Who is the greatest cricketer of them all?

Cricket, as I am sure you may have noticed at some stage, is a team sport. You need several people, with different skills and abilities, to form a decent team. And then you need two such teams, sufficient officials and a plethora of support staff in order to have a respectable first-class match.

(Of course you need a stadium. And if that stadium is Eden Gardens, you need one more stadium.)

Within a team you need people with radically different skills. You need fast bowlers, slow bowlers, aggressive batsmen, defensive batsmen, one batsman from Tamil Nadu, wicketkeepers, allrounders, one captain, one vice-captain in case the captain is not in a position to call the toss; one tailender of questionable bowling ability and inconsistent batting ability, who will almost make you win a match in the form of a stunning comeback but not quite; one random fellow who will field in place of Sachin Tendulkar, who has strained something after the second ball of the first over after India's batting; and one bowler who is open to bowling any type of delivery based on prior arrangements made via booking office in London.

What I mean to say is that cricket is essentially a team-oriented, collectivistic, multi-lateral sport. Unless you are Lalit Modi, there is just no way to play this game on your own. Yet cricket has to be the team sport that is most obsessed with individual achievement.

Let me explain with two examples. Very recently, almost towards the end of the 324-match Test and ODI series between India and South Africa, I noticed that there was a brand new debate about who is "the greatest cricketer alive". Apparently Jacques Kallis had just scored several thousand runs in some innings and fans immediately began to declare that he was undoubtedly the best in the business right now. It was impossible to avoid this controversy. People were discussing it absolutely everywhere - i.e. both on Twitter and Facebook.

The only way to avoid running into a heated exchange of 140 characters between the various factions - Kallis, Tendulkar, Ganguly, Bradman, Binny, Bedade - was to log off Twitter and Facebook and switch off the internet and read a book or something.

As if. This is not 1990!

After weeks of debate finally there seemed to be some consensus that Kallis was either the greatest allrounder of the modern era, or the greatest allrounder currently playing the game. Passions subsided. Tensions eased. Curfews were removed. People began to take their fingers off the Caps Lock key.

Only for a new debate to explode a few days later about whether Dale Steyn was the greatest of all time, of this time, of that time, or of a little bit of this time and that time but not all time.

And that went on for a long time.

Compare this with another sport that is arguably of equal importance and popularity: football. FIFA, the division of the Qatari government that currently oversees the sport, does not even have a mechanism to rank or rate individual footballers. They have two international team rankings, for men's and women's teams. They do have individual prizes but these are modest affairs decided by voting each year.

The ICC, on the other hand, have rankings for ODI bowlers and batsmen, Test bowlers and batsmen, and no doubt soon they will have one set for Twenty20 as well.

Argentine Lionel Messi won the award for best player of 2009. I ask you to walk up to any Messi fan and say something derogatory about the man. At best they'll ignore you and go away. At worst they'll punch you lightly in the face once or twice.

On the other hand, walk up to a hardcore Tendulkar fan and tell him that you think Sachin is merely a made-in-Taiwan plastic duplicate of Bradman purchased online. The fan will begin by expressing sadness at your ignorance. Then he will chain you to the wall in a room in his basement. Subsequently he will try to explain to you in detail with scores, scorecards, statistics and Youtube video clippings why Sachin is the best ever.

By the end of the month you'll be begging for a punch in the face. With a car.

Make no mistake, cricket is an individual-obsessed wolf-sport in a genial-looking team-sheep's clothing.

But why is this so? Why do fans gets so worked up about who is the greatest batsman of all time, or the best fast bowler of the modern era, or the greatest left-arm spinner since the white ball was introduced?

Frankly I have no idea. Maybe it is because there is just so little chance of really comparing our players favourably.

Who knows? Maybe Sachin is often bogged down by the other 10 jokers. Ponting, on the other hand, perhaps is buoyed by the quality of his company.

Because almost all popular cricket is played, unlike football, on national lines it is impossible to figure some of these things out.

Or maybe it is just parochialism. I leave you with this fictional conversation I once overheard in Mumbai. It involves two men.

Man 1: Who do you think is the greatest cricketer of all time?
Man 2: Sunil Manohar Gavaskar, surely.
Man 1: What nonsense. For one, he was a pure batsman. He bowled very little.
Man 2: That is because they wouldn't let him. If he had bowled more, India would have won so many World Cups…
Man 1: Ha ha! Also, did he face good enough bowlers? I don't think he could have faced many of today's young kids. On fast pitches? Unlikely.
Man 2: He would have taken today's kids, chopped them into little pieces, sautéed them with garlic butter and fed them to his Doberman.
Man 1: Garbage. There is tremendous conflict of interest here.
Man 2: What conflict?
Man 1: Obviously you will say Gavaskar is the greatest. You are also from Maharashtra!
Man 2: So what. Irrelevant. He was the greatest.
Man 1: Okay, Sunil, I can't argue with you.