Sachin Tendulkar has been named Wisden’s Leading Cricketer in the World for the first time to mark a phenomenal year in which he became the first player to reach 50 Test hundreds. He is the third successive Indian player to win the coveted award, following Virender Sehwag who took the award in the previous two years.
The 148th edition of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, published on Thursday, has a nastier surprise in store for Australia. Influenced by their home defeat to England in the Ashes series, there is no Australian in Wisden’s World Test XI. Wisden finds room for only two Englishmen, Graeme Swann and Jimmy Anderson, and includes five Indians.
Alastair Cook’s Wisden snub continues. Cook, who made 766 runs in the Ashes series at an average of 127.66, was overlooked as one of Wisden’s Cricketers of the Year because the award concentrates on achievements in the English season. He is also omitted from the World Test XI as Wisden opts for a blistering opening combination of Sehwag and the Bangladesh batsman Tamim Iqbal.
Tendulkar, who began the month as part of the Indian team that won the World Cup in his home city of Mumbai, which he described as the proudest moment of his career, is in some of the richest form of his career at the age of 37. In 2010 he made more than 1,500 Test runs and seven Test centuries. He also became the first player to hit a double century in a one-day international.
Scyld Berry, in his fourth and final year as the Almanack’s editor, said of England’s Ashes victory that it was “hard to think of a sizeable human organisation that has come closer to perfection for a couple of months than England’s cricket team during the Ashes”.
Wisden Test XI
1 Virender Sehwag (India), 2 Tamim Iqbal (Bangladesh), 3 Kumar Sangakkara (Sri Lanka), 4 Sachin Tendulkar (India), 5 Jacques Kallis (South Africa), 6 VVS Laxman (India), 7 Mahendra Singh Dhoni (India, capt & wk), 8 Graeme Swann (England), 9 Dale Steyn (South Africa), 10 Zaheer Khan (India), 11 James Anderson (England)
With www.guardian.co.uk input
