Top 20 batting
Top 20 bowling The greatest individual Test performances of 2001 came from Harbhajan Singh and VVS Laxman in India's spectacular victory over Australia, according to the Wisden 100 list of the year's best batting and bowling performances, published today.

Laxman's monumental 281 at Calcutta, the highest Test score ever made by an Indian, was far and away the innings of the year, while Harbhajan topped the bowling chart just as easily with his 8 for 84 in the second innings of the third Test at Chennai.

And Harbhajan wasn't finished there - he produced four of the top five performances this year, and all in the space of 11 delirious days in March. The man they call the Turbanator spearheaded a good year for the spinners, who were responsible for 10 of the top 15 bowling displays. Indeed it was a good year to be in a minority - of the top 20 batting performances, 12 came from the blade of a left-hander.

Both lists were produced by the man behind the Wisden 100, the analyst Ananth Narayan, using the same set of impartial measures ranging from the quality of the opposition to the effect on the match result.

As well as Harbhajan and Laxman, there were formidable ratings for Mark Butcher (second in the batting), Muttiah Muralitharan (second in the bowling), Andy Flower (the only man to make either the batting or bowling top 10 in a losing cause - and he did it twice, in the same match), Graham Thorpe (best performance overseas), and a few new boys who found themselves in elevated company: Zaheer Khan, Mohammad Sami and Andy Blignaut.

There were other notable trends. Australia inspired immortality in their opponents - of the top ten performances, seven were against them - but the Aussies themselves relied more on their formidable team strength. They had only three entries in the batting top 20, and the highest - Adam Gilchrist's Birmingham butchery of Darren Gough and co. - came in 16th. Of the four Aussie bowling displays to make the cut, the highest was Shane Warne at eighth, with 7 for 165 against England at The Oval.

Australia also provided the curious case of the top 10 reject. Stuart MacGill hit number 10 with a bullet for his 7 for 104 against West Indies at Sydney at the start of the year - but has not played a Test since, though that looks set to change when Australia play South Africa at the start of 2002 … again at Sydney. Even the world champions have horses for courses.

Apart from Bangladesh, every Test-playing nation was represented in the top 20 innings. But the bowling was notable for the absence of two of the game's former masters - the toothless West Indians (not a great surprise, as their bowlers managed only two five-fors all year) and England (for whom nobody took more than five wickets in an innings).

It was a good year to watch cricket at the SSC in Colombo, which witnessed six of the top 40 performances, more than any other ground, although Calcutta - through Harbhajan, Laxman and Rahul Dravid - got four in one go.

They ended the year in something approaching disarray, but whichever way you look at it, the cricketing year 2001 belonged to India, to their victory over the world's best team, and to those already legendary performances from Harbhajan and VVS.

© Wisden CricInfo Ltd