What makes a cricketer great?

Cricinfo's recent quest to determine the greatest cricketer of the 2000s finished with Ricky Ponting, as the election reports say, "securing a landslide victory". I did not concur, but that is hardly relevant. There was a case to be made for almost all the remarkable players on the shortlist. The thing of interest was to consider how we assess cricketers. It is a process of rationality forced through filters, starting perhaps with partisanship, then attractiveness, an assessment maybe of a "champion" factor, a judgement of the player's greater impact on the game, arriving finally at a cold percolate of numbers.

I found myself rationalising past the extraordinary Brian Lara. To watch Lara bat was to not only understand the scope of cricket, but also appreciate the beauty of the moving human form. He was one of the very few cricketers to watch whom I was willing to drop anything I was doing. And yet, succumbing to the task of making a worthy verdict while simultaneously resisting the tyranny of stats, I decided to focus instead on 'influence'.