Shaun Pollock was one of the finest bowling all-rounders the game has ever seen. Fast-bowling great Allan Donald on Saturday said his former teammate Shaun Pollock was the Glenn McGrath of a South African team that dominated world cricket alongside Australia.
Shaun Pollock, a former South African captain, was inducted into the ICC Hall of Fame on Saturday ahead of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup final alongside Sri Lanka’s Mahela Jayawardene and ex England women’s team skipper, late Janette Brittin.
Shaun Pollock Was Proteas Glenn McGrath: Allan Donald
In a letter to Shaun Pollock, which was uploaded on the ICC website, Allan Donald heaped high praise on his former pace bowling partner.
“What I admire a lot about you is the way you were able to adapt your game. When you first came into the Proteas side, you were this fast bowler who could terrorise batters. Despite injuries later in your career, you always managed to be effective, even if you didn’t quite have the pace you once had, and that’s a remarkable quality. You were our Glenn McGrath, the sort of bowler who could lock down an end and let the rest of us run free at the other,” Donald wrote in the letter.
Allan Donald will be remembered as one of the best South African bowlers of all time. He bowled with an aggressive intent and looked to attack the stumps. The right-arm pacer generated a lot of speed and more often than not troubled the batsmen with his quick bouncers. His fast yorkers would often unsettle the batsmen.
The 53-year-old would hit the deck hard and always tried to bowl in the good length area. Allan Donald operated quite well in the slog overs and extracted a lot of bounce even on slow wickets. Allan Donald took 330 wickets in 72 tests and 272 wickets in 164 One Day Internationals. He was quite penetrative with his fast outswingers.
Shaun Pollock Also Scored 2 Test And 1 ODI Ton Apart From 421 Test And 393 ODI Scalps In His 13 Year Long Career
Shaun Pollock was the first player to achieve the 3,000 runs and 300 wickets double in both Test and ODI cricket.
“We could throw you the ball and say ‘See you tonight’. You would pile up the dots at one end and then I would have licence to express myself,” Donald wrote.
“Where my style was to combine control with pace, you did so with swing, getting so close to the stumps that batters would have to play almost every ball. It took incredible stamina and concentration because you gave them nowhere to hide.”
“I think we were never better than when the West Indies came to South Africa in 1998/99. Between us we took 52 wickets in a 5-0 series victory. There was also the tour to India in 2000 when we won 2-0 and the two of us, along with the rest of the pace attack and Nicky Boje just seemed to click.”
The son of former South Africa Peter Pollock and nephew of ICC Hall of Famer Graeme Pollock, Shaun Pollock went on to play 108 Tests, 303 ODIs, and 12 T20Is across 13 years after making his Test debut in 1995 against England.
It was with the ball that pacer Shaun Pollock was truly special, but as a batsman he stood out as well, managing three centuries in total in Tests and ODIs combined. Two of those hundreds came in Test cricket, in which he made 3781 runs at an average of 32.31 with a further 16 half-centuries to boot.
His lone ODI ton came for an Africa XI against an Asia XI in 2007. It was a 110-ball 130-run blitz fitting for a man with a career strike rate of 86.69. In total, he made 3519 runs at 26.45 in ODIs, with 14 fifties to his name alongside the lone ton. Unerringly accurate with the ability to swing and seam the ball, Shaun Pollock took 421 Test wickets at 23.11, 393 ODI wickets at 25.4, and 15 T20I wickets at 20.6.