Posted by Our annual Lord Megachief of Gold award is the highest honour in cricket. The title is recognition of performance over the previous calendar year. Here are all the winners.
No point being all coy about this and postponing the opening of the envelope for dramatic effort. Heck, why even insert the name into an envelope in the first place? It’s not like there’s an actual ceremony taking place here.
There’s no need for envelopes. We can get right on with reading the name out. In fact, thinking about it, we don’t even need to write the name onto the little slip of paper that was going to go inside the envelope. Writing it down, then reading it out to ourself, then typing out the name? That process can definitely be streamlined.
It’s us making the decision and us telling you the name. This whole Oscars-style envelope thing is really just a series of unnecessary steps. The fact of the matter is that we can do this announcement really, really quickly. The name is right here in our brain. We’ll just type it out.
The name is Jasprit Bumrah.
Honourable mentions
Joe Root made six Test hundreds, but it took him 17 matches. Kamindu Mendis was therefore the pick of the batters. He hit five Test tons and averaged 74.92.
Some would say the first two hundreds, against Bangladesh, don’t carry so much weight, but he came in at 57-5 and 126-6, so we wouldn’t quibble with them too much. If you’ve batted well enough that people have forgotten that you bowl both left- and right-handed, you’ve had a decent year.
Of the bowlers, a handful averaged under 20: Kagiso Rabada (34 wickets at 19.94) and Keshav Maharaj (35 at 19.20) for South Africa; Josh Hazlewood (35 at 13.60) for Australia; and Matt Henry (48 at 18.58) for New Zealand.
The second-highest wicket-taker in 2024 was England’s Gus Atkinson with 52 at 22.15.
Jasprit Bumrah took 71 Test wickets at 14.92.
Lord Megachief of Gold 2024 – Jasprit Bumrah
Jasprit Bumrah’s year began with 8-86 in a victory in Cape Town. It finished with 9-156 in a defeat in Melbourne. Only in Pune, against New Zealand, when almost every batter fell to spin bowling did he fail to take a wicket.
Not that such pitches always blunted him. In February, England went into the Visakhapatnam Test with just the one quick bowler – James Anderson – while India indulged themselves with two. While Anderson acquitted himself well enough, Mukesh Kumar took 0-44 off seven overs in the first innings and 1-26 off five overs in the second innings. The wicket he took was Shoaib Bashir.
Not a quick bowler’s pitch really, but Jasprit Bumrah won the game with 6-45 in England’s first innings and sealed the deal with 3-46 in the second. One of those wickets delivered some serious stump-splatteriness.
Wickets and averages can make a case for greatness, but this is the stuff that really matters.
The visceral stuff.
This is what you want from a cricketer and it is why bowlers are so much more fun than batters. The latter steer cricket matches, but for the most part only slowly, like a cornering barge. In contrast, a bowler can redirect a game in an instant.
There was no better example of this than the first Test against Australia in Perth. Fresh from a 3-0 defeat to New Zealand and bowled out for 150 on day one, India were gasping on their knees with one arm half sliced off, like Amleth at the end of The Northman. (Favourite quote about the shooting of that climactic scene from director Robert Eggers: “The vast majority of all that stuff is practical. There are CGI cinders and we had to have smoke to make sure everyone’s penises were hidden, but the vast majority of that stuff was all on set.”)
Bumrah surveyed the damage, gathered himself, roared insanely and began swinging his sword.
As we put it at the time, the end result was that he had the better of Australia’s top order in much the same way that the Death Star had the better of Alderaan.
As impressive as they are, the bare figures of 5-30 don’t do justice to how far off its predicted course he took that game.
He finished with 8-72 for the match and followed it with 4-63 in Adelaide and 9-94 in Brisbane before that final salvo in Melbourne.
It was no flash in the pan. Whatever India’s fortunes as a team, Bumrah himself has been astonishingly consistent. He played 13 Tests in 2024, and in nine of those games, he averaged less than 20. In six of them, he averaged less than 12.
Bumrah walks, then trots; his elbows pump, his arms jab out; and then he whirls and releases the ball from half a yard closer to the batter than makes any physiological sense. He swings it, he seams it, he lands it where he pleases and he knows precisely how he wants to dispatch you.
Usman Khawaja didn’t sweat it too much. After six dismissals in eight innings, the opener simply concluded that he was “just getting Bumrahed” and moved on with his life, comforting himself with the knowledge that there is only one man who can do that.
Congratulations, Jasprit Bumrah, you are 2024’s Lord Megachief of Gold.
Lord Megachiefs of Gold
- 2007: Shivnarine Chanderpaul
- 2008: Shivnarine Chanderpaul
- 2009: MS Dhoni
- 2010: Dale Steyn
- 2011: Ian Bell
- 2012: Michael Clarke
- 2013: Dale Steyn
- 2014: Brendon McCullum and Angelo Mathews
- 2015: Kane Williamson
- 2016: R Ashwin
- 2017: James Anderson
- 2018: Jason Holder
- 2019: Neil Wagner
- 2020: Postponed
- 2020/21: Kane Williamson
- 2022: Ben Stokes
- 2023: R Ashwin
With this award he is, in a way, becoming immortal.
The ever-living Bumrah
(I would make my usual ‘Round The Bend’ reference but no-one remembers it and people think I mean ‘Round The Twist, so I’m not doing it. This is not me doing it, this is me not doing it).
PS I sent an important update in via email over the festive period, hopefully the email address is the same.
It is. We should probably check it.
Solid choice, KC, Bumrah. Hard to disagree.
I’m not at all sure about you dispensing with the envelope, though. And the absence of an extraordinarily expensive, besuited fellow from a massive firm of auditors, removing the envelope from a briefcase and handing it to you. The whole thing feels a little half-hearted without that envelope and the bloke in a suit and stuff.
What if we wrote it in invisible ink on some parchment that we baked inside some leftover pizza dough and then we tore the resultant bread roll open and shone a blacklight on the parchment to reveal the name through the mafts of steam?
Hmmm, well I’m all for innovation and that certainly sounds like an innovative idea.
I like the “big reveal / wow factor” theatricals and I like the fact that PricewaterhouseCoopers would be cut out of the loop. They always seemed surplus to requirements, counting the one vote that is involved in determining The Lord Megachief of Gold.
Have you tested the proposed method yet? I find it almost impossible to believe that you have anything better to do at the moment, so perhaps you would like to devote some weeks this year honing the technique ahead of next year’s ceremony. Be sure to wear appropriate protective clothing – I believe a hazmat suit would be the absolute minimum required. I should imagine The Scientician would help you with your experiments if the physics and chemistry is beyond your ken/experience.
Suiting up…
71 wickets at 14.92.
That is bowling.
Someone on Bluesky reminded us that one of the Guardian writers didn’t pick him for their Test team of the year. Would love to know who.
That’s not even a minor snub. It means someone picked three seamers ahead of him.
Through all those 71 wickets, he even had the time to turn the course of the T20 World Cup final on its head in a couple of overs