Finding cricket's premier player

So who, right now, is the planet's prime perpetrator of flannelled folly? The main trouble with responding to that question - and only when Don Bradman and Garry Sobers were at their peak could it be answered without fear of voluble contradiction - is our value system. Is Muttiah Muralitharan more important to Sri Lanka than Sachin Tendulkar is to India? Are runs more vital than wickets? Does captaincy trump both? Hang on, though, isn't it catches that win matches?

And yet we try - oh, how we try. According to the ICC Awards trumpeted with due pomp and circumstance in Bangalore last week, the World Player of the Year, the current numero uno, is Tendulkar, who gained the nod over Hashim Amla, Virender Sehwag, Dale Steyn and Graeme Swann for his performances across all formats. Each and every member of this melodious quintet, however, owes at least 80% of his standing to his accomplishments in one particular area of expertise. You could go a step further and cite Sehwag as the most exhilarating cricketer, the one likeliest to persuade promoters, as they did with WG Grace, that his very presence would justify bumping up the admission price, but is even that enough?

The constancy of the pattern can be seen in previous ICC Player of the Year winners such as Rahul Dravid (2004), Jacques Kallis (2005), Ricky Ponting (2006 and 2007) and Shivnarine Chanderpaul (2008). The only exceptions are Mitchell Johnson, whose victory last year was, at a rough estimate, 70% attributable to his wickets, and Andrew Flintoff, who shared the crown with Kallis on the back of a near one-man Ashes-snatching summer and remains the only victor for whom bat and ball were anywhere near equal in inspiration.

Given that comparing a saxophonist's lips to a cellist's fingers and a singer's lungs is an endless but ultimately pointless exercise, nobody debates the identity of the globe's pre-eminent musician. Nor its foremost biochemist, its leading expert on 19th-century Austrian soft cheese, or its most talented taxidermist. Not seriously, no, because, however many polls are conducted or opinions proffered, there can never be any proof.

Being a man-made world, and hence allergic to uncertainty, sport is different because it seeks to make the subjective objective. Sport has statistics, crunchable numbers that can be deployed to settle all manner of trivial disputes, sometimes for better, occasionally for worse, almost always for amusement. Individual sports - most notably tennis - are easier to be definitive about: few would argue that Rafa Nadal does not warrant his place at the top of the ATP rankings, measured as it is by points gleaned directly from measurable commodities: victories and losses The number of successful back-hand passing shots or breathtaking lob retrievals, attack and defence, is irrelevant.

Team sports are a more complex kettle of cod. How do you decide who has contributed most to a victory? Judging by some recent decisions, being named Man of the Match, as Zaheer Khan was, ahead of VVS Laxman, in last week's Mohali Test, is not necessarily the most reliable gauge. While soccer's chief awards make no distinction between forwards and defenders, and rugby union refuses to distinguish between wingers and flankers, Major League Baseball wisely divides its premier gongs: there is one open to everyone (Most Valuable Player) and one exclusively for pitchers (the Cy Young award), though it is possible to win both (then again, the jury is comprised exclusively of pressmen). The ICC awards committee would be well advised to emulate Dubai's own genre-driven ranking system, which separates flat-track bullies from pie chuckers.

As it stands, being the best cricketer, the top banana, as opposed to merely the best batsman, bowler or fielder, should therefore be a measure of breadth as much as quality. The closest to a complete set of objective criteria I have come across are the FTI MVP rankings, which assess England and county thoroughbreds across all formats throughout the season, based on a cumulative points system that rewards every run, wicket and catch.

A credit to the imagination and persistence of Jason "Ratters" Ratcliffe, the much-admired assistant chief executive of the Professional Cricketers Association, the weekly rankings, initially mocked by sceptics such as myself, until the inner workings were revealed, have quickly become an indispensable guide to form. The rationale ought to stir few objections. Batting points are based on runs scored plus the percentage contribution to the team total, with bonus points for centuries, achieving a benchmark run-rate, and for scoring more than 30% of the collective score. Bowlers gain points according to their victim's position in the opposing order, and bonus points by achieving a benchmark economy rate, five-fors and maidens. Fielders garner points for catches, run-outs and stumpings, with bonus points for five dismissals in an innings. All members of a winning team, furthermore, receive a bonus, and additional bonus points are awarded to the victorious captain. So far, so persuasive.

