Year in Review: Flop ODI XI of year 2013

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and not reflective of the website as a whole.

Newton’s third law states- ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction’. Gary Zukav expounded the theory further by stating, ‘You receive from the world what you give to the world’.

Both of them couldn’t have been more accurate in their summation, especially when it comes to some of the most spine-chillingly numb performances that we witnessed this year.

For every good and deserving performance in 2013,  there were counter-performances bordering on mediocrity and haplessness. So, for every Virat Kohli century, there was a Kamran Akmal etching out painstaking zeroes; for every pace bowler trying to keep the art alive, there was an Ishant Sharma proliferating runs for an Australian lower-order batsman; and for every Misbah innings that saved his team from a certain disaster, there was a Matthew Wade imploding his way into obscurity.

Going by Zukav’s theory, it then also gives us the right to ridicule and give them back on the basis of the cricketing rubbish that was dished to us. On that note, I thought I would create a list of such super-human performances and make the best out them – a flop ODI XI of the year. The minimum criteria for a player to be selected is to have played at least 7 ODIs in the calendar year and to have produced at least one performance which single-handedly led to his team’s devastation.

Also, players are picked spot-wise in the team, so even though there were 3 pathetically gruesome openers this year, we could select only two (really a pity). And like every time, the more known a player is, the more chances of him being featured here.

Here we go then.

1) Chris Gayle 

Chris Gayle

(Matches – 16, Runs – 311, Average – 19.43, HS – 109, 100s – 1, 50s – 0)

For all the sixes that he hit in the IPL for his beloved RCB, his performances for West Indies were not exactly the over-abundantly clichéd and the over-extensively used ‘Gaylestorm‘ material.

It was as if there were two Gayles, one that did extremely well for his IPL team and the other which failed consistently for his national team, much like Rohit Sharma, before he found his mojo or so he would like us to believe.

Gayle’s only 50+ knock in this time-frame came against Sri Lanka in the tri-series also involving India, where West Indies failed to make it to the final. Out of the 16 innings that he batted in, he had 7 single digit scores and his next-best score was a 39 against Pakistan.

The year was perfectly summed up for him against India in the 1st ODI when while attempting a run, he fell down in a bizarre fashion and got himself injured for the rest of the year. Needless to say, he was run-out.