With England’s Joe Root is all set to make his captaincy test debut today at historic ground of Lords against South Africa today. This will be the start of an era for “fab four” of modern day cricket. Fab four quartet comprised of England’s Joe Root, Australia’s Steve Smith, New Zealand’s Kan Williamson & India’s Virat Kohli.
Although the talks about fantastic four started about 2-3 years back as all were showing their batting skills & holding the batting forts of their respective teams but with Joe Root taking over the reins of England & with other three already settled in their captaincy roles during last year or so, this will start of sterner test as who will came out as a real star with burden of captaincy as mostly when a world class player have been burdenized with captaincy there form fell away.
As all of them are following almost identical career pattern. All of them are of same age bracket, made test debut almost at same age and all four have been tipped as a future captain since start o their career.
Initially all of them was treated as good player in one format and not so good in other. For example for major part of their early career Virat Kohli & Steve Smith were treated as a good limited over batsman but off late they have shown great improvement in their test match batting skills. Joe Root & Kane Williamson was always seems to be more suitable in longer format of the game with classical batting but they have enhanced their repertoire to match the modern batting and now regarded as permanent fixture in all formats of the game.
If we compare international runs for all three batsman’s than Virat Kohli is little ahead of others with 14,352 international runs to his credit (it is mainly because he has played more ODI cricket as compared to others). Whereas Kane Williamson, Joe Root and Steve Smith have scored 10,846, 9122 & 8869 runs respectively.
In batting averages in test cricket fab four is led by Steve Smith leading the chart with staggering average of 61.05, Kane Williamson with 51.16 & Joe Root with 52.80 are also on right side of fifty runs per innings mark. Virat Kohli with an average of just shade under 50 with 49.40 runs per innings. In ODI’s Virat Kohli is on top with 53.94 runs per innings & T20I average of 53.40. Joe Root has ODI average of 49.37 & T20I average of 40.30 runs per innings. Kane Williamson managing 46.98 runs per innings in ODI’s & 36.29 in T20I’s. Joe Root has ODI average of 49.37& T20I average of 40.30 to his name.
A brief summary of international centuries for the quartet is also mentioned with Virat Kohli leading the charts followed by Steve Smith, Kane Williamson & Joe Root respectively.
This is not only the current performances of these players that had made them to be termed as fab four, it was their performance over the past few years which have lead them to a success in international cricket and their current ratings in international cricket shows the performances they have at their back. It is a great achievement in presence of Hashim Amla, AB Devillers, Younis Khan, Ross Taylor, David Warner and others, these four have managed to remain in top 10 ICC batsman across all formats (except Steve Smith who is on # 10 in ODI and not featured in T20I rankings). Interestingly all of them have enjoyed a short stint at # 1 batsman in test cricket because of their performances and replaced each other many a times at # 1 spot.
Hopefully the competition among the four continues and this generation would witness the best batting geniuses in these four to have grace the game of cricket.
