95: Kapil Dev

131 matches. 5248 runs @ 31.05. 8 hundreds. Highest score 163. 434 wickets @ 29.65. Strike rate: 63.92. 23x 5wi.

17 years. Batting: 2x good. Bowling: 6x good. 5x excellent.

The discussion

Set against the shadow of the Cold War, in the 1980s the cricketing world bore witness to a showdown of its own — Kapil Dev, Sir Ian Botham, Sir Richard Hadlee and Imran Khan battling it out for the mantle of greatest allrounder of all time. It is a made-for-Netflix mini-series: interviews with teammates, opponents and more grainy YouTube montages than the number of hyphens and lists I have shamelessly shoe-horned into this opening paragraph.

As a teaser, let’s take a look at some key stats from the big four throughout their Test careers:

Sources: ESPNCricInfo, ESPNCricInfo, ESPNCricInfo, ESPNCricInfo, ESPNCricInfo, ESPNCricInfo

As a means of comparison, let’s look at the ‘Joe Average’ column — the (median[1]) performance of middle-order Test batters and first-change bowlers (the fifth column above) to see how the greats compare to having a dedicated batter or bowler at that position in the order.[2]

Let’s try to make some sense of all that by breaking it down a little. I started by giving the best result in the above table a score of 100, and the worst score a 0, then put the other scores somewhere in between depending on how close they were to the best or worst score (in the middle gets a 50). This is the same scoring mechanism I used to score the overall and average stats for StatRank.

Here are the results:

The first thing we notice is that Kapil Dev dominates the categories that benefit from longevity — most runs, most wickets, most 50s. Not surprising that he dominates those categories given he played the most Tests. That is a great achievement, but match-for-match, innings-by-innings, his contemporaries had more impact on the individual games that they played.

The climax of the made-for-Netflix special is the battle-royale for the record for most Test wickets. From 1986 until 1994, record changed hands no less than five times, all between the great allrounders. First Botham took over from Dennis Lillee to hold the record with 356, then Hadlee overtook Botham at 374. Then Botham took the record back and extended it to 383, before Hadlee went ahead again in 1988. But Kapil Dev’s longevity allowed him to overtake Sir Richard’s 431 in 1994, and retired shortly after with 434 wickets. That record stood until 2000 and has since almost doubled to an incredible 800 Test victims. Although held by spinners Warne and Murali in the decades since, Courtney Walsh, Glenn McGrath, Stuart Broad and most recently James Anderson have further extended the wicket-taking capabilities among the upper echelon of fast bowlers.

Can any of the current crop of Indian pacemen reach Kapil Dev’s landmark 434 Test wickets? Jasprit Bumrah is currently on track with 4.37 wickets per Test but, like all Indian seamers, he will have to overcome the challenges of both staying injury free and playing a significant proportion of his Tests in spin-friendly conditions. But who knows? With Ashwin so successful, and starting to overcome the perception that he is not suited to seam-friendly conditions (see: recent tour of Australia, and watch closely India in England August 2021) , and a battery of quicks that are arguably India's greatest collection of fast bowling talent, we might see Indian pitches favour swing and seam, rather than drift and spin. Stranger things have happened.

The final point on Kapil Dev is to note that he meant far more to Indian cricket than simply being a great allrounder. He was regarded as an inspirational captain who led them to their first ICC title - the 1983 ODI World Cup. He proved that good Indian fast bowlers could succeed in (and sometimes in spite of) Indian conditions, and has no doubt been a huge inspiration for the generations that have followed, with the likes of Zaheer Khan, Javagal Srinath and current heroes Jasprit Bumrah, Ishant Sharma and Mohammed Shami following in his footsteps.

The verdict

Kapil Dev is India's greatest fast bowler, and arguably their greatest allrounder too. Is he their greatest cricketer? I don’t believe so, but plenty have him in that conversation. So, why isn’t he ranked higher in this Hall of Fame?

Perhaps my view of Kapil Dev is impacted by a direct comparison to his peers. When compared with Hadlee, Botham and Imran Khan, Kapil ranked fourth, and by my points system he was some distance off third, almost exactly in between ‘Joe Average’ and Sir Ian Botham. That may seem harsh to Indian fans, and maybe I’m judging him against lofty standards. But such was the nature of the intense competition between allrounders in the 1980s that someone had to finish fourth. He boasts a positive plus/minus of +1.41, which once again means he was an outstanding cricketer, but that stat only has him sitting as the 12th ranked plus/minus allrounder among qualifying players.

Should he be higher in the list? Some would think so, but the 90s feels about right for me, given there is some distance between Kapil Dev and his cohort of all-time allrounders. Still one helluva cricketer, and whomever plays him in the Netflix series is a great chance to sweep the Bollywood awards that year.

In one word

Ground-breaker

Notes

1. I had a bet with my editor I could get to five hyphens in the opening paragraph. He took the unders. He won by one with a spelling correction of all-rounder. I call shenanigans. [ed: it is clearly allrounder - you owe me a pint]

2. I am not going to get all nerdy about why a median is a better measure of central tendency than the traditional mean, or average. If I do, I will lose what remains of my audience at this point. Suffice to say, I acquiesced to over 150 years of using the established method of batting and bowling averages, rather than re-inventing the wheel. I feel like every time I mention statistical methods, I will lose half my remaining audience (on average). See, there I go again!  

3. All Test batters who have batted at 6 or 7 for more than 20 Tests, and all pace bowlers who bowled first change or later who played at least 20 Tests and took more than 75 wickets (to remove part-timers).

Bio

Record

Sources: ESPN CricInfo