Here's one I've been saving for a while, figuring I'd want to get back to cricket at some point when the excitement about the events of this summer had started to recede. Last month in the Sunday Times, Simon Wilde nominated the top 10 Test teams of all time. The first three on his list were West Indies under Clive Lloyd, Australia under Steve Waugh, and Australia under Don Bradman. The full list, with Wilde's elaborations, is here.
Of course, one can argue back and forth about these matters endlessly, enjoyably and without resolution - something I don't intend to do, you'll be relieved to hear. But I will say that I have no quarrel with Wilde's choice of the first three. As chance would have it, in 2001 when Waugh's Australians were laying waste to the Poms, I ran a sort of statistical game in which these three sides were matched against one another. The result was that there was only a hair between Lloyd's team and Waugh's - with the hair in Australia's favour - and both of them beat Bradman's team by a clear margin. The occasion of this exercise was a piece by Mike Brearley arguing that Waugh's Australians were the greatest ever Test side, followed by a loud raspberry from Frank Keating who thought they were nothing of the kind. I agreed with Brearley and not with the raspberry.
One caution I would enter about Wilde's list, all the justified hoo-hah over their achievement this summer notwithstanding, is that I think it premature to have included Michael Vaughan's England, even at number 9. It's still early days for them. Consider a team that doesn't appear on the list at all: the Australian team of the mid-1970s, led successively by Ian and Greg Chappell, and for which Lillee and Thommo did their devastating stuff. Michael Costello makes a case for this being 'the best cricket team of the past 50 years'. It routed both England and the West Indies, 4-1 and 5-1 respectively. I doubt that Costello's judgement would withstand a statistical comparison between Australia in this period and Simon Wilde's top three - though I haven't (yet?) done the comparison. But I'm also not sure the claims of Vaughan's England are (yet?) stronger than the claims of Australia in the years 1974 to 1976. (By 1977 it was all over, as I witnessed at first hand.)