INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the latest installment in my “100 cricketers” series. In this post we look at the remaining batters from our sixth XI. The introductory post to to the whole series can be found here, the post in which I introduce the sixth XI here, and the most recent post in the series here. Just before I get to the main meat of this post there is a piece of cricket news from today…

ENGLAND WOMEN SWEEP T20 SERIES IN SRI LANKA WITH A DOMINANT DISPLAY

The England women had already secured a 3-0 whitewash in the ODI series, and this morning they made the scoreline in the T20 series the same. Having chased successfully twice they batted first this time, and scored 204-2 from their 20 overs, Amy Jones (of whom more in my next post) scored 57 off 38 balls, Danielle Wyatt 51 off 33, Natalie Sciver 49 not out off 24 and Tammy Beaumont 42 not out off 25, with five extras completing the total. Sri Lanka were then restricted to 108-6 in reply, giving a winning margin of 96 runs (absolutely huge in this form of the game). Everyone who was asked to bowl contributed, although left-arm slow bowler Linsey Smith was a little expensive, taking 1-33 from her four overs. Freya Davies with 1-12 from her four was the most economical bowler, while Kate Cross with 2-20 from her four was alone in taking more than one wicket. Laura Marsh (1-17 from 3) and Heather Knight (1-13 from 3) also got wickets while Wyatt bowled 2 overs for 7 runs. A scorecard can be viewed here and an official report here. Now to our main business, starting with…

VIRAT KOHLI

77 Test matches to date have yielded him 6,613 runs at 57.26, 227 ODIs have produced 10,843 runs at 59.57 and 67 T20Is have produced 2263 runs at 50.28, making unquestionably the best batter across the formats in world cricket today. With Steven Smith yet to return to international cricket after serving his ban for involvement in a cheating scandal only Joe Root of England and Kane Williamson of New Zealand are close to him for performing in all formats. Although I have made him captain of this XI I have reservations about him in this area, having not been impressed when England beat India 4-1 last summer. However, the only other person in this XI whos been a long term captain is Courtney Walsh, and there are often problems with specialist fast bowlers as captains, so I stuck with him, although I did briefly consider bestowing the captaincy on off-spinning all-rounder Deepti Sharma who will feature in the next post in this series. 

HARMANPREET KAUR

Harmanpreet (note that Kaur is a middle name shared by all Sikh women – it means princess, and her actual full name is Harmanpreet Kaur Bhullar) like so many of the women has not had the opportunities in test matches (she has played twice in this format), but her records in ODIs and T20s are both good, and a best score of 171 not out indicates that she does know how to play a big innings. 

CHLOE TRYON

The big hitting South African (71 sixes in all forms of international cricket) is still only 25, so should still be improving as player. Although it is a middle order batter that she is in this squad she does bowl occasional left-arm medium fast as well. With Jayasuriya, Sidhu, Kohli and Harmanpreet as well as the all-rounders who we will look at next, and and an awesome bowling line-up to defend whatever the XI manage to score we can well afford the presence of a bit of a wild card.

PHOTOGRAPHS

I sign off in my usual fashion…