Bye Bevo

Michael Bevan (ODI avg. 53.58, runs per inning 35.26, strike rate 74.16) announced his retirement from all forms of cricket. He thus becomes eligible for a spot in the All-Star Book Cricket XI.

Unfortunately, there's no way he's going to get into a test side ahead of middle-order batsmen like Hussain, Martyn and Thorpe. Bevan was coolness personified in the one-day game, no target beyond him. Try arguing with 4510 runs from positions 5, 6 and 7 from 138 innings and 1725 runs from 45 innings in successful chases! In fact, Bevan was quite successful at #4 where Australia tried him at that position between 2000 and 2001. I wonder why they pushed him back to #5 or #6 after that. Bevan's poor showing in the 2003/04 VB Series involving India and Zimbabwe where he only made 195 runs, most of them against Zimbabwe, was perhaps the main reason he got dropped a series later.

But there's absolutely no way he's going to miss out on a spot in the one-day side which would probably read: Craig Wishart, Michael Slater/Nasser Hussain, Damien Martyn, Graham Thorpe, Michael Bevan (c), Chris Cairns, Heath Streak, Phil DeFreitas, Ridley Jacobs (wk), Venkatesh Prasad and Allan Donald.

That's a pathetic opening pair. I'm sure we'll see this side become much better after the 2007 World Cup.

Labels: bevan, book cricket, retire