The best ODI finisher of all time! Bevan or MSD
AHA! Now you decide if he is Australian or Indian-> my friends would say. I had planned to write the article after Dhoni retires. But I can’t bear to wait any longer. Mirror Mirror on the wall. Who is the best finisher of all of them? Well, apart from all that, the only real contestants who are called the best one-day cricket finalists of all time are Michael Bevan and Mahendra Singh Dhoni. No, don’t make the mistake of comparing them as cricketers because Dhoni with his versatility will win hands down. Just compare them as ODI finishers. That’s what I’m going to do today. Some interesting facts and statistics occurred to me while doing so.
Let’s first list some deserving candidates even if they are not in the same league as these two specialists. Some of them are Lance Kluesner, Virat Kohli, Sachin Tendulkar, Mike Hussey, AB De Villiers and VIA Richards, arguably the greatest one-day hitter of all time. He and Sachin will say no, we don’t need a finisher. We can finish the match long before the overs are complete with the resources available at the other end. But that’s another story and another breed of hitter.
By runner-up do we mean a batter who doesn’t stay out at the end when an inning ends? No. I mean the batter who finished the game and won it for his team is the better finisher. In most cases, such an inning will result in the batter not being out at the end. But there are plenty of innings where the batter was pretty much done before he came out. Sachin Tendulkar in Sharjah in 1998 against Australia played two magical century innings, one to propel India to the final and the second to win the final for India. He came out on both insides. But he was a finisher of the highest order and did the job for his country very effectively. And this is where Bevan and Dhoni come into the picture. They made a real difference when it mattered most to their teams. And they did it many times. This fact alone leaves clear daylight between them and others.
The best qualities of MS Dhoni is that he is calm with everything when everyone in the stadium and watching the game on TV is about to have a heart attack. This was also the case with Michael Bevan. But Bevan had solid hitters accompanying him during his time, like the Waugh brothers, Damien Martyn, etc. Dhoni also benefited from these batsmen at the other end, but more towards the end of his career. Both were outstanding runners between the wickets. More than that, they were excellent race judges. They knew when to turn a single into a two and a two into a three, and also when not to take chances. This greatly increased the pressure on the opposition. Not only did the limits keep coming, but the race between the wickets killed the match for the opposition.
One area where Dhoni excels is big shots. He can hit sixes and Bevan, on the other hand, wasn’t much of a hitter. He could hit if he had to, but not with the same consistency as Dhoni. That, in my opinion, is the real difference between the two. Bevan has won as many games for his team as Dhoni but with nuzzling and shoving instead of Dhoni’s controlled punch. A finisher needs temperament and they both had it. I’m saying “went” although Dhoni is still around. But I think we’ve seen the best of him.
Most Indians will point to his career hit rate to tip the scales in Dhoni’s favour, but Bevan played in a slightly different era where batsmen didn’t score at the same rate as they are today, apart from the Tendulkars, Waughs and Laura, obviously. And the teams didn’t rack up the same totals as they did today, either. So this statistic doesn’t do Bevan justice. They both have excellent batting averages that are over 50. They absolutely slayed the opposition with exquisite finishing. No matter how they did it, running or punching, it was clinical.
Dhoni’s finishing is all about his ability to do both: big punches and pushes and shoves and run like a hare. Also, Dhoni played in an era where a lot of cricket was played and had to play multiple roles in T20, ODI, Tests and IPL. This is just devastating. Whereas Bevan played ODI cricket basically along with first class matches and a bit of Test cricket. Definitely less stress than compared to modern cricketers like Dhoni. Maintaining physical shape in such cases is very difficult. Dhoni has made it, but Bevan struggled towards the end of his career with a series of physical problems.
Michael Bevan beat at number 4 or 5 when he engineered those grand finales, while Dhoni at 5-6. This is mainly because Dhoni would take more risks than Bevan and due to the high wicket price of him, there must have been a tendency to push him down within team management, although this is conjecture. Though Dhoni’s most famous innings, the 2011 world cup final, had him playing at number 4. It was thrilling to see the cricketing great finish the final with clinical aplomb. And he ended it all with a six. That was like putting an exclamation point on the match and the world cup!
Most of the mortal cricketers in this world panic when the difference between the number of balls left and the runs to get starts getting out of control, but not these two. It was just amazing to see them stay calm and do their job as if they were daily chores. What these guys are made of can be seen in a finish that no one else can repeat that many times. Many great cricketers have graced the game and many of them have played a star role in winning their teams. But finish victorious matches for your teams so many times? No, nobody! These two just can’t be beat on that.
Bevan was part of two world cup winning squads in 1999 and 2003. It is noteworthy that Australia were at the top of their game when playing ODI cricket and were in their prime. Dhoni won the only ODI WC victory for India in 2011, although he is still playing and I am sure he is considering the 2019 world cup as his last hurray.
Bevan has the highest batting average for a retired ODI cricketer of 53.58 while Dhoni is averaging 51.37 at the moment and will finish around 50. This also does not indicate any clear advantage for Bevan because Dhoni would take more risks and as a result have a better hit rate than Bevan, who will have a slightly better average. They both played and won matches playing tail-enders and many times. Words cannot describe how amazing it was to watch these men do it over and over again.
Another critical point that goes against Dhoni is the fields in which he played. Bevan played on big Australian wickets that make hitting sixes difficult, while Dhoni batted at a time when the game was tailor-made for batsmen and in Indian conditions that have always been batsman-friendly. Although Bevan hails from an era of Australian dominance when the team was on a roll, Dhoni broke the Indian habit of being bad hunters. That is really his greatest achievement for his country. Not a minor achievement let me tell you as I have watched Indian cricket since the 1980s and this had become a minor crisis back then.
VERDICT
I have tried hard not to compare them as general cricketers and talk about Dhoni’s captaincy or Bevan’s left-arm spin bowling. They were like bonuses for their teams. I’m also not going to discuss Bevan’s test record, as again that’s irrelevant to the topic. You can compare his stats all you want, all day. You will find that they balance each other out in the end. But despite all things considered, I still can’t ignore the huge difference in strike rate. It’s 15 points and I think that’s the real and revealing difference. Need I say more?