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[aryan]

NEW DELHI: Five of the 20 greatest ODI cricketers of all time will be in action during the World Cup starting next month and India will be the only team to have two of them. That's the heartening news from a new and innovative system of measuring the performance of cricketers.

Dubbed the Impact Index, the new system values performance based on the match context in which they happen rather than against an absolute yardstick. Thus, a 50 in a match where both teams score, say, 300-plus, will count for a lot less than one in a low-scoring match.

The best ODI cricketer of all time, in a soon to be announced list, is Vivian Richards followed by Imran Khan, Richard Hadlee, Adam Gilchrist and Ian Botham.

The Impact Index has been developed by a team led by Jaideep Varma and Jatin Thakkar; http://www.impactindexcricket.com launches on January 25.

What is striking is that every one of them brought more than one skill to the table. Given the fact that ODIs have long been acknowledged to be the all-rounder's version of the game, as opposed to Test cricket where specialists come into their own, that's not surprising.

The Indians in the top 20 of the ODI Impact Index who are still playing are Mahendra Singh Dhoni at No. 13 and Sachin Tendulkar at No. 18. The only other active cricketers in that category are South African Jacques Kallis at 8, Australia's Shane Watson at No. 16 and West Indian Chris Gayle at No. 19. Dhoni and Sachin apart, Kapil Dev is the only Indian in the top 25, ranked at No. 9.

If you're surprised at Sachin's relatively low ranking, remember the new system does not rate cricketers by aggregates, but by how much of an impact the player has had in his team winning matches. Also, when you're talking about the 20 best of all time, there clearly isn't all that much to choose between the one on top and the one at the bottom of that exclusive club.

The basic philosophy behind the new performance measurement system is that in a team game how well you have done has to be seen in the context of how much it helped your team win, which after all is the ultimate objective of whatever you do as a cricketer.

Hence, it measures performance in a match on a 0 to 5 scale, which roughly translates into saying that someone who gets a score of 3 on this scale contributed the equivalent of what three people did in that particular game and so on.

With the exception of Gilchrist, a wicketkeeper, everybody in the top 25 of the list is either a batsman who was more than just an occasional bowler or a bowler who was more than just a useful batsman. The only one who makes it almost entirely on the strength of a single skill is the West Indian Joel Garner, universally acknowledged as one of the most effective ODI bowlers ever and the master of the yorker in the death overs.

The system has been applied to all forms of the game, but with the ODI World Cup just round the corner, its creators have understandably decided to start by revealing their findings for the 50-over version.