Our annual Lord Megachief of Gold award is the highest honour in cricket. The title is recognition of performance over the previous calendar year. Here are all the winners.

Up until now we’ve always recognised players for their batting or their bowling or both. This year, something else has swayed us.

This is a bit tough on Babar Azam, who couldn’t have done a great deal more. Four Test hundreds and an average of 69.64; three ODI hundreds and an average of 84.87; and a T20 hundred too.

But Babar was also the losing captain in a T20 World Cup final and for a three-Test series at home against England.

Lord Megachief of Gold

Ben Stokes then. A man who can bat, bowl and take 82 per cent amazing catches, but who has achieved the highest honour in cricket this year for precisely none of those things. He is instead being named Lord Megachief of Gold for captaincy, or rather for taking a sad, dead bird’s carcass and restoring it to life with a couple of bonus superpowers for good measure.

We may as well recap the playing contributions first though. There was a hundred in the Caribbean and then a 173-run partnership with Ben Foakes against South Africa that turned 147-5 into an innings victory when England were one Test down.

While there was nothing too remarkable with the ball, he did keep his Test averages the right way round across the calendar year – 870 runs at 36.25 versus 26 wickets at 31.19.

Oh and he was also the top scorer in a T20 World Cup final. If we’re saying he only had an okay year, it was the very top end of only okay.

And now to the other stuff.

Captaincy

An awful lot has been written about exactly what England have done since Ben Stokes became captain. But you actually can’t really gauge that properly without first revisiting what the team had become leading up to his tenure.

This year’s achievements are one thing. What’s more remarkable is that they didn’t arise from a baseline of competence. England have leapfrogged adequacy, hopping from deathly underperformance straight to rewriting what may or not be possible. Even if we discover more of this side’s limits and frailties in the coming year – and we surely will – that transformation did happen. It’s not really about the team’s ‘feats’. It’s about wresting the team from awfulness and instantly flinging them at least some distance in the opposite direction.

We spent the first half of 2022 angry with the England Test team and the second half amazed with it. Angry to amazed with just a change of captain (and coach).

So before we get to Stokes’ 10 Tests in charge (nine wins), let’s first look at the previous 10 (one win).

Right-arm fast-medium and batting collapses

The pre-Stokes captaincy period we’re looking at here comprises a win and then a loss against India, four defeats and a draw in the Ashes, and then two draws and a defeat in the West Indies.

Those are the basic results, but let’s recall how they came about as well. The two main themes were batting collapses and wilfully samey and unexciting bowling attacks.

The second Test of this period, a 157-run loss to India at the Oval, was a fine example. With the ball, England went with James Anderson, Ollie Robinson, Chris Woakes and Craig Overton – all right-arm fast-medium seamers – plus Moeen Ali. With the bat, they fell to 62-5 in their first innings.

The next Test was the first of the Ashes and to mark the occasion they went two runs better, collapsing to 60-5 on day one. They then went into the second Test with no fewer than five right-arm fast-medium bowlers and no spinner. They managed a whopping 85 runs before the fall of the fifth wicket in their second innings, which started to feel like a high water mark when they were bowled out for 68 in the third Test.

By this point, England looked burned-out, mediocre and sick of cricket, yet somehow they saved the fourth Test, even after being 36-4. They also picked a spinner – which wasn’t the case for the fifth Test. They were 85-5 in the first innings of that one and all out for 124 in the second.

And then it was on to the West Indies, where any tiny shreds of joy and goodwill were incinerated with the dropping of James Anderson and Stuart Broad in a myopic bid to engineer something that looked like a fresh start. Draws in the first two Tests were followed by a match in which they fell to 67-7 in the first innings and 97-7 in the second.

That’s where they were when Ben Stokes was named Test captain.

The Stokes era

England won their next four Tests. And how.

Having been just about the collapsiest team in Test history, they chased over 250 four times in a row while scoring at about five runs an over. Jonny Bairstow’s innings against New Zealand at Trent Bridge in particular was a truly incredible thing.

While these feats could partly be ascribed to a slightly duff batch of balls, it was pretty obvious that the team was also now being run in a very different way.

Anderson and Broad were not just back but embiggened. Jack Leach was given a full-time job too instead of the shaky zero hours contract he had been on. Leach wouldn’t be omitted from the team again all year – a vote of confidence in him but also in spin bowling more generally. Stokes would show similar faith in Rehan Ahmed later in the year, even going so far as to bat him at three when he felt the wind was at the teenager’s back.

