The most underrated XI of all time in cricket

10. Kyle Mills

The most underrated cricketers tend to be the unflashy ones. Not much to see in the way of cool haircuts, novelty tattoos and quirky soundbites from post-match interviews. If anything, those tend to be the overrated ones. This next one will be probably best be remembered for just having been born with curly hair, which he normally wore quite long. But he deserves to be remembered for so much more.

Who were the great New Zealand bowlers in ODIs? The canny Daniel Vettori, the lightning-quick Shane Bond, the incomparable Richard Hadlee. How about the strangely effective Chris Harris, the swing sensation that is Trent Boult or the supremely gifted Chris Cairns? You could make a case for any of them but it’s very easy to forget Kyle Mills.

And it’s even easier to forget that for quite a long time he was the number 1 ranked ODI bowler in the world. He never really got to grips with the demands of Test cricket and probably had neither the pace nor the varieties to master T20 bowling. But he loved ODIs and for a long time was as good as anyone. Well, obviously given that he was officially the best of the lot ranking-wise for a period and that for year after year, he was an almost permanent fixture in the Top 10 list of ODI bowlers.

He was also a rare case of a feisty New Zealander cricketer. It got him into hot water on a number of occasions and some would say taking on Graeme Smith face-to-face isn’t a particularly good idea. But hey, there’s also something to be said for not backing down in those circumstances.

Sadly for Mills, he always seemed to get injured at the wrong times and one problem or another deprived him of playing more international cricket. But he still finished as New Zealand’s second-highest wicket-taker ever in ODIs with 240 wickets from 170 games. Only Daniel Vettori got more.