Muralitharan and the all-time best ODI bowlers

The Sri Lankan spin legend takes a bow from Test cricket finishing as the highest wicket-taker in the history of the sport. Our expert reflects on where Murali stands among the bowling greats in ODIs.

Two weeks ago, Muttiah Muralitharan announced his decision to retire from Test cricket. In the five day version of the game, Murali is arguably the greatest bowler of all time. He is well ahead of the pack in the wickets column and has a better average and strike-rate than his closest competitor Shane Warne. In ODIs though, there’s a lot more fuel for debate. Akram’s overall numbers are comparable to Murali; McGrath has a better average and Pollock a better economy rate. To identify the greatest, I decided to create a snapshot of how the world’s best bowlers stack up against each other.

Having spent some time working as a strategic consultant, I did what all consultants do to find the answer to a question - create a complex graph. Leonardo da Vinci had the Mona Lisa, Mozart had the Marriage of Figaro; for a cricket-crazed columnist obsessed with numbers, the pinnacle of my artistic achievements is creating a bubble chart of the world’s best ODI bowlers. A little explanation of what this bubble chart represents; if you have been lucky enough to have worked in a job that involves the word ‘strategy’ or ‘business development’ then you can avoid the explanation. And yes, I italicized lucky for a reason! The X-axis is a bowler’s average, the Y-axis is a bowler’s economy rate and the size of the bubble represents number of wickets. Since the best have low averages and low economy rates, the greatest bowlers fall at the bottom left of the graph with the biggest bubbles, while the good-but-not-so- great will fall at the top right with the smallest bubbles. Bowlers with 250 or more wickets in ODIs are considered.

So there’s the graph, which tells a pretty clear picture of who the best bowlers are.  The players on the top right- Jayasuriya, Afridi, Kallis, Razzaq, Kumble and Vettori- are all good bowlers but not in the league of the very best. That’s not surprising since most of these guys are all-rounders, Kumble is the only pure bowler in here. On the top left, are the wicket-takers who got breakthroughs, but couldn’t keep batsmen tied down. Waqar, Lee and Ntini make up this list - all of them had great strike-rates with a wicket about every 30 balls. But they also had economy rates in excess of four and a half, which is why they are no Usain Bolts in the all-time best race. Right in the middle of the chart are the likes of Agarkar, the least economical bowler on the list, Srinath, Vaas, Warne and Kapil Dev. Kapil is probably India’s best ODI bowler coming closest to bottom left of the graph.

That brings us down to the top six. The oft underrated Saqlain Mushtaq is at the back of the list. With an average of 21.78, he’s tied with Allan Donald for the best average on this list. What made Donald better and puts him in fifth is his better economy rate. The top four are hard to tell apart as the table below indicates.

McGrath’s bubble is the most bottom left on the graph indicating he’s the got the best eco rate and average combination. Despite having taken fewer wickets than Akram and Murali, the numbers suggest McGrath is the best ODI bowler of all time. Murali edges out Akram for second, while Pollock is fourth - he is the most miserly but loses out by a bigger margin on the averages. The four of them should be automatic selections in an all-time ODI XI. Who else would be on that team? That’s a story (and a graph) for another day!