It’s unkind to do a Captain Stokes v Captain Root head-to-head, but things were unarguably cheerier too. Players felt wanted, supported and secure. Stokes didn’t just say he thought a player was great before leaving them out of the next game. For the most part he tended to stick with them.

He also demonstrated that he would support positive batting in the face of any mistakes by going completely overboard and making boatloads of batting mistakes himself. His often irresponsible approach was leadership by example. He knew that no-one was going to deliberately copy his errors. It was a self-sacrificial attempt to raise the ceiling of what was permissible under his captaincy. He figured that even if the change in mentality brought a few more misguided slogs, it would eradicate a greater number of equally suicidal uncertain prods. As that Bairstow innings and 500 in a day proved, more can be achieved by batting with freedom and conviction than by second-guessing yourself and trying to avoid doing the wrong thing.

Stokes’ one defeat as captain came in the first Test against South Africa. However, his team responded with an innings victory and then a nine wicket win before positively rollocking their way through three Tests in Pakistan. They won them all, despite not having played Test cricket there since Rehan Ahmed was in nappies.

This year may or may not see the same success, but that’s not really the point. The point is this: Immediately before Ben Stokes became captain, following the England Test team was incredibly unfun. Since he became captain – regardless of results – it has been incredibly fun.

Congratulations, Ben Stokes, you are 2022’s Lord Megachief of Gold.

Lord Megachiefs of Gold

• 2007: Shivnarine Chanderpaul
• 2008: Shivnarine Chanderpaul
• 2009: MS Dhoni
• 2010: Dale Steyn
• 2011: Ian Bell
• 2012: Michael Clarke
• 2013: Dale Steyn
• 2014: Brendon McCullum and Angelo Mathews
• 2015: Kane Williamson
• 2016: R Ashwin
• 2017: James Anderson
• 2018: Jason Holder
• 2019: Neil Wagner
• 2020: Postponed
• 2020/21: Kane Williamson

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Our annual Lord Megachief of Gold award is the highest honour in cricket. The title is recognition of performance over the previous calendar year. Here are all the winners.

Two things to note before we get into this.

(1) We’re looking at a two-year timespan here after Lord Megachief Postponed this time last year. There’s no recency weighting. What little that happened in 2020 is every bit as significant as what happened in 2021.

(2) Even with a double year, there’s not much to look at. While Joe Root played 23 Tests in this period, no-one from any other country played more than 17. Most teams only played about 10 Tests. Australia played eight – all at home.

The purest illustration of the paucity of Test cricket is the fact that three of the top four run-scorers across 2020 and 2021 are England players.

Dom Sibley is third.

The other contenders

Cricket awards are severely impact by a lack of cricket. Even the frontrunners this time around brought a trail of buts and what ifs with them.

The two other standouts were newcomer Kyle Jamieson and 2016 Lord Megachief of Gold, R Ashwin.

Jamieson seems pretty comfortable with Test cricket. He took 52 wickets at 16.03. Plenty of those came in big matches against India, West Indies and Pakistan with only a handful hoovered up in a solitary match against the minnows of England. His 5-31 in the World Test Championship final almost swung it for him, but his record is tempered by the fact that eight of his 10 Tests were in New Zealand or England.

The story is similar for Ashwin, who took 67 wickets at 17.53. While he’s been steady when selected overseas – he took 12 wickets at 28.83 in Australia, for example – 46 of those wickets and all three of his five-fors came in India. He’s an incredible bowler, but 4-48 seems a lot less good when Joe Root’s just taken 5-8.

Lord Megachief of Gold

So it’s Kane Williamson, who was also Lord Megachief of Gold 2015.

In eight Tests, he made 893 runs at 74.41. He also captained New Zealand to the World Test Championship and the final of the T20 World Cup, in which he made 85 off 48 balls.

He’s been suffering an elbow injury for most of that time.

Kane Williamson’s hundreds

From December 2020 to January 2021, Williamson made successive Test scores of 251, 129, 21 and 238.

The first of those, against the West Indies, came in an innings when only two other batters passed 50. The Windies made 138 in reply and New Zealand went on to win by an innings.

The 129 against Pakistan probably ranks as underperformance given that New Zealand only won that Test by 101 runs, but the 238 brought another innings victory.

Kane Williamson’s fifties

But if there is a feature of Williamson’s batting that elevates him, it’s not so much the big scores as the gritty fifties. He’s a batter who appreciates the variable value of a run.

