Tendulkar, Sehwag bag batting honours in ESPNcricinfo Awards

Master blaster Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag took the Test and ODI batting honours in the third annual ESPNcricinfo Awards, announced on Friday.

Whereas, the third batting award, for Twenty20, went to West Indies skipper Chris Gayle.

West Indies fast bowler Jerome Taylor bagged the Test bowling award, while the bowling honours in the shorter formats went to two Pakistanis Shahid Afridi and Umar Gul.

The awards recognise the best individual batting and bowling performances in 2009, in all three formats of the game.

Sehwag has now won the Test batting award for the second year running. His thrill-a-minute 293 against Sri Lanka in Mumbai was voted the year's top Test batting innings by all but one member of the jury. Coincidentally, he won it last year for another double-hundred against Sri Lanka- a match-winning 201 in Galle.

Three teams share the six awards for 2009- two wins apiece for India, Pakistan and West Indies.

Afridi won the ODI bowling award for his 6 for 38 in Dubai, which tore into the Australian batting line-up after their openers had got off to a comfortable start.

The closet race in this year's awards was for Twenty20 batting and Gayle's 50-ball 88, which featured the shot of the World Twenty20 - a monster straight six off Brett Lee, sneaked past Tillekaratne Dilshan's 57-ball 96 in the semi-final of the same tournament.

Editor of ESPNcricinfo, Sambit Bal, said the Awards are a small way to show gratitude to the people the site owes its existence to.

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India retain number one spot of ICC test rankings

On Thursday at kolkata, India's victory against South Africa by an innings and 57 runs in the final cricket Test retain their status as the number one Test team.

India needed to pick up the remaining seven wickets to draw the series 1-1, were made to wait till the very fag end of a dramatic fifth day's play for their moment of glory with Hashim Amla nearly carrying the proteas to safety with a defiant unbeaten 123.

Resuming at 115 for three after conceding a mammoth 347-run first innings lead, the South Africans were all out for 290 with just 15 minutes remaining on a nail-biting last day.

Spinners Harbhajan Singh (5/59) and Amit Mishra (3/84) were the wreckers-in-chief as they ripped through the South African middle order but it was the stout resistance from Amla and the tailenders which delayed the victory.

Harbhajan claimed the last wicket of Mornie Morkel, trapping him leg before wicket, to mark India's victory and send the vociferous Eden crowd into a frenzy.

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