Top 20 batting
Top 20 bowling Inzamam-ul-Haq and Muttiah Muralitharan were the star performers of 2002 - according to the Wisden 100, whose list of the year's best batting and bowling performances was published today.

Inzamam's mammoth 329 against New Zealand at Lahore in May - the tenth highest score of all time - was the innings of the year by about four waist sizes, and Murali's 9 for 51 against Zimbabwe, when he came within a dropped catch of Test cricket's third ten-for, was fractionally further ahead in the bowling list.

The theme of 2001 was the immortality that playing against Australia occasionally engendered - Laxman, Harbhajan, Butcher and all that. In 2002, however, the Aussies inflicted an overwhelming sense of mortality on everyone who came near them. Nobody could get close. But the fact that there were no truly great performances reflected a slightly subdued year for Test cricket: Inzamam's was one of the more soulless triple-hundreds, Murali's nine-for came against a ragged Zimbabwe, and only Nathan's Astle's amazing 222 against England at Christchurch, which came second in the batting list, could justify the richest superlatives.

If there was another theme it was the prosperity of slow bowling ... again. The top ten bowling performances included seven by six different spinners. Harbhajan Singh had two in the top five, making it six of the top ten bowling performances in the last two years.

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.

Overall, it was undeniably the year of the all-conquering Aussies - a fact reflected in the ratings. Only one of the top 20 bowling performances, and two of the top 20 batting, were against them, and one of those (Faisal Iqbal's Warne-baiting 83, the only non-century to make the cut) just scraped in at the bottom.

The other two scripted Australia's only defeat of the year: Herschelle Gibbs's 104 at Durban, and Jacques Kallis's 3 for 29. Kallis's was the only three-for to make the top 30 let alone the top 20. Doing it against the best counts for so much more.

With 13 of the top 40 performances, Australia took top billing, slightly ahead of ... Pakistan, who surprisingly picked up nine nominations despite losing heavily to Australia, Sri Lanka and South Africa. But then blowing hot and cold has always been the way of Pakistani cricket. The same cannot be said of South Africa, whose remorseless efficiency manifested itself in just those two performances from Gibbs and Kallis.

Even England were better represented than that, although Michael Vaughan was nowhere to be seen. Computers are not equipped to judge beauty. Graham Thorpe - remember him? - played England's best innings, against New Zealand at Christchurch, and in the same match, one which is generally remembered for leather disappearing off willow, Matthew Hoggard and Andrew Caddick bowled themselves into the top three; naturally, Caddick's came in the second innings.

Those four days at the Jade Stadium were the place to watch your cricket: the Test of the year had five of the top 40 performances. There was Astle's astonishing assault, second only to Inzamam, and Nasser Hussain's bloody-minded 106 on the first day - so different an innings that it seems absurd they were only separated by three days - crept in at 13th.

There was no sign of Bangladesh, or of Zimbabwe, and for the first time in a long time the batting list had nothing from Sachin Tendulkar or Steve Waugh ... or Brian Lara, which demonstrated the decline of West Indian cricket - they had just one performance in the top 40. There was also only one performance in a drawn Test in either list, a reflection of the irrevocable change in the dynamic of Test cricket. One thing that doesn't change is Australia's omnipotence. If they are to be toppled, it'll require some individual performances that feature pretty high in the list this time next year.

Rob Smyth is assistant editor of Wisden.com

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