An One

So who has been the best cricketer in the past 10 years?I've become fascinated to the point of obsession by a question of such incomprehensible triviality and unimportance.

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Should it be Ricky Ponting? Photograph: Cameron Spencer/Getty Images

I blame Boycott. It is his fault. His fault that I can't sleep. There is a worm wriggling around inside my mind. It squirms when my head sinks into the pillow, and I lose all track of time chasing it around, until I find myself wide-awake in the small hours, staring at the curtain. This thought-worm has started to come out in the day time too. When I'm sat at my desk, staring at the screen. Or standing on the bus, shuddering in a traffic jam.


I have become fascinated to the point of obsession by a question of such incomprehensible triviality, such unequivocal unimportance, that I would be ashamed to admit my preoccupation with it to any normal person. On these pages though I feel I am in good company. Safe among a community of fellow cricket tragics. People who won't judge me for thinking these things.


As I said, it is all Boycott's fault. His, and Angus Wagstaff's. A fortnight ago or so I was listening to Boycott's podcast on Cricinfo - a sentence which, while I think of it, is as clear indication as any that I need to get out more. Wagstaff had emailed in with a question. "With the end of the decade approaching," this man Wagstaff wondered, "who do you think is the best cricketer of the decade?"


And there's the rub.


Wagstaff's poser was the rarest of things, a question which had Boycott sitting on the fence. He had drawn up a shortlist: Brian Lara, Sachin Tendulkar, Ricky Ponting, Shane Warne, Jacques Kallis, Muttiah Muralitharan and Mohammad Yousuf. But in the end he was unable to give a single answer, and plumped for a split-decision between Ricky Ponting and Jacques Kallis.


The player of the decade is not something you can judge by statistics alone. It need not be dictated by a player's personal success in terms of runs made or wickets taken. It is not necessarily related to how many matches, or series, a player won for his team. There are other issues to be considered: could they captain? Could they catch? Did they change the way the game is played? Did they change the way the it was perceived? It could hinge on character as well as achievement. The style in which they played, the entertainment they provided, the dignity and grace with which they handled themselves. Possibly they deserve the title on the strength of one epoch-defining performance alone.


More than any of those, maybe the title has to be tied to something altogether less tangible. Who best captured the spirit of the age? And what was that spirit anyway?


It's the sheer number of criteria that make the question so hard to answer. So now it is over to you, dear readers. There are only two qualifications - deeds done before 2000 don't count. The likes of Lara and Tendulkar then, can be judged only on what they have done since the turn of the century. And the question spans all forms of the game, limited and unlimited overs. How much weight you give to each of ODI, T20 and Test cricket will depend on personal preference, but these 10 years will be certainly remembered as the era when Twenty20 began to flourish and that has to be taken into account.


Ponting's case is easy to make. He has won more matches since the decade began than anybody else, 252 out of the 359 he has played in, and more runs - 2,270 - than anyone else too. If he were inclined to, no doubt Ponting could master Twenty20 cricket too. He clobbered 98* from 55 balls in the very first T20 international after all. And if he has steadily lost interest in it ever since, to the point where he has now quit the team, well maybe that only makes him a more appealing candidate to the traditionalists. But then he has lost successive Ashes tours as captain. And for me Ponting's batting is never as magical as Lara's was, or as awesome as Tendulkar's is. Did Ponting's captaincy define this era in the same way that Mark Taylor's did the 1990s?


Last Thursday you would have found any number of people willing to put forward Tendulkar's name and leave it there. That was the day he made 175 out of 347 against Australia, his 41st century of the decade (compared to Ponting's 55). Tendulkar is as famous in this era as WG Grace was in his, and, as Rob Smyth was eager to point out when I dragged him into this mess, has had to endure publicly reinventing his approach to the game as he has got older.


Kallis is less loved than either of those two, but is arguably a more gifted cricketer than either. He is the only man to average over 50 in all forms across the entire decade, a mind-boggling achievement before you even take into account the 400 wickets he has taken in that time too. But then there are plenty of cricket fans who can't stand the man. Still, no other all-rounder comes close. Except, that is, for Adam Gilchrist, the one man who could rightly claim to have redefined an aspect of the game.


How much of Shane Warne's best work was done in these last 10 years? Does the credit he gets for leading the Rajasthan Royals to the inaugural IPL title outweigh the embarrassment he suffered when he was given a drug ban for taking diuretics? Murali has taken more wickets since 2000 than Warne and Anil Kumble combined. For some folk though, Boycott among them, his bowling action automatically renders him ineligible, a criticism I find absurd.


Mohammad Yousuf broke Viv Rchards' record for most Test runs scored in a calendar year. Shiv Chanderpaul has batted like Atlas, shouldering a burden seemingly too big for any man to bear. In those 10 years Rahul Dravid has been at the crease batting for over 664 hours, which is almost 95 straight days of Test cricket. Nobody has been more entertaining then Virender Sehwag, more enthralling than Andrew Flintoff, or more redoubtable than Graeme Smith.


For the wealth of batsmen, there is scarcely a single fast-bowler among the bunch. Glenn McGrath bent the course of two entire World Cups to his will by taking 47 wickets and helping Australia stay unbeaten in both. On wickets taken alone, the No1 is Makhaya Ntini, a man who deserves more recognition than he gets. Ntini? Is this a symptom of just how confused my thinking has become?


It is 4am. The sky is lightening outside. The worm has grown longer, and coiled itself all around me. It's consuming me from the inside out. I need to go to sleep.


Help me. Please. Vote for your cricketer of the decade here.


This is an extract from The Spin, guardian.co.uk/sport's weekly take on the world of cricket. Subscribe now, it's free