by Catherine Hanley
Friday, March 14, 2003

Along with most of the cricket world, the selectors have been busy this month watching the World Cup. But even the attractions of seeing men in coloured pyjamas thrashing a little white ball around can fade after a while: with no Test-match bunny performances to keep tabs on they got all misty-eyed and nostalgic, and resorted to arguing among themselves about the merits of all the great rabbits of the past. How they measure up today's upstarts?

The only thing to do, then, was to settle the dispute in the time-honoured manner: order a round of drinks and pick an XI. And the only place to start looking for candidates was the Wisden Wizard, that repository of all things statistical. Believing that consistency is the key to great bunniness, they restricted themselves to those players who had taken part in at least 25 Test innings, and examined five categories in order to judge the all-round capabilities of the contenders.

The initial criterion was to find out which player had the lowest high score, and here Zimbabwe's Pommie Mbangwa reigned supreme, having never managed to reach the dizzy heights of double figures: his career best is 8. The only two other players to avoid ever scoring 15 or more at one throw were Aussie beanpole Bruce Reid (13) and West Indies legend Alf Valentine (14).
Wizard page

Mbangwa was also some way ahead of the field when it came to the fewest number of runs scored in a career, having scraped together only 34 in his 25 innings. However, another three players creditably managed to keep their aggregates under 100: current bunny contender Manjural Islam (69), Reid (93) and former Indian spinner Maninder Singh (99).
Wizard page

It was a different story when it came to the players who had scored the most ducks, though. Here one bunny stood head and shoulders above the others: legend-in-his-own-lifetime and wafter-outside-off-stump Courtney Walsh may well hold the record for most Test wickets, but he should be equally proud of his phenomenal 43 dismissals on 0, streets if not whole blocks ahead of nearest contenders Shane Warne (27), Curtly Ambrose and Glenn McGrath (both 26).

Wizard page

However, as this category is possibly the only bunny list in existence which contains both Steve Waugh (21 ducks) and Michael Atherton (20) in the first XI, the selectors decided that examining only the number of ducks scored might be misleading, so they got out their calculators and worked out a percentage of ducks scored per innings for each player.

Several scratched heads later they finished their sums, and were mightily impressed with the efforts of current West Indian rabbit Merv Dillon, whose 23 ducks in only 54 visits to the crease means that he has been dismissed without scoring in an incredible 42.59% of his innings. Now that's style.

The next nearest challengers in this particular discipline, all exceeding the 25% mark, were New Zealand's arch-bunny Danny Morrison (33.80), Indian spin king Bhagwat Chandrasekhar (28.75) and the inevitable McGrath (25.49).
Wizard page

The true test of a great bunny, however, remains his career batting average, and here Mbangwa once again stood out, his average of exactly 2.00 plumbing new depths and placing him comfortably ahead of Manjural Islam (3.63) and Maninder Singh (3.80), the only others to stay below the acknowledged rabbit level of 4.
Wizard page

Bearing all these results in mind, and weighting the number of categories a player appeared in, the extent of his superiority in each, and of course their own personal opinions, the selectors ventured to pick the following XI as their representative "great bunnies of our time" side, believing that it epitomizes all that is inept in batting terms.

Squabbling about the minor places there may have been - with at least one selector ending up looking as though he'd encountered Chris Cairns outside a nightclub - but there was no arguing with the choice for captain: bestriding the bunny world like a Flemish Giant, the man with the lowest average, lowest high score and fewest runs in a career rules the roost. No wonder he's spent the World Cup in the commentary box. Pommie Mbangwa, take a bow.

1 Pommie Mbangwa (Zim) (capt)
2 Courtney Walsh (WI)
3 Merv Dillon (WI)
4 Glenn McGrath (Aus)
5 Danny Morrison (NZ)
6 Bruce Reid (Aus)
7 Manjural Islam (Ban)
8 Maninder Singh (Ind)
9 Bhagwat Chandrasekhar (Ind)
10 Alan Mullally (Eng)
11 Curtly Ambrose (WI)

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Catherine Hanley is a university lecturer, a keen cricketer and a regular contributor to Wisden.com. She was born in Tasmania and now lives in Sheffield, England.

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