Afridi promoted to nine in King Cricket top ten.

I think we should all spare a thought for Rahul Dravid.

You start a new job and the previous incumbent is still hanging around with a surly look on his face. Not only that, you have to tell him what to do and he won’t pull his weight. You actually want him replaced, but your bosses won’t let you get rid of him.

You’re captaining your nation in what is just about the most important sporting event on earth. Things are going badly. Your opponents, Pakistan, are building a truly monumental total at a rate of knots. You get a wicket. You should be happy. Shahid Afridi comes out to bat.

Would there be any less welcoming sight? Your side are haemorrhaging runs. Shahid Afridi is coming out to bat. Your best hope of salvaging something from the match is to slow Pakistan’s scoring rate. Shahid Afridi is coming out to bat. Shahid Afridi is coming out to bat and people are telling him to score some quick runs. There is hardly ever an occasion where you need to instruct Shahid Afridi to score quick runs.

Spare a thought for Harbhajan Singh. Six. Six. Six. Six. Two. One. Twenty-seven runs off the over. The only man to ever score more runs off a Test over is King Cricket himself, Brian Lara. The only reason that you haven’t gone for more than twenty-seven runs is because the batsman took a single off the last ball so that he could have a second attempt at hitting every ball of the over for six.

Here are the bare facts: 103 runs off 80 ball with seven fours and seven sixes.

Apologies to Steve Harmison, but Shahid Afridi is up to number nine in the King Cricket top ten.

King Cricket Top Ten

Well, as you can see, this list doesn’t follow the official rankings.

All-rounders barely feature. This is a list that only takes into account the exceptional, so being a decent batsman and bowler won’t help you. You must excel. As for the absence of South Africans – their best two players are Shaun Pollock and Jacques Kallis, both of whom use the method of boring the opposition into submission.

Shahid Afridi’s probably the biggest surprise. We haven’t even loaded anything onto this blog yet and we’re already worried that it’s eventually going to boil down to a series of entries saying: “Afridi scored 42 off 17 balls today. We love Shahid Afridi.”

King Cricket: Brian Lara

Brian Lara rocks like Megadeth in a hammock being buffeted by a force 10 gale.

He doesn’t have the average of Tendulkar – this is mainly because he’s had some lean years as well as some years where he’s not played because he’s been sulking.

He’s played in the worst West Indian sides there have ever been and yet he’s scored more Test runs than anyone; he is the only person to have scored 500 in a first class innings; he’s the only person who has scored 400 in a Test innings and he’s the only person to reclaim the top Test score having lost it.

He’s not the most reliable, but do you see Jacques Kallis in this top ten? No-one, but no-one can bat as well as Lara at his best.

Brian Lara. We crown you King Cricket.

2 - Shane Warne

Look at him standing there, hands on hips, flared trousers rustling in the breeze (although not in this picture). He looks like a spoon, but here’s the situation: England require 12 runs to win and have all ten wickets in hand. Shane Warne’s bowling and it genuinely feels like Australia are favourites.

We always think that we would have been the best cricketer ever, but when Warney’s bowling and the match is in the balance, we have heart palpitations and have to breathe into a paper bag like they do on the telly.

3 - Muttiah Muralitharan

Australians get upset because they think that he might be better than Warney, so they keep trying to ban him on the grounds that he’s too ace or something.

Murali plays for Lancashire sometimes and everyone likes him. He’s all double-jointed and gifted. No other sport can boast of a player who nobody can copy due to their body.

Reminds me of Carlton from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air in a funny sort of way. Sorry Murali. You’re much cooler than anyone or anything called Carlton – especially the Vauxhall type.

4 - Sachin Tendulkar

First announced himself to the world by being one half of a 600-and-odd partnership with Vinod Kambli when they were foetuses or something.

Averages more than anyone still playing and is also the most popular person in the universe to boot.

5 - Andrew Flintoff

Fred’s going to be King Cricket one day. How can he not be? He plays for Lancashire. He plays for England. He bats like King Kong swatting flies. He bowls like a man who thinks he can propel the ball through the batsman and into the stumps if he tries a bit harder.

He’s got a big thick northern accent, but he’s obviously smarter than all of the South Africans put together – even if they got help from their mums. He’s really, really nice and when he went to console Brett Lee at the end of the nail-biting Edgbaston Test, we nearly cried. Then we remembered that we had two testicles and didn’t bother.

6 - Adam Gilchrist

He scores lots of runs, very quickly, most of the time. He’s also a wicketkeeper. He’s having a fairly lean time at the minute, but who else would you pick as wicketkeeper for the World All Time XI against the Mars All Time XI? Ridley Jacobs? Get away.

7 - Ricky Ponting

We didn’t want to include him, but he’s really good. He recently scored a hundred in each innings of his hundredth Test.

8 - Inzamam-ul-Haq

Once waded into the crowd to try and hit a spectator with his bat because they called him Aloo (potato) just like everyone else in the world does.

Runs people out for fun. Doesn’t bother with anything as mundane as practice. Bats like someone who doesn’t know what all the fuss is about – even when there’s a really big fuss.

Looks like a big cuddly bear, unlike Matthew “Ain’t-Even-Seen-The-Top-Ten” Hayden, who looks like the kind of bear who likes eating human faces.

9 - Steve Harmison

What? What’s the problem? Shoaib Akhtar? Are you kidding? Glenn McGrath? No way. When Steve’s on song, he’s like Glenn McGrath only faster and therefore better. Plus he got Michael Kasprowicz out at the end of the BEST TEST EVER and made us emotional even though we are a boy and our only emotions are ‘hate’ and ‘hungry’.

Fast bowlers should be fast. Proper fast. They should hurt people. That’s what fast bowlers do. They don’t care about accuracy except for aiming at people’s faces. Hooray for Steve.

Anyway, he’s English and we don’t pretend to be anything other than outrageously biased. If you really love Steve Harmison, you can sing: ‘Steven. Steven Harmison’, to the tune of ‘Go West’ by the Pet Shop Boys. We do. Even in winter when we're just driving to work and there’s no cricket on anywhere in the world.

10 - Shahid Afridi

We toyed with making him King Cricket, because we love him more than the biggest Transformer in the world, but he’s not actually that good in any traditional sense.

Shahid Afridi coming out to bat in a dull game is like fancying a ham sandwich and then getting a knock on the door from the hog roast man and he’s giving away free hog (and baguettes).

Never has anyone played with such palpable disregard for his own wicket or the match situation. The best part is: he does it EVERY SINGLE TIME.

He also bowls leg-spin at about the same speed as so-called “fast bowlers” such as Glenn McGrath and Shaun Pollock.

Welcome

Welcome to King Cricket: News for people who get sad when it’s winter.

As the sort of writing-about-cricket equivalent of the coin toss, we’ve started with a top ten. People love ranking things, especially cricket lovers, because they’re a little bit autistic and love statistics.

The top ten is of current players and the winner will be crowned King Cricket. We’re not going to go into the selection criteria too much, because somebody might read it one day and poke holes in our argument.

To offer a vague notion of what the title entails, all the players are unbelievably good and all are entertaining. Grit has no place here unless it’s so bloody-minded that it causes people to literally pass out through amazement.