SA great Kallis gets top honour
Proteas great 4th SA to be honoured
Proteas great Jacques Kallis yesterday became the fourth South African cricketer to be inducted into the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) Hall of Fame.
The announcement was made live on the ICC’s social media channels and the show featured retired greats Sunil Gavaskar‚ Melanie Jones and Shaun Pollock as the main guests and had Wasim Akram‚ Graeme Smith and Alyssa Healy joining in to congratulate the 2020 inductees.
Kallis follows Allan Donald‚ Barry Richards and Graeme Pollock as fellow South African inductees.
The other two players bestowed the same honour yesterday were Australia’s Lisa Sthalekar and Pakistan’s Zaheer Abbas.
Abbas becomes the sixth Pakistani while Sthalekar is the 27th Australian‚ and the ninth woman player in the list.
In all‚ 93 players have been inducted so far under the system‚ which sees retired players become eligible five years after playing their last international match.
Former ICC Cricket Hall of Famers formed the majority of the adjudicating panel with representation from the media‚ ICC and Federation of International Cricketers’ Association (Fica).
Kallis is the only player to score at least 10‚000 runs and take at least 250 wickets in both Test and ODI cricket‚ and was ICC Player of the Year and ICC Test Player of the year in 2005.
He is South Africa’s leading Test run-scorer‚ and currently third on the all-time list and is also the most capped South African player in both Test and ODI cricket.
He won 23 Player of the Match awards in Test cricket‚ more than anyone else and spent 592 days as the No1 ranked Test batsman (20052011).
He also had 4,028 days as the best-ranked Test all-rounder (2000-2013) and a record 493 matches ranked number one.
“It’s a great honour to be inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame‚” Kallis said.
“It is something that I never expected when I started playing. I certainly did not play the game for any accolades or anything like that‚ I only wanted to win the games for whoever I was playing for.