Is there any player you’d trust to weigh up a pitch more accurately?

“What should we be aiming for here?” asks a team-mate.

“About 237,” he replies.

In New Zealand’s first Test of 2020, Williamson asked India to bat and they made 165. Williamson then came in at 26-1 and made 89. Mayank Agarwal was the only other batter to pass 50 in that Test with 58 in India’s second innings.

A purer example came in the World Test Championship final against the same opposition. After India were 217 all out, Williamson and Devon Conway put on 70 and New Zealand scraped a 32-run lead. It wasn’t even a 50. He was out for 49.

India were then rolled for 170, only for Williamson to be entirely untroubled by the ever-present twin threats of bad weather or a collapse. He got his side home with an unbeaten 52.

In a rain-affected shoot-out of a final, against one of the finest bowling attacks of modern times, Kane Williamson averaged over 100.

Congratulations, Kane Williamson, you are 2020 and 2021’s Lord Megachief of Gold.

Lord Megachiefs of Gold

• 2007: Shivnarine Chanderpaul
• 2008: Shivnarine Chanderpaul
• 2009: MS Dhoni
• 2010: Dale Steyn
• 2011: Ian Bell
• 2012: Michael Clarke
• 2013: Dale Steyn
• 2014: Brendon McCullum and Angelo Mathews
• 2015: Kane Williamson
• 2016: R Ashwin
• 2017: James Anderson
• 2018: Jason Holder
• 2019: Neil Wagner
• 2020: Postponed

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At this time of year, we normally bestow the greatest honour in cricket by naming Lord Megachief of Gold. It’s a title that is earned through freakish cricket performance across the previous calendar year, but after much rumination we have concluded that 2020 wasn’t actually a proper year.

There were great performances, sure, but the simple fact is there was not much cricket and so nobody has really strung together a real eye-waterer.

We figure we’ll just roll 2020 and 2021 into one. We’ll pretend we’re a year younger, die a year later and name just one Lord Megachief of Gold in 12 months’ time to cover both 2020 and 2021. Hope that works for you.

We may as well do a half-time report though. These are probably the three frontrunners ahead of a gargantuan second half of the “year” which promises to swamp what little has taken place this year.

Stuart Broad

We really, really wanted to name Broad Lord Megachief of Gold but there are two problems. Firstly, the general lack of competition which would diminish the title were we to hand it out at this point, and secondly the fact that he actually only took one five-for all year.

Hell of a five-for though and 38 Test wickets at 14.76 is a pretty nuts effort. Just as importantly, we also have to throw in his 177 runs at 35.40 which were scored at the quite bonkers strike rate of 112.02. The sheer density of fun he provides makes Broad the best batsman in the world.

He had such a good year that even when he put down chances, he still dismissed batsmen.

All in all, it seems insane that England dropped him – but he even performed well on the sidelines.

Broad was top wicket-taker in 2020. The lower two steps on the podium were occupied by two New Zealanders, Tim Southee (30 at 17.03) and Kyle Jamieson (25 at 14.44).

Kane Williamson

2020 was in some respects the same as any other year for Kane Williamson because he is a man whose default state is already, ‘about to score a hundred when we can finally get on the field again’.

Williamson hardly did any batting but was still batsman of the year with 498 runs in four Test matches at 83.00, including one hundred and one double.

Ben Stokes

Bowling all-rounder of the year was, quite obviously, Stuart Broad – and he was batting all-rounder of the year too in our book (The Book Of Indisputable Facts).

Run-scoring all-rounder of the year was, however, Ben Stokes. He made 641 of the blighters at an average of 58.27, including two hundreds.

He also took 19 wickets at 18.73, which is, you know, kind of handy.

Often described as two (or sometimes three) cricketers in one, Stokes in fact proved himself to be six cricketers in one during the second Test against the West Indies.

And that wasn’t even the match when he did a bit of captaining.

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Our annual Lord Megachief of Gold award is the highest honour in cricket. The title is recognition of performance over the previous calendar year. Here are all the winners.

Take one average height fast-medium bowler, hand him a Kookaburra cricket ball and ask him to bang it in halfway down on a bland, lifeless pitch. Ask him to do this for marathon spells.

What do you end up with?

Somehow or other, in 2019 you ended up with 43 wickets in six Test matches at an average of 17.81.

Neil Wagner makes no sense at all.

