Laxman, Steyn, Tendulkar win ESPNcricinfo awards
VVS Laxman and Dale Steyn have won the top awards in the fourth annual ESPNcricinfo Awards, announced in Bangalore today. The other winners were Sachin Tendulkar, Umar Gul, Michael Hussey and Tim Southee.
Laxman won the Test batting award for his 96 on a seaming pitch in Durban, while Steyn took the bowling prize for his 7 for 51 against India in Nagpur on a flat batting track. That both players overcame unfavourable conditions and led their teams to historic wins was important in their beating some impressive competition. That the two Test winners emerged from India's series home and away against South Africa is a validation of the growing importance of the rivalry between the two teams, the top-ranked sides in Tests.
The one-day batting award also went to a performance from an India-South Africa game: Sachin Tendulkar's remarkable unbeaten double-hundred in Gwalior, the first in the 40-odd years of the existence of the format. A performance that Kepler Wessels, one of the members of ESPNcricinfo's awards jury described as "the perfect one-day innings", it brought Tendulkar his second consecutive win in the category. He won last year for his monumental 175 in a lost cause against Australia. Tendulkar's innings was run close by Abdul Razzaq's hyper-violent 109, which took his side to a win against South Africa after they were nine down and needed 30 runs to win.
Also winning his second award in two years was Umar Gul, last year's Twenty20 bowling winner, who took the ODI prize for 2010 for his 6 for 42, which undid England's modest chase of 242 at The Oval.
In Twenty20, Tim Southee's five-wicket burst in nine balls, which included a hat-trick - New Zealand's second in the format - at tiny Eden Park was the jury's overwhelming favourite for the bowling award. Michael Hussey's "freak" of a 60 in the World Twenty20 semi-final, which one of the judges, Ramiz Raja, called "the greatest Twenty20 knock of all time", beat Brendon McCullum's century, only the second in Twenty20 internationals, to the batting prize. Hussey's was a death-defying innings in which he scored 22 off the last four balls to drag Australia from a point of no hope against Pakistan into the tournament final.
Besides Ramiz and Wessels, the jury included former internationals Ian Chappell, Tony Greig, Geoff Boycott, Sanjay Manjrekar and Martin Crowe, and ESPNcricinfo's senior editors. The jurors picked their top three performances in each category out of shortlists compiled by the site's editorial staff. Each performance ranked No. 1 got five points, while Nos. 2 and 3 got three points and one respectively.
Tendulkar's and Gul's performances were ranked No. 1 by 10 jury members, Steyn's by eight and Laxman's 96 by five. The voting for Laxman was marked by dissent over what his best performance of the year was: three of his innings featured in the Test batting shortlist, the most by any player in a single category in the history of the awards. His 73 against Australia in Mohali, where he batted through back spasms to lead India to a one-wicket win, was picked by three jurors as their No. 2 and by one as the No. 1. Alastair Cook's Ashes double-century got four No. 1 votes.
Laxman's innings divided ESPNcricinfo's readers, too, who were invited to vote for their favourite performances of the year: his Mohali innings got just 871 more votes than his Durban one. The readers concurred with the jurors in all other categories except Twenty20 batting, where Suresh Raina's World Twenty20 century got nearly 40% of the total votes polled.