Swann, to no great astonishment, leads the national team rankings. This season's county winner was Neil Carter, Warwickshire's durable South African, whose left-arm swing and table-setting swashbuckling saw him beat Adil Rashid into second place : the same Yorkshire bowler-batsman whom the England selectors somehow saw fit to overlook when selecting their 30 winter tourists. Outstanding as Alfonso Thomas and Marcus Trescothick, Somerset's sharpest sabres, were with ball and bat respectively, neither proved sufficiently rounded to challenge the two allrounders.

Nevertheless, while the ICC is hereby advised to adopt the FTI rankings as soon as humanly possible, we are no nearer establishing the identity of the game's premier player. How, then, do we resolve such a conundrum? Dipping into the past might not be the worst idea.

SUPERFICIALLY AT LEAST, there is something rather quaint about single-wicket cricket. As may readily be gleaned from the fact that in Ambridge, fictional location for The Archers, England's longest-running radio or TV show, an annual single-wicket competition is played for the Mark Hebden Memorial Trophy.

Once upon a time, in fact, the cricket-as-duel format was more popular than the 11-a-side version, being especially popular among gamblers at London's Artillery Ground during the mid-18th century. Indeed, legend has it that it was a single-wicket match in May 1775 that prompted the introduction of the middle stump. On three occasions, Edward "Lumpy" Stevens beat John Small but saw the ball pass between the two stumps without troubling the bails; Lumpy's furious protests persuaded the organisers to agree that the wicket should be augmented.

Alfred Mynn and Nicholas Felix were at the heart of the revival of single-wicket contests in the 19th century, when the seeds of the north-south rivalry were sown, according to AA Thomson, by the mano e mano duels between Fuller Pilch and "Marsden of Sheffield", but then the gamblers began to sniff a killing, match-fixing spread virulently and the format went into seemingly terminal decline. Enthusiasts remained, such as EV Lucas, who was fond of telling the possibly apocryphal story of a match between a pair of 80-somethings. Exhausted after dismissing his opponent for 12, one combatant staggered to the pavilion, bemoaning his age, only to be declared the winner after the other octogenarian bowled 13 wides at the unattended stumps.

The 1960s saw a brief revival when the English counties staged an annual knockout event, sponsored by a major brewery and staged initially at Scarborough, where Barry Knight won in front of a crowd of 20,000, and subsequently at a somewhat lesser-packed Lord's. Participants, including guests such as Garry Sobers, the 1967 winner, had a maximum of eight overs to bat and bowl, abetted by nine fielders from the MCC groundstaff and backed up by high-class keepers such as JT Murray and Bob Taylor.

Nineteen-sixty-eight brought the first national championship in Pakistan - Mohammad Siddique defeated Ijaz Hussain - as well as a double-wicket variation, World Cricket (Doubles), staged in Australia on three consecutive weekends two months later, the winners Sobers and Wes Hall. In the last Charrington final, in August 1969, Keith Boyce walloped 84 from 46 balls, then had Brian Bolus caught second ball, thus highlighting the main shortcoming: the potential brevity of it all. At Lord's three years earlier, Clive Radley skipped out to his first ball from Fred Titmus and missed, leaving his Middlesex captain to seal a two-ball victory.

So is a renaissance for this revealing sideshow possible, or even desirable? In the interests of pure entertainment, I don't see why not. Yes, the possibilities for match-fixers would be multiplied, yet the nature of the ego of the successful professional sportsman is such that one would expect a renewed desire among the participants not to submit without a fight. Yes, the final could be settled during an ad break, but let's not be discouraged by that.

It might be as antithetical to cricket's essential collectivism as the Ryder Cup is to golf's rampant individualism, but then the latter, as a spectacle, is a far better team game than it is in its customary incarnation. Just think of the fun and frolics cricket could have if it turned itself inside out.

Imagine Sehwag scrapping with Tendulkar, Daniel Vettori pitting his wits and wiles against Shane Watson's, Shakib-al-Hasan mixing it with Mohammad Amir, Johnson going toe-to-toe with Stuart Broad, MS Dhoni gloving it out with Mark Boucher. What a pity AB de Villiers and Paul Collingwood won't be able to help themselves out with any slip catches.