5 current Test players who are underrated
The months of June and July 2016 have seen Test match cricket take the centre stage as opposed to the T20 cricket season that had prevailed before that, with the Asia Cup T20, the World T20 2016 and the Indian Premier League being organised one after the other, the last of which, the IPL, concluded on May 30.
While the shortest format of the game has become more about hitting skills than cricketing skills of late, and any batsman, be it a top order batsman or a tailender, has developed the capability to clear the ropes, it is certainly not so in Test cricket. In the longest format of the game, a player’s discipline, temperament, and patience are tested, for five continuous days.
However, while in T20 cricket, the contribution of every player, howsoever small or large, becomes crucial to the outcome of the game, in Test cricket, it cannot be clearly demarcated.
Although some players, with their centuries or five-wicket-hauls, take the limelight with them and prove out as potential match-winners in the longest and the most arduous format of the game, there are other cricketers as well, who despite their gritty temperament and the ability to spend hours at the crease and score vital runs for the team, remain under the shadows of the ones that are naturally gifted. Here, in this piece, we enlist 5 cricketers currently active in Test match cricket who have been severely underrated.
#1 Dean Elgar (South Africa)
Ever since the departure of Graeme Smith, South Africa have struggled to find a half-decent opener for Test matches. A year later, Alviro Petersen, Smith’s long-time opening partner also called it a day and that added more woes to the South African batting lineup that was already weakened by the departure of one of their all-time greats, Jacques Kallis.
The South African top order, in the absence of these three gentlemen, was rendered fragile, as a consequence of which, the one-time world beaters, over years have deteriorated in terms of the quality of cricket that they have produced. In such tumultuous times, one figure of solidity at the top of the batting order in Tests has been the 29-year-old Dean Elgar.
Although Elgar had made his Test debut in 2012 against Australia at Perth, he became a regular member of the Test squad only after Smith called it quits, in 2014, and has, since then, established himself as one of the solid top-order batsmen for South Africa.
An average of 36.73 from 25 Tests, having accumulated 1249 runs from them with 4 centuries speaks of a modest career, but Elgar’s contributions cannot be judged just from the stats that he has. The left-handed batsman has made his name as someone who has the ability to soak in the pressure and grind in sessions in order to tire out the opposition bowlers and churn out runs in the process.
During the away tour of Sri Lanka in 2014, Elgar, opening the batting, scored his second Test hundred (103), at Galle, that helped South Africa win the first Test. The knock’s relevance was hidden under Dale Steyn’s 10-wicket-haul, that earned the speedster the man of the match. However, in the next Test, when South Africa escaped defeat only by a whisker, finishing 159/8 in their 2nd innings while chasing 369, the importance of Elgar’s knock was realised.
Elgar’s knocks of 118* and 40 against England in the first Test of the 2015-16 tour, in Durban, although couldn’t prevent his team’s defeat, but gave a strong display of his temperament when faced with adversity. Notwithstanding the 2-1 series defeat that the Proteas faced at the hands of the English, Elgar’s scores of 118*, 40, 44, 46, 15, 20 and 1 indicated that the gritty left-hander had more resolve to him than what meets the eye and certainly deserves to be named, if one looks beyond the famed trio of Hashim Amla, AB de Villiers and Faf du Plessis.