Given his personality (or the supposed lack thereof), it feels slightly odd to imagine Kallis donning a cape and costume but amongst modern day cricketers (ie post 1990) he came closest to being superhuman in terms of his overall achievements in Test cricket alone. Tendulkar and Ponting have more runs (and the former more hundreds), Dravid has as many runs and a few more catches, Ponting and Waugh have more Test match wins, but the fact that Kallis scored as many runs as he did (at an average over 55), took nearly 300 wickets and picked up 200 catches puts him above them all as an all-round cricketer. Add to that over 11000 runs and 270 wickets in ODI cricket, and a pretty successful IPL career (including a pivotal role in one title win) and the superman image starts to build up quickly.
My memories of the man however are nowhere close to that image. The first two things that came to mind when Kallis announced his retirement were - 1) All of the cricketers on my favourite XI(I) are now retired, and 2) The top 5 run scorers of all time will not add to their tally any more. Kallis has always for me been about solidity and reliability and like the best functioning machines its hard to isolate moments and images that were remarkable. Partly because there were so many of them and partly because he did everything with such little flourish and pomp. The latter (and the fact that he was from South Africa who don't have a tradition of going overboard with their athletes) meant that he rarely got the kind of recognition he deserved from fans or the media. His team clearly acknowledged his greatness though with most of them unhesitatingly dubbing him the greatest South African cricketer ever. He may not have sold tickets or drawn in TV audiences but he won matches (or saved them from being lost) and that's a much more valuable (if sometimes under-appreciated) quality in a cricketer.
Much has also been made of the comparisons with Sobers and whether Kallis could really be called an allrounder (the blog post here being one example). I think the traditional or much bandied around definition of an all-rounder being one who can be selected in the team on the strength of any of his primary skills (batting, bowling, and/or keeping) is somewhat limited. To me the more sensible view is that an all-rounder gives his team the value of two players thereby allowing the team the luxury of playing a virtual 'extra' man. And this Kallis did much better than any cricketer in his generation and as well as Sobers, Botham, Miller, Imran and any other allrounder of any era. The other oft-quoted numerical bar for an all rounder is [batting average - bowling average] and on this criteria too Kallis (with a value of 22.72 in Tests and 13.07 in ODIs) surpasses most allrounders across eras and is very nearly the equal of Sobers. To be the second best of all time (behind a once in a lifetime genius) is not a bad way to call it a day.
My memories of the man however are nowhere close to that image. The first two things that came to mind when Kallis announced his retirement were - 1) All of the cricketers on my favourite XI(I) are now retired, and 2) The top 5 run scorers of all time will not add to their tally any more. Kallis has always for me been about solidity and reliability and like the best functioning machines its hard to isolate moments and images that were remarkable. Partly because there were so many of them and partly because he did everything with such little flourish and pomp. The latter (and the fact that he was from South Africa who don't have a tradition of going overboard with their athletes) meant that he rarely got the kind of recognition he deserved from fans or the media. His team clearly acknowledged his greatness though with most of them unhesitatingly dubbing him the greatest South African cricketer ever. He may not have sold tickets or drawn in TV audiences but he won matches (or saved them from being lost) and that's a much more valuable (if sometimes under-appreciated) quality in a cricketer.
Much has also been made of the comparisons with Sobers and whether Kallis could really be called an allrounder (the blog post here being one example). I think the traditional or much bandied around definition of an all-rounder being one who can be selected in the team on the strength of any of his primary skills (batting, bowling, and/or keeping) is somewhat limited. To me the more sensible view is that an all-rounder gives his team the value of two players thereby allowing the team the luxury of playing a virtual 'extra' man. And this Kallis did much better than any cricketer in his generation and as well as Sobers, Botham, Miller, Imran and any other allrounder of any era. The other oft-quoted numerical bar for an all rounder is [batting average - bowling average] and on this criteria too Kallis (with a value of 22.72 in Tests and 13.07 in ODIs) surpasses most allrounders across eras and is very nearly the equal of Sobers. To be the second best of all time (behind a once in a lifetime genius) is not a bad way to call it a day.
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