Former New Zealand cricket captain Martin Crowe has died aged 53.

Mike Selvey penned a fitting tribute to Martin Crowe in The Guardian today that focused on his innovative mind.

Quote:Has there ever been a sharper cricket mind? Not in my experience. For all the orthodoxy of his play, he was an innovator, someone ahead of his time by years. He denied it strongly (not wishing to appear skittish in his practice) but one day at Lord’s, when he was a groundstaff lad, I saw him switch-hitting. It was his thinking that came up with the idea of Cricket Max, a short form of the game that we can now see as a precursor to Twenty20 (one day, we might see his idea for straight hits clearing the boundary being worth double morphing into extra runs for the distance struck). Much is made of his impact on the 1992 World Cup (although he was always at pains to point out that his career lasted a good deal longer than the few weeks of that tournament). That he introduced the strategy of opening the bowling with an off-spinner, Dipak Patel, and the batting with the whirling pinch-hitting blade of Mark Greatbatch, is almost cliche now, but what is rarely acknowledged is that this was something dreamed up on the hoof, after they had played three matches in more orthodox fashion.

Two wonderful statistics courtesy of ESPN that provide a snapshot of Crowe's dominance:

Quote:58.46 Crowe's average in Tests between 1985 and 1991 - the best for any batsman with at least 2500 runs in the period. Crowe made 3391 runs in 66 innings in those six years. His 12 centuries in that period also were the most by any batsman, bettering Allan Border, Graham Gooch and Richie Richardson who made 11 centuries each. Crowe's average never reached 30 till his 21st Test match and the average in his last seven Tests was less than 20 as well. He averaged 56.20 in those 50 Tests between his 20th and 71st Test, and made 16 centuries.

56.02 Crowe's average in his first-class career, scoring 19608 runs in 412 innings. Among 469 batsmen who aggregated 15,000 or more runs in first-class cricket, only ten others had a better average than Crowe's. He made 71 centuries in his first-class career which is the second-most among all New Zealand cricketers behind Turner's 103. Crowe had a great ability of converting fifties into hundreds. His ratio of centuries to half-centuries in first-class career was 0.88 (71 centuries and 80 half-centuries). Among 166 players who scored 50 or more centuries, only the legendary Bradman (1.69) and Wally Hammond (0.90) had a better ratio than Crowe. In Tests also, Crowe made 17 centuries and only 18 half-centuries, which puts him eighth among the 71 batsmen with 15 or more centuries in terms of that ratio.

It's always sad when anyone passes away but when it happens in the world of sport, it seems to hit people the hardest.

People will have grown up watching Crowe play, and wanting to be like him as they themselves were playing, so to lose a player such as him and at the age of 53, is very, very sad indeed.

R I.P Martin.