off 174 balls.
Ravi Shastri (ODI World Cup, 1992)
This knock was played at a time when a strike rate of 60 or 70 was good enough for ODI cricket, but even if you consider those standards, Shastri’s knock was still incredibly slow in the 1992 World Cup game against New Zealand as he scored 25 runs off 67 balls.
The target for India in that game was 238 runs, which was then later revised to 236 in 47 overs because of rain interruption.
India went very close to the target and eventually lost the game by just 9 runs. Who knows what would have happened if Shastri had scored a little quicker?