The other contenders

You’re going to say Steve Smith, who made almost a thousand Test runs at 74.23. (Lord Megachief of Gold primarily rewards Test performances.) While it’s not unheard of for an Aussie batsman to win, when Michael Clarke took the title in 2012, he made 1,600 runs, averaging over 100. The last batsman to win was Kane Williamson in 2015 and he averaged 90 without ever once getting a nice long run at an opposition bowling attack in conditions he’d grown used to.

Of the bowlers, only Nathan Lyon and Pat Cummins took more wickets than Wagner. Lyon, who took 45, averaged 33. Cummins averaged 20 but, like Lyon, his 59 wickets came in twice as many matches.

A word for Umesh Yadav, who took 23 wickets in four Tests at 13.65, but he just didn’t have the same body of work as Wagner.

Neil Wagner’s worst performance of the year

Do you want to know Neil Wagner’s worst performance of the year? You’re reading a section headed “Neil Wagner’s worst performance of the year” so we can only presume you do.

Neil Wagner’s worst performance of the year was when he took 2-104 against Bangladesh in Hamilton.

This is, on the face of it, an unremarkable thing, but we’ll give you a little more context because this effort actually says a great deal.

Neil Wagner’s worst performance of the year was when he took 2-104 against Bangladesh in Hamilton, having taken 5-47 in the first innings on a pitch where New Zealand made 715-6 batting second.

That was as bad as it got for Neil Wagner. His worst performance came in a match where he took a five-for on a flatty in an innings victory.

The rest of the year

In the second Test against Bangladesh, he took 9-73.

Then he bounced the shit out of England.

Then he bounced the shit out of Australia.

These last three Tests sum things up

Winning or losing, no wickets down or tail-enders at the crease, every ball from Neil Wagner is an effort ball.

England reached 455-5 at one point in the second Test. The match probably wasn’t going anywhere and Wagner had taken 1-114. Was he deterred? Did he slack off even slightly? Put it this way: he finished with 5-124.

Similarly, everyone knows how Australian Tests go when the home team bats first. They made 416 and 467 in two Tests against New Zealand.

In the first Test, Lockie Ferguson got injured, so Wagner bowled 37 overs and took 4-92. In the second, he bowled 38 overs and took 4-83.

He has bounced out Steve Smith four times in four innings.

The workhorse strike bowler

Neil Wagner is a paradox. He bowled, on average, 45 overs a Test match, yet took a wicket every 37 balls. His strike-rate is as good as anyone’s. His workload is unsurpassed.

He achieves all this with a stock ball that’s an 83mph bouncer.

It makes no sense.

Neil Wagner makes no sense.

Neil Wagner is magnificent.

We once gave Neil Wagner an award for his commitment to bustling fast-medium bowling in the face of being stereotyped as a bustling fast-medium bowler. Now we’re giving him another award.

Congratulations, Neil Wagner, you are 2019’s Lord Megachief of Gold.

Our annual Lord Megachief of Gold award is the highest honour in cricket. The title is recognition of performance over the previous calendar year. Here are all the winners.

There was some half-decent batting in 2018 – Virat Kohli played a couple of blinding innings, while Henry Nicholls averaged 73 – but it was the bowlers who stood out, and the pace bowlers in particular.

Full respect to Kagiso Rabada, the top wicket-taker with 52 at 20.07; kudos to Jasprit Bumrah who straight-armed his way to 48 at 21.02; and worthy mentions to Pat Cummins, Jimmy Anderson and Ishant Sharma, all of whom took over 40 wickets at somewhere around 20. However, the standout performers were Mohammad Abbas and Jason Holder.

The former took 38 wickets at 13.76 with his ostensibly unspectacular dobblery. The latter took 33 wickets at (what?!) 12.39 and nobody noticed.

The metamorphosis

At some point in the middle of June, Jason Holder turned into a completely different bowler. He went from being a guy who always looked like he should take wickets but didn’t, to being a guy who took exactly as many wickets as you imagined he would and then maybe a couple more on top of that.

We’ve no idea what happened. Maybe he and Michael Holding shared the same telepod and mingled DNA. Maybe he got confused by time zones following a long flight and gorged himself after midnight, triggering a metamorphosis into a seam bowling gremlin.

On June 20, Jason Holder had a Test bowling average of 38.83. In his next four Tests, against Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India, he took 30 wickets at 9.20.

That is, by any stretch, an improvement.

