Sportskeeda Cricket Awards 2016: ODI team of the year
One-day international cricket is going through a fascinating stage in its existence, one could call it its adolescence, as it jostles with a more traditional force that has always been there, and a younger, cooler version, for relevance.
One-day cricket still boasts of the game’s ultimate showstopper, the governing body’s crown jewel, the Cricket World Cup, that is played once every four years.
It is a format that is somewhere stuck in between at the moment. Having lost its title as the coolest boy in town, it is coming under severe threat from T20s as people are moving towards the shortest format of the game.
But cricket aficionados and players around the world recognize one-day cricket for what it truly is, the best of both worlds. While it has a number of the qualities that make T20 so attractive, it also allows for a certain of the nuances that make Test cricket the premier format of the game.
In 2016, one-day cricket took a backseat, as the year was dominated, first, by T20s, and the later, by Tests. However, at the beginning of the year, and towards the end, we saw some fascinating contests with the highlight being the tightly contested tri-series between the West Indies, Australia and South Africa in the Caribbean.
Tasked with the responsibility of ranking the best teams in the world we were left with a number of questions –
How do you judge who was the best team when not all teams competed against one another? Do you go purely based on rankings? Does win percentage matter more or the opponents you faced? Does an away win count more than a home win?
As we deliberated on these topics, we let you, the fans, vote for who you thought performed the best in 2016. To provide you the final picture, we compiled your votes and had our experts add a final touch before bringing you the ODI team of the year.