Ravi Shastri Names India’s Five Greatest ODI Players; Picks One Player Who Never Won World Cup
As a two-time World Cup winner as well as a team that has played the final four times in history, India are without doubt one of the greatest ODI teams in the history of the sport and have produced some of the finest cricketers the world has seen in the format.
While many of the best in the world will be Indians, who are the finest from the country? Ravi Shastri picked his top five, in which he put Virat Kohli at the top of the list.
Alongside Kohli, he picked four players who have been involved in World Cup wins, including three from the 2011 squad, including skipper MS Dhoni. The third player from the Men in Blue squad who broke a 28-year-old wait was Sachin Tendulkar, universally regarded as the greatest cricketer in the history of the game.
Shastri also picked Kapil Dev, who is arguably the best all-rounder the sport has ever seen as well as the captain of the Indian team, which changed the sport’s destiny in the country by upsetting the odds and winning the 1983 World Cup-winning squad.
The fifth player picked by Shastri is Rohit Sharma, who led India to the final of the 2023 World Cup after their most dominant campaign with 10 victories in a row. Rohit is also the only player in history to score five centuries in a single campaign.
“I’ll go with Kohli, Tendulkar, Kapil Dev, MS Dhoni, and Rohit Sharma. And the only reason I’ve not put Bumrah there is because Bumrah has got another three or four years of cricket left. You know, these players, they’re more or less coming to the fag end of their careers. They played over a decade, some over a decade and a half, so I would put… And it’s tough to pick. There are so many other good players there when you look back. But these stand out for me.
“They’ve been outstanding contributors. Two World Cup captains there, who won the World Cup as well. And barring Rohit Sharma, everyone in that list are World Cup winners. But you can’t take Rohit out of the mix with three double hundreds and over 11,000 runs. He’s number three in the list of run-getters. And all these on the given day are genuine match winners,” said Shastri in an interaction with FOX Cricket.
Shastri’s list includes India’s top three run-getters in ODI cricket in the form of Sachin, Virat, and Rohit, as well as the two World Cup-winning captains, with both Kapil and Dhoni included.
