The bowlers who travelled to us from the future
Batters are often celebrated for being ahead of their time. We need the time-travelling bowlers to get their due.
Jacques Kallis is one of the greatest cricketers to have ever lived, but he was not a cricketer ahead of his time.
A case could be made for Kallis being amongst the ten best Test batters in history, who was a formidable fifth bowling option too. As far as all-rounders go, only Garry Sobers and Imran Khan have claims of outshining him. His bowling numbers might flatter on paper, given how he played his home cricket in South Africa - but that very fact makes his batting averages look other-worldly.
The South African all-round behemoth was adjudged the best male cricketer of the 21st century by ESPNcricinfo. While that could be debatable, what is not up for debate is Kallis being a bonafide legend of the game, and a sureshot entrant to the all-timers list.
What he’s not, though, is a time-traveller. Definitely not. He didn’t play the game as if he had arrived from the future. If anything, he was aligned with the times that he played in, and some might even refute that statement if they have T20 batting on their minds.
We often speak of, or read about, batters who were ahead of their time.
Victor Trumper activated the on-side with his cross-batted shots, Viv Richards was a ball striking anomaly, AB de Villiers introduced 360-degree play, and Adam Gilchrist changed the role of a wicketkeeper-batter forever.
Then you have the blitzy trio of Sanath Jayasuriya, Shahid Afridi, and Andrew Symonds, who could give you crucial overs with the ball as well. Had they been born a decade later, they would have enjoyed the most lucrative T20 contracts that billionaire franchise owners could offer.
More recently, we have seen someone like Abhishek Sharma going hell for leather in T20 cricket with unimaginable consistency. As of today, there exists a 15-year-old boy from Bihar who is making Abhishek look like antiquity faster than you can fully pronounce Sooryavanshi.
All of these names played cricket ingested with intent pills, and were, or are, ahead of their time. But none of them earned their time-traveller tag because of their bowling skills. Batriarchy is still the one principle that rules us all.
But bowlers form one half of cricket. And a fair few of them have displayed wizardry straight out of a time machine, over the last nearly 150 years of Test cricket.
