We hear a lot about the most prolific wicket-takers in Test cricket, and the Warne-Muralitharan battle for supremacy made a great sporting soap opera in the last decade. However, who has taken more wickets in one-day (List A) cricket than anyone else?
As with first-class cricket, to get anywhere near the top of the list, it helps to have played many seasons in county cricket, regardless of whether you played for your country. 48 players have taken more than 400 in their careers. However, only seven were still plying their trade in the 40- or 50-over formats in 2011 and Murali and Jayasuriya have probably bowled their last in anything other than Twenty20, which isn't included here.
Perhaps surprisingly the list features many English stalwarts of the 1970s and 1980s. However, while ODIs were relatively rare in those days, the summers were chock full of domestic competitions: the 60-over Gillette/Nat West Trophy, 55-over B&H Cup and the 40-over Sunday League filled every spare day in the county calendar, even more than now, although the schedule didn't start before Easter as it sometimesn does now!
Fourth on the all-time list is Essex left-armer John Lever, a brilliant exponent of fast-medium swing. A blend of Malinga and McGrath but blonder with bigger sideburns, he never nailed down a place in the Test team for long but chalked up 674 one-day wickets in a 23-year career, just a few short of Murali and Allan Donald, and equal with Waqar Younis. John Emburey and Ian Botham each topped 600, too.
Courtney Walsh claimed an incredible 1,807 first-class wickets but in one-dayers, a mere 551, although still more than any other West Indian. Most came not for the national team but for Gloucestershire. At 18th and 23rd in the table stand two Englishmen who never represented their country but who toiled away for their respective counties - with some winters in the southern hemisphere - for more than two decades. Lancashire's 'Flat Jack' Simmons and all-rounder Stuart Turner of Essex each took more List A scalps than McGrath, Hadlee or Mushtaq Ahmed, and Turner had a better average (only 22.98) than even Marshall or Pollock.
So who is king of the one-day bowling chart? Step forward, Wasim Akram. With 881 wickets from almost 600 games, his total is almost 200 clear of runner-up Allan Donald. If that isn't impressive enough, the Pakistan legend also aggregated a touch shy of 7000 runs, too. The top five of Wasim, Donald, Murali, Lever and Waqar would make a frightening one-day attack!
As for today's cricketers, can anyone ever get near Wasim Akram's total? Well, with T20 threatening to topple the 50-over game at international level (a shameful prospect), I suspect not. The highest ranking bowler still playing such formats is another left-arm seamer, Sri Lankan veteran Chaminda Vaas, with 504 wickets. He still looked a dangerous player for Northants last summer even if his international days are behind him. Next up is Shahid Afridi. Still probably best known as a big hitter, his leg breaks have netted him 437 victims in 423 matches, predominantly for Pakistan. Had he played more in England, that total would have been inflated further but the modern international schedule rules out a decent run for county cricket beyond a few T20 cameos. Glamorgan's Robert Croft has amassed 410 but is in his twilight years now but there is still life in a few other pacemen with little or no English county experience. Brett Lee and Agit Agarkar limit their one-day appearances these days but each are members of the '400 club',but with little hope of reaching 500. Unlike Afridi, provided he maintains recent form and keeps in with the notoriously fickle Pakistani board. However, I doubt if anyone else will ever take 500 wickets in this type of cricket, and Wasim Akram will stand tall and proud for the rest of time.
