Who is best Captain you know ?
Pointing? Fleming ? Dhoni ? Ganguly ?
You may say either of these mostly (Maybe Clive Lyod, Mark Taylor or Martin crowe if you are old generation cricket fan)
But most of them forget that there was another guy who deserved to be in Elite Category of Captains
The guy is none other than ,
Graeme Smith!
(He is guy who is never is credited as much as he should be getting for both Batting and Captaincy)
He was handed the Captaincy at 22 - which made him his country's youngest captain and he was tasked with restoring the faith of his countrymen by becoming The successor of Hansie Cronje in Leading the Team . He , took over the reigns from Shaun Pollock after the 2003 World Cup and immediately set about rebuilding the side
He debuted Vs the best team of that time - Australia,
The bowlers were Mcgrath , Gillespie , Lee and Warne!
He played two gritty knocks in his 1st 2 matches
Scored a 60 and a 40 vs Aussies !
Then What he did was something unimaginable,
Smashed 2 consecutive double tons on English soil in tests !
His Dedication can be seen by the fact when he came out to bat,even with a broken hand against Australia to save a test match
His Captaincy record was great too , he build a great team which went onto become of the best Teams in world
Stats :
(In tests )
Has an win percentage of over 50 even after Captaining for over 110 matches!
In batting he was too good as well , He had 9,200 runs at 48 avg
Infact Only Gavaskar (among opening batsmen ) has scored more runs and has better average than Smith
( In ODI )
Captained for 150 Matches and has win percentage of over 65 !
His batting Average too was over 40 which is great for a opener. Also he was quite versatile his 90 runs of 55 balls in the Famous Chase vs Aus is proof of that
( In T20i )
In T20i too he was good and had an batting average of 31 and SR of over 130
He also has win percentage of 67 in T20i !
Facts :
- During his career (almost entirely as captain) Smith has led South Africa to 21 run-chases. He has scored 1,114 runs in these fourth innings (nobody else has scored over a thousand) at an average of 85.69. But that is not all , he also has a strike rate of 69.02 in these innings (his career strike-rate is 59.62).
- He has most Test wins as captain
- He has also scored most runs as Captain in Tests !