(AFP): India’s star batsman Virat Kohli and Australia’s all-rounder Ellyse Perry bagged top honours in the International Cricket Council (ICC) Awards of the Decade.
The awards, held in a place of the usual end-of-year ceremony due to the effects of COVID-19 on the fixture calendar, were primarily decided by a panel of former players and experts, with a 10 percent weighting on a public vote.
Kohli claimed the Sir Garfield Sobers Award for his performances across all formats and also scooped the ODI cricketer of the year, while Perry celebrated a hat-trick by taking the Rachael Heyhoe Flint Award for women’s cricketer of the decade alongside the ODI and T20 prizes.
In a video message, Kohli said, “It’s just been an honour for me to be able to go out there and perform for my team, and it’s a great honour for me to win this award. My only intention was to make winning contributions for the team and I just strive to do that in every game.”
India’s all-formats captain was the decade’s highest run-scorer with 20,396, hitting the most fifties (66) and having the highest average (56.97) of players with more than 70 innings.
Perry won four T20 world titles and the 2013 one-day World Cup, scoring 4,349 runs and taking 213 wickets in the decade. “It has been tremendous to develop the women’s T20 game and take it forward,” Perry added.
Meanwhile, Australian batsman Steve Smith was crowned as the best Test player. Smith won the Test award despite his role in the ball-tampering scandal at the 2018 Cape Town Test which saw him banned for a year.
Afghanistan spinner Rashid Khan said he was speechless after being picked as the men’s T20 player of the decade. “For someone from Afghanistan to get this award, it’s a special moment for me,” he said.
Former India captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni won the decade’s Spirit of Cricket award for sportingly calling back England batsman Ian Bell after a bizarre run-out in the 2011 Nottingham Test.
