All-Live vs All-Dead

Jonathan Bernstein has a jolly post attempting to select a squad of baseball players who are still alive to take on Babe Ruth and his comrades on the All-Dead team in some kind of hypothetical celestial match-up. This is the kind of parlour game that can’t be left to baseball alone. So here’s an effort to do the same with cricket:

All-Dead XI:

1 Jack Hobbs
2 Victor Trumper
3 Don Bradman
4 Wally Hammond
5 George Headley
6 W.G Grace (Capt)
7 Keith Miller
8 Godfrey Evans (wkt)
9 Malcolm Marshall
10 Bill O’Reilly
11 S.F Barnes

The batting, frankly, pretty much picks itself. I’d questioned selecting the Doctor on the grounds that nineteenth century cricket – complete with his own, outdated even then, round-arm bowling – is so different that meaningful comparisons are hard to make. Nevertheless, I’m not sure one can quite leave him out.