The three remaining shortlists will be confirmed before the close of the year. And there is Indian interest in both the men’s and the women’s awards.
The ICC Awards
The ICC Awards are bestowed annually by the sports overall governing body and are designed to recognise excellence across the various formats of the game.
This year the Awards Panel have had plenty of high profile tournaments from which to choose the best of the best, including the Women’s World Cup, the Men’s T20I World Cup, and numerous bilateral series.
The nominees themselves are decided by an expert panel made up of leading cricket writers and broadcasters from across the world. They have based their decisions both on statistics and individual achievements in international cricket throughout the year.
The Categories
There are nine main individual categories.
Sir Garfield Sobers Trophy – the ultimate accolade in the men’s game, awarded to the ICC Men’s Cricketer of the Year.
Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy – the female equivalent.
ICC Men’s Test Cricketer of the Year,
Men’s ODI Cricketer of the Year
Women’s ODI Cricketer of the Year
Men’s T20I Cricketer of the Year
Women’s T20I Cricketer of the Year
Men’s Emerging Cricketer of the Year
Women’s Emerging Cricketer of the Year
The shortlisted names for the Sobers, Flint and Men’s Test Cricketer of the Year have yet to be confirmed.
Other Categories
There are four other award categories, although, again, the nominees have yet to be announced.
Men’s Associate Cricketer of the Year
Women’s Associate Cricketer of the Year
Neither of these two categories will feature shortlists. This will be determined by the ICC Voting Academy only.
ICC Spirit of Cricket award honours a moment, gesture, or individual action which personifies the spirit in which the game should be played. The ICC selects this directly.
Umpire of the Year, an award based on votes collected from the Elite Panel of Match Referees, as well as the playing captains from the ICC 12 Full Member Nations.
Team Awards
In addition to the individual awards, the ICC Voting Academy will also name five ICC Teams of the Year. They will feature the standout XI in both men’s and women’s international cricket in 2022.
Indian interest
From the point of view of India, they have players nominated in four categories.
Suryakumar Yadav is up for Men’s T20I Cricketer of the Year, alongside Sikandar Raza of Zimbabwe, Sam Curran of England (who recently fetched the highest price in the Indian T20 league auction) and now the
Smriti Mandhana has been nominated for Women’s T20I Cricketer of the Year, alongside Nida Dar of Pakistan, Sophie Devine of New Zealand, and Tania McGrath of Australia.
Young Indian pacer Arshdeep Singh’s progress in 2022 has been recognised with his nomination for Men’s Emerging Cricketer of the Year. The other nominees are Marco Jansen of South Africa, Ibrahim Zadran of Afghanistan, and Finn Allen of New Zealand.
Meanwhile, India are well represented in the Women’s Emerging Cricketer of the Year category. Bowler Renuka Singh and Yastika Bhatia are up against Darcie Brown of Australia, and Alice Capsey of England.
Voting
Now the nominees have been identified, the next stage in the process is voting, which will begin early in the New Year. This will be undertaken by the ICC Voting Academy, comprising a wider selection of the global sporting media, alongside cricket fans, who are encouraged to submit their votes through the ICC website.
The total of the votes cast from all sources will be used to determine the overall winners.
The winners will be announced at the end of January, 2023.
Previous Sir Garfield Trophy Winners
This award, named after the former great West Indian all-rounder, is arguably the most prestigious, and previous winners reads like a who’s who of some of the modern greats of the game.
They include Rahul Dravid in 2004, Sachin Tendulkar in 2010, Ravichandran Ashwin in 2016, and Virat Kohli, who won it in 2017, and again the following year.
Kohli and Ricky Ponting are the only men to have won it twice.
Last year’s winner was Shaheen Afridi of Pakistan.
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