5 best first change bowlers in ODIs

#2 Anil Kumble

Anil Kumble is quite simply the greatest bowler India has ever had and for the major part of his ODI career, Anil Kumble’s quote of 10 overs used to be of huge significance for the team. India did not have a decent bowling attack in ODIs for many years and depended on the singular skills of Kumble to win games for the major portion of the 1990s.

Naturally, he came in to bowl as the first change bowler plenty of times so that the tide of the game could be turned and more often than not, he obliged.

Out of the 271 ODI games that he played from 1990 to 2007, Kumble bowled as first change in 96 of them and remains the 2nd most successful in ODI history with a tally of 118 wickets.

His pace, accuracy, variations of pace and the ability to extract bounce made him an extremely tough bowler to get away in ODIs. The Indian ace had an average of 33.09 and an economy rate of 4.38. However, a relatively high strike rate of 45.3 can be explained by the fact that the opposition often played him with more caution.