Of course he did

In many respects, this makes perfect sense. Jason Holder is a laser-guided two metre tall bowler. Of course he’s a challenge for batsmen to face. But where did this come from?

In the first innings of the day-night Test against Sri Lanka at Bridgetown, Holder came in to bat with the score reading 53-5, at which point he made 74.

This seems to have been the turning point as he then took 4-19 plus 5-41 in the second innings. (It was a stellar effort from the West Indies to lose that match really.)

Against Bangladesh he took 2-10 and 3-30 before ramping things up a bit in the second Test with 5-44 and 6-33.

Cheap wickets in easy conditions against easy opposition?

Not a bit of it. After that, Holder’s performance in a ten-wicket defeat in Hyderabad featured a fifty and 5-56 in India’s first innings. (He didn’t really get much chance to bowl in the second innings thanks to the swift losing of the match.)

There his Test year ended.

There’s a sense of dissatisfaction here; a feeling that others may have proven more. Holder took his wickets in six Tests against Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India. Rabada took his in ten against India, Australia, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

But ask yourself this: what more could Jason Holder possibly have done? If a captain can chip in with crucial runs and take his wickets at 12 while enduring all the press conferences and other hassle, that’s really something.

We’re not 100 per cent sure what that something is, but with three Tests against England and a couple more against India coming up in 2019, maybe we’ll find out.

4 minute readOur annual Lord Megachief of Gold award is the highest honour in cricket. The title is recognition of performance over the previous calendar year. Here are all the winners.

From a personal perspective, one of the great tragedies of modern Test cricket is that we don’t draw the curtains, switch off our phone and scrutinise each and every delivery bowled by James Anderson. He has been so brilliant for so long that what he does has become no more remarkable to us than the fact that human life exists.

Even the most extraordinary things can eventually become wallpaper.

Rivals

You’re probably thinking ‘what about Steve Smith?’ because it’s all anyone’s been banging on about for the last few weeks. Honestly, why don’t you all just agree to live in a gargantuan harem and marry him?

Let’s put Steve Smith in context.

With 1,305 Test runs at 76.76 and six hundreds, he’d probably make the podium. However, the batsmen named Lord Megachief of Gold typically do better than that.

Shivnarine Chanderpaul averaged over 100 in Tests in both 2007 and 2008; MS Dhoni averaged 92.25 in 2009, plus he kept wicket and won a billion one-day games; Ian Bell averaged 118.75 in 2011; Michael Clark averaged 106.33 in 2012; Brendon McCullum and Angelo Mathews averaged in the 70s in 2014, but did so in such freakish and contrasting ways that each had a unique case; and Kane Williamson averaged 90 in 2015.

Even this year, Virat Kohli’s averaged 75.64 and he’s done so scoring 50 per cent quicker than Smith.

Smith’s is a lofty sustained brilliance defined by the fact that this year isn’t even ‘all that’ by his unique standards.

Also, it’s our website and we’ll pick who we want.

There are perhaps two other bowlers who also warrant a quick mention. Kagiso Rabada took 57 Test wickets at 20.28, but we’d argue it’s Nathan Lyon who’d push Smith down to the third step on the podium. 63 wickets at 23.55, largely playing against India or on flat pitches is a half decent effort by anyone’s standards.

But enough about everyone else

Jimmy’s taken 55 Test wickets at 17.58 – and this despite playing his winter matches in a team that’s been getting royally battered.

There will again be the argument that many of these wickets were taken on green, seaming English pitches. Guess we’ll have to counter this again.

Imagine a hypothetical scenario where a player won half the Tests he played for his team but contributed nothing in the other half. A player who single-handedly gave his team victories in 50 per cent of its matches would be a name for the ages.

But it’s hardly like Anderson hasn’t been contributing Down Under. He’s basically been waging a one-man war. Well set batsmen annihilate bowling averages and the 16 wickets he’s taken at 26.06 would surely have come cheaper had the strongest support not come from Craig Overton (six wickets at 37.66).

Even more context

Context, context, context, averages, averages, averages. We’ll be through all this in a second, we promise. We just want to frame the ‘English bowler takes wickets on green, seaming English pitches’ argument a bit better.

These were the returns of England’s other seamers in 2017:

• Stuart Broad – 30 wickets at 36.06
• Toby Roland-Jones – 14 wickets at 19.64
• Ben Stokes – 16 wickets at 31.31
• Chris Woakes – 12 wickets at 51.41

Those are his team-mates, bowling in the same matches. Anderson’s basically been twice as effective as Stuart Broad, while Toby Roland-Jones might want to try and sustain that level of performance for more than four matches before getting too pleased with himself.

The best English bowler we’ve seen

At the age of 35, we consider James Anderson to be the benchmark for swing bowling in a very real sense. If he doesn’t take wickets, we very rarely even consider the possibility that he could have bowled better. We tend to conclude that he achieved all that could be achieved by a swing bowler in those conditions and so instead look to his team-mates in our bid to pinpoint the team’s shortcomings.

Like R Ashwin last year, Anderson’s greatest achievement is in meeting and occasionally even exceeding expectations that are really quite unreasonable. There will be young England fans who have never really heard a commentator say about their team that it ‘failed to make the most of good conditions for swing bowling’.

Plonk Anderson in a low-scoring game on a September pitch and he’ll take 7-42. Gift him a once-in-a-lifetime chance to bowl with a new pink ball under lights in Australia and he’ll actually make use of it.

The whippersnappers among you will have to trust us on this: failing to make the most of good conditions for swing bowling really is a thing. It will happen again – almost as soon as James Anderson retires.

3 minute readOur annual Lord Megachief of Gold award is the highest honour in cricket. The title is recognition of performance over the previous calendar year. Here are all the winners.

A nod for Ben Stokes’ relentless Test excellence (904 runs at 45.2 and 33 wickets at 25.81); a second nod for Virat Kohli’s performance across all formats, which included 1,215 Test runs at 75.93; and a third nod for the homicidal capybara Rangana Herath, who took 57 wickets at 18.92.

However, this year’s Lord Megachief of Gold is R Ashwin, a man who can’t so much as look at a cricket ball without winning a Test match for India.

R Ashwin took 72 Test wickets at 23.9 in 2016 and also scored 612 runs at 43.71 during his downtime, which he mostly likes to spend with a bat in his hand. He is a strike bowler who does the donkey work who also bats well enough that his side can field an extra bowler. If his captain is higher profile, it is Ashwin who India would miss most.

To repeat a point we made a few weeks ago, pit a team of 11 Ashwins against one comprising 11 of any other individual player and the Ashwin XI would surely come out on top after the two teams had come up against each other home and away.

We’ll come to the bowling in a second, because that’s the heart of the matter, but before we do that it’s worth closing this section by pointing out that only three Indian batsmen scored more runs than him in 2016.

How to take wickets

R Ashwin is not a mystery spinner. Mystery spin – in the form of the carrom ball – is just something he resorts to when necessary, or when he thinks the pitch suits that particular delivery. Once upon a time, mystery spin was something to aspire to, but Ashwin has transcended it. It is something he is occasionally reduced to.

Mystery spin is Plan B because Plan A generally works pretty well. Against England, Ashwin took 28 wickets, including three five-fors and that was far and away his least successful series of the year. In the West Indies, he took 17 wickets at 23.17 (while averaging 58.75 with the bat) and against New Zealand, he took 27 wickets in three Tests at an average of 17.77.

Expectations

In all honesty, 2015 was probably more impressive in terms of his returns with the ball, but that is arguably what’s so admirable. This has been a continuation; a meeting of already lofty expectations.

Ashwin took no wickets in the first 2016 Test innings in which he bowled (against the West Indies). In the second innings, he took 7-83 and India won the match. Even when he seemingly lets India down – such as when they drew the next Test – you see that he still took 5-52 in the first innings.

Like a badly-trained dog, he has never been down for long. A slow start in the first Test against England was followed by 5-67 in the first innings of the second. As a UK website, we focused on the England batsmen’s response to pressure, but that pressure didn’t come out of thin air. It fizzed down, out of R Ashwin’s right hand.

The series against New Zealand was pretty much relentless wicket-taking.

In a nutshell

As he skips around the outfield like a primitive robot inexplicably constructed out of wet concrete, you remember that R Ashwin isn’t actually flawless. Far from it. He is a trier. He is a ponderous and pondering man who has methodically hewn himself into the most influential cricketer around.

He is the nerdiest nerd who delivers the least fashionable style of bowling. He approaches the crease as if both his arms have been stuck on inside-out, indulges in a brief prance and then delivers the ball without the least bit of ceremony.

And it works.

2 minute readOur annual Lord Megachief of Gold award is the highest honour in cricket. The title is recognition of performance over the previous calendar year. Here are all the previous winners.

