The Best of 2017: 5 Top performers for India

When a cricket team can be found within the top five rungs of the rankings ladder in all 3 formats of the game, you’ve got to admit that they’ve been doing something extraordinarily right. India have had a fantastic year so far in 2017 in every zone and in all quarters. They’ve had a seemingly unending unbeaten streak, most of them on home turf albeit. However, this barely takes away anything from the team that has toiled day in and day out for the past 12 months to be standing tall at No.1 in Test, No. 2 in ODIs and No.4 in T20I rankings.

India’s remarkable success rate in the recent past has been nothing but a high turnover of the abundant talent of the existing player pool that they possess right now. They’ve beaten Bangladesh, Australia, New Zealand, England, West Indies and Sri Lanka in the year that’s about to come to a close, and they’ve done so on a trot, proving their strength as a unit in the process. Currently, 6 Indian players can be found in the ICC Top 10 Players ratings (batsmen, bowlers and all-rounders combined) over all the formats of the game.

Indian batsmen, such as Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, KL Rahul, Cheteshwar Pujara and the bowlers, Ravichandran Ashwin, Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Shami and the likes have contributed heavily to the team’s winning causes. Batting and bowling records have been written and re-written by India in 2017 plenty of times as they’ve left a vivid mark on the cricketing calendar of 2017. Here’s our take on the top 5 performers for Team India in 2017:

5. Bhuvneshwar Kumar

Indian pace spearhead, Bhuvneshwar Kumar may have only played 3 Tests in 2017, but he has bagged 11 scalps in that very short span, at an average of 21.00 and an economy of 2.67. Kumar has been instrumental in Indian victories for quite some years now and the lanky bowler has only gone up the performance ladder in 2017, playing lesser matches than usual. Since India currently boasts of an immensely strong bench strength, Kumar has found it difficult to make it to the Playing XI in the longer format of the game.

In the 50-over version, the 27-year-old has played 24 ODIs and has picked up 28 wickets in the process, including a 5-wicket haul against Sri Lanka at Colombo in September 2017. The T20 format got to see very less of him this year as he got only 5 dismissals in the 7 T20Is he played. Kumar’s notable performance came in the Kolkata Test against Sri Lanka in September this year, where he executed his swing bowling talent to perfection and ended the Test with figures of 8/96 in both Lankan innings combined.