The hundreds and five-fors rating – why Moeen Ali is England’s best player

Further to yesterday’s debate about the identity of England’s best player, here’s one possible way of rating them

We made the point yesterday that people shouldn’t blindly accept that Joe Root is England’s best player because he only regularly contributes in one facet of the game. We then a touch disingenuously suggested that all of England’s many all-rounders had a better claim to such a title, simply by dint of contributing in multiple disciplines.

There then followed an interesting-but-lengthy to and fro about the definition of an all-rounder and their value to a team.

Bradders suggested that players could be assessed by their ability to make match-winning contributions. We therefore give you the hundreds and five-fors rating, a wilfully simplistic system whereby hundreds and five-fors are given equal weight and everything else a player might do is utterly disregarded.

These are the figures for the last 12 months, presented within an old-school HTML table which will probably lose its formatting in the majority of internet browsers.

As you may or may not be able to see, Moeen Ali is England’s best player and he is almost twice as good as Joe Root.