Last year, the Lord Megachief of Gold award was split with both Brendon McCullum and Angelo Mathews honoured. This year, one man is out there on his own.

All aboard the Kane train

Destination: who knows? But the journey will take a while and it’ll feature many, many runs.

A number of players have made 200-300 Test runs more than Kane Williamson in 2015. All of them have played at least 50 per cent more matches. He averaged 90.15 for the year.

New Zealand only get short tours – batsmen don’t get long to acclimatise – but yet in every series he played, he made a hundred. Against England, at Lord’s, he made 132. Against Australia he made 140 at Brisbane and 166 at Perth. The year was also bookended by contrasting hundreds at home against Sri Lanka.

In Wellington, back in January, he made light of a 135-run first innings deficit and made 242 not out in the second innings. He trumped Kumar Sangakkara’s 203 and New Zealand won. It would have been a passing-of-the-baton moment if cricket had a baton to signify its finest batsman – which it doesn’t. It has a mace for best Test team though. Against that backdrop it doesn’t seem all that ludicrous to introduce a Baton of Blinding Batsmanship.

More recently, Williamson made a hundred in a fourth innings run-chase. You don’t get many of those. He alone contributed what you could realistically have expected the entire team to muster in those circumstances. New Zealand won.

How?

In that mammoth double hundred in Wellington, Williamson made just 72 in boundaries. That’s not the way big innings are built in this day and age. When there’s a high score in New Zealand, it’s often at a small ground. There was no inflation here though. He faced 438 balls and just 18 of them went to the fence.

In contrast, when he made 140 in Brisbane, 96 runs came in boundaries. It’s almost like he was a different batsman, which in many ways sums up his brilliance.

In summary

Oh, by the way, Williamson was also the second-highest scorer in one-day internationals and during the World Cup, he demonstrated how to hit a six.

We hereby move that henceforth, whenever Williamson comes in to bat, all commentators must intone the words: “New Zealand are about to administer the Kane.”

4 minute readWe’re never sure why people are so averse to comparing apples and oranges. They’re both fruit, after all. It’s not like comparing ox heart and communism. Like apples and oranges, Brendon McCullum and Angelo Mathews are quite different, but also have rather a lot in common.

Why a dual award?

There were plenty of other contenders this year. Kumar Sangakkara couldn’t stop scoring runs and Steve Smith developed a real taste for the Indian bowling, while last year’s Lord Megachief of Gold, Dale Steyn, has become so relentlessly brilliant that people don’t even bat an eyelid when he takes 39 Test wickets at 19.56.

However, Brendon McCullum and Angelo Mathews have been the players who have stood out for us. We have spent the last week or so trying to choose, but their cases are so different that it has been like comparing crisps with ennui. In the end, we decided that as captains of lower profile Test nations who have led by freakish example, they both have an equal claim to the title, even if they have reached this point via entirely different routes.

The highs and lows

We’ll start with McCullum because his case is more obvious. Until recently, he has always been far better in one-dayers than Tests, but in 2014, he averaged 20.33 in one-dayers and 72.75 in Tests. But even that doesn’t really give the full story because between the middle of February and the end of November, he didn’t get past 50 in the longest format.

Truth be told, McCullum didn’t register a single Test fifty all year. He was only an ounce of extra heft away from not having made a score between 100 and 200 either. His 134-ball 195 against Sri Lanka on Boxing Day seemed an almost childishly needless means of pointing out to everyone that he could also score normal hundreds as well as doubles and triples.

New Zealand won that match – their last of the year – just as they’d won against India in their first match of the year when McCullum had made 224. One match later, he made 302 after his side had surrendered a 246-run first innings lead to earn an unlikely draw. You can’t say he doesn’t influence matches and nor can you say that he doesn’t make the most of good form.

McCullum’s crowning achievement came in November, however. Australia had just demonstrated how hard it is to even compete against Pakistan in the UAE, let alone win, and the ‘home’ team had at first carried on in much the same vein against New Zealand. But a Kiwi side hewn in McCullum’s stumpy-but-still-up-for-a-fight image was having none of it. They drew the second Test and then minced Pakistan in the third.

Mark Craig was man of the match, but McCullum made 202 off 188 balls. It’s hard to respond to something like that and Pakistan couldn’t.

