The best ODI finisher ever! Bevan or MSD

AHA! Now you decide if he is Australian or Indian-> my friends would say. I had planned to write the article after Dhoni retires. But I can’t bear to wait any longer. Mirror Mirror on the wall. Who is the best finisher of them all? Well, aside from all that, the only real contestants who are called the greatest one-day cricket finishers of all time are Michael Bevan and Mahendra Singh Dhoni. No, don’t make the mistake of comparing them as cricketers because Dhoni with his versatility will win hands down. Just compare them as ODI finishers. That’s what I’m going to do today. I came up with some interesting facts and statistics while I was doing it.

Let’s first list some deserving candidates even if they are not in the same league as these two specialists. Some of them are Lance Kluesner, Virat Kohli, Sachin Tendulkar, Mike Hussey, AB De Villiers and VIA Richards, arguably the greatest one-day hitter of all time. He and Sachin will say no, we don’t need a finisher. We can finish the match long before the overs are completed with the resources available at the other end. But that’s another story and another breed of hitter.

By finisher do we mean a batsman who doesn’t stay out at the end when an inning ends? No. I mean the hitter who finished the game and won it for his team is the best finisher. In most cases, such an inning will result in the batsman not being eliminated at the end. But there are plenty of innings where the batter was pretty much done before he came out. Sachin Tendulkar in Sharjah in 1998 against Australia played two magical innings of the century, one to propel India to the final and the second to win the final for India. He went out in both interiors. But he was a top-level finisher and did the job for his country very effectively. And this is where Bevan and Dhoni come into the picture. They made a real difference when it mattered most to their teams. And they did it many times. This fact alone leaves clear daylight between them and the others.

The best qualities of MS Dhoni is that he is calm about everything when everyone in the stadium and watching the game on television is about to have a heart attack. This was also the case for Michael Bevan. But Bevan had solid hitters who were with him during his time, like the Waugh brothers, Damien Martyn, etc. Dhoni also benefited from these batsmen at the other end, but more towards the end of his career. Both were standout runners among the wickets. More than that, they were excellent racing judges. They knew when to turn a single into a two and a two into a three, and also when not to take chances. This greatly increased the pressure on the opposition. Not only did the limits keep coming, but the race between the wickets killed the match for the opposition.

One area where Dhoni excels is hitting the big shots. He can hit sixes and Bevan, on the other hand, wasn’t much of a hitter. He could hit if he had to, but not with the same consistency as Dhoni. That, in my opinion, is the real difference between the two. Bevan has won as many games for his team as Dhoni did but with stroking and shoving instead of Dhoni’s controlled punch. A finisher needs temperament and they both had it. I’m saying “were” even though Dhoni is still around. But I think we’ve seen the best of him.

Most Indians will point to his career shooting rate to tip the scales in Dhoni’s favour, but Bevan played in a slightly different era where batsmen didn’t score at the same rate as today apart from the Tendulkars, Waughs and Laura, obviously. And the teams didn’t rack up the same totals as today, either. So this stat doesn’t do Bevan justice. They both have excellent batting averages that are over 50. They absolutely killed the opposition with exquisite finishing. No matter how they did it, running or hitting, it was clinical.

Dhoni’s completion is all about his ability to do both: big punches and shoves and shoves and run like a jackrabbit. Furthermore, Dhoni played in an era when there was a lot of cricket being played and he had to fill multiple roles in T20, ODI, Tests and IPL. This is just devastating. Whereas Bevan played ODI cricket basically along with first class matches and a bit of test cricket. Definitely less stress than compared to modern cricketers like Dhoni. Maintaining fitness in such cases is very difficult. Dhoni has made it, but Bevan struggled towards the end of his career with a series of physical problems.

Michael Bevan won at number 4 or 5 when he engineered those big endings, while Dhoni at 5-6. This is mainly because Dhoni would take more risks than Bevan and because of his high wicket price, there must have been a tendency to push him down within the team’s management, although this is conjecture. Although Dhoni’s most famous innings, the 2011 world cup final, had him playing at number 4. It was exciting to see the great cricketer clinically finish the final with poise. And he ended it all with a six. That was like putting an exclamation mark on the match and the world cup!

Most of the deadly cricketers in this world panic when the difference between the number of balls left and the runs to get starts to get out of control, but not these two. It was just amazing to see them stay calm and do their jobs as if they were everyday chores. What these guys are made of can be seen with a finish that no one else can replicate so many times. Many great cricketers have graced the game and many of them have played a stellar role in the victory of their teams. But finish matches victorious for their teams so many times? No, nobody! These two just can’t be beat at it.

Bevan was part of two world cup winning squads in 1999 and 2003. It is noteworthy that Australia were at the top of their game when playing ODI cricket and were at their best. Dhoni won the only ODI WC victory for India in 2011, although he is still playing and I am sure he is considering the 2019 world cup as his last hurrah.

Bevan has the highest batting average for a retired ODI cricketer of 53.58 while Dhoni is averaging 51.37 at the moment and will finish around 50. This also does not indicate any clear advantage for Bevan because Dhoni would take more risks and as a result have a better hit rate than Bevan, who will have a slightly better average. They both played and won games playing tail-enders and many times. Words cannot describe how amazing it was to watch these men do it over and over again.

Another critical point that goes against Dhoni is the fields in which he played. Bevan played on big Australian wickets that make hitting sixes difficult, while Dhoni batted at a time when the game was tailor-made for batsmen and in Indian conditions that have always been friendly to batsmen. Although Bevan hails from an era of Australian domination where the team was on a roll, Dhoni broke the Indian habit of being poor chasers. That is really his greatest achievement for his country. Not a minor achievement let me tell you as I have watched Indian cricket since the 1980s and this had become a minor crisis back then.

VERDICT

I have taken pains not to compare them as cricketers in general and talk about Dhoni’s captaincy or Bevan’s spin bowling with his left arm. They were like bonuses for their teams. I’m also not going to discuss Bevan’s test record, as again that’s irrelevant to the topic. You can compare his stats all you want, all day. You will find that they balance each other out in the end. But despite all things considered, I still can’t ignore the huge difference in strike rate. It’s 15 points and I think that’s the real and telling difference. Need I say more?

You may also like...

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *