Ravindra Jadeja Named India's Most Valuable Player Of 21st Century

Ravindra Jadeja emerged as the most valuable Indian player of the 21st century beating the likes of MS Dhoni and Virat Kohli in the process. Jadeja started his career as a batsman before his bowling abilities started to come to the fore. His straight line soon began to deceive batsmen in across formats as he became a reliable player for the team.

Jadeja has a decent average across formats with the bat and picked up 213 wickets in Tests and 187 in the ODIs. He became second fastest Indian to bag 200 wickets — in 44 Tests. His feat was behind R Ashwin‘s efforts — he achieved the feat in 37 matches.

Ravindra Jadeja was only behind Muttiah Muralitharan in the world

According to media reports, to analyse the all-rounder’s performance, Wisden used CricViz, a detailed analysis tool in cricket. As per the tool, Jadeja emerged as the second most valuable player, behind Sri Lanka’s Muttiah Muralitharan.

“It might come as a surprise to see Ravindra Jadeja, India’s spin-bowling all-rounder, feature as India’s number one. After all, he’s not even always an automatic pick in their Test team. However, when he does play he is picked as a frontline bowler and has batted as high as No.6 – contributing to a very high match involvement,” Cricviz’s Freddie Wilde told Wisden.

“The 31-year-old’s bowling average of 24.62 is better than Shane Warne’s and his batting average of 35.26 is better than Shane Watson’s. His batting and bowling average differential of 10.62 runs is the second-best of any player this century to have scored more than 1,000 runs and taken 150 wickets. He is an all-rounder of the very highest quality,” he added.

Jadeja is still to resume training as a lot of Indian players have already hit the deck.