The bit in-between

Angelo Mathews has been harder to spot. Not for him the double hundreds. In fact, even the single hundreds feel like aberrations. Mathews’ year has been almost the exact opposite of McCullum’s. He seems to have made 50 almost every time he has gone out to bat.

Only once in 20 Test innings was he dismissed for a single-figure score and despite only two hundreds, he averaged 77.33. If this is starting to sound like a celebration of mediocrity, factor in his one-day knocks and you start to get a feel for the scale of his achievement. Over 31 50-over innings, he averaged 62.20 and even when his team was rubbish, he was good. In five sad defeats to India, he delivered 92 not out after arriving with the score reading 64-3, 75 after arriving at 42-3 and 139 not out after arriving at 73-3.

Quite simply, he never lets his side down. At times in the past, he’s seemed a trifle bits and pieces. But nowadays his bits of bowling arrive alongside some magnificent pieces of batting.

His all-round performance at Headingley must rank somewhere reasonably high in some list or other of good cricket things. We’re not going to define that list or choose the ranking because that could only elicit nit-picking which is surely besides the point.

Mathews had taken 4-44 in England’s first innings when he walked out to bat. His side were 68 ahead with four wickets down and had just expended an extraordinary amount of energy in securing a nine-wickets-down draw in the first Test (a match in which he had made 102). Pretty soon, Sri Lanka were seven down and just 169 ahead. Surely the reservoirs of self-belief were running dry?

At the time, we wrote about how batting with the tail is an amorphous puzzle where your goal oscillates between singles and boundaries with the field waxing and waning constantly. In short, it’s mentally exhausting, yet Angelo Mathews took his side from 277-7 to 437-9.

Even then, he wasn’t done. England fought back through Moeen Ali. When you’ve poured so much into a game and it seems it’s still not enough, you can crumple or you can redouble your efforts. Quite how you accomplish the latter is beyond us, but that is presumably what Mathews managed in captaining Sri Lanka to their first proper series victory in England.

In summary

Between them, they’ve got it all covered. Take a bow, Brendon McCullum and Angelo Mathews – the sides you captain are better for your presence. You are 2014’s Conjoined Lord Megachiefs of Gold.

2 minute readSame as 2010. In fact, it’s probably worth reading that article again because much of it still applies. We don’t try and overthink the Lord Megachief of Gold award. We don’t get too fancy with it. It was business as usual for Dale Steyn in 2013 and business brought him 51 Test wickets at 17.66.

Start as you mean to go on

When you’ve racked up 525-8, as South Africa did against New Zealand back in January of last year, you brace yourself for a long, tough stint in the field. Only in your wildest dreams do you imagine that your opening bowler will take 5-17 in that sort of scenario.

For most bowlers, that would be the standout performance of the year – perhaps even in their entire career. However, as we know, Dale Steyn ain’t most bowlers. He’s a vicious threshing machine into which helpless Test batsmen are fed. He spits out husks. Against Pakistan in February, he conceded eight runs and spat out six husks.

It doesn’t matter who you’re playing against, or where: 6-8 is just stupid.

Worse figures, better bowling

What really swayed it for us, however, was Steyn’s performance against India towards the end of the year. That highlighted the quality that separates him from those who are merely pretenders. Dale Steyn is simply unremitting. It’s tempting to list synonyms to drive this point home, but you’re smart people – you can read that one word and appreciate how much we mean it.

Even good bowlers can find themselves cowed from time to time. It might not be the opposition that cause this to happen – it might just be conditions – but at some point or other, pretty much every bowler finds themself ever so slightly disheartened. It’s entirely natural. It’s entirely logical. It would be freakish and delusional to feel any different.

In the first Test between South Africa and India, Dale Steyn took 1-61 and 0-104. In the second Test, India reached 198-1 and Steyn had conceded 62 runs without taking a wicket.

Did he relent? Did he bollocks.

His next 10 deliveries saw the departure of Cheteshwar Pujara for 70, Murali Vijay for 97 and Rohit Sharma first ball. Match and series suddenly veered down an unmarked side road. Then, at 316-5, he was at it again, dismissing MS Dhoni, Zaheer Khan and Ishant Sharma within the space of eight deliveries.

Steyn finished that innings with 6-100 and this is why he’ll finish his career with a better average than Vernon Philander. Even when going for runs and with nothing to show for it, he was still hell-bent on dismissing batsmen. That, after all, is what Test cricket is all about.

Congratulations, Dale Steyn. You are 2013’s Lord Megachief of Gold.