Hashim Amla crowned a year of great personal achievement when he won Cricket South Africa’s (CSA) premier award, the South African Cricketer of the Year, at the 2010 SA Cricket Awards Gala Dinner at the Sandton Convention Centre on Tuesday evening.
Amla not only won two major cricketing awards — SA Cricketer of the Year and Test Cricketer of the Year — but was also honoured
across the entire spectrum of the game’s stakeholders, being honoured both by his peers and by the wider public.
He was named both SA Players’ Player of the Year and CSA Fans’ Cricketer of the Year. He also earned a fifth accolade with the KFC “So Good!” Award. This is awarded for an individual performance and recognised his mammoth, match-winning knock of 253 not out in the first Test against India at Nagpur.
The other major award winners in the SA Team Category were AB de Villiers who was named Standard Bank ODI Cricketer of the Year and Charl Langeveldt who was named Standard Bank International Pro20 Cricketer of the Year.
The MTN Newcomer of the Year Award went to Ryan McLaren.
A feature of the main professional domestic awards was the recognition of both experience and youth with Herschelle Gibbs being named MTN40 Cricketer of the Year, Rilee Rossouw SuperSport Series Cricketer of the Year and Colin Ingram Standard Bank Pro20 Cricketer of the Year.
It is a highly encouraging feature for CSA that a player so new to the franchise ranks as Rossouw has won such a major award.
Ingram was the big winner in the domestic category as he also won the South African Cricketers’ Association (SACA) Most Valuable Player Award and was honoured by his peers as the Domestic Players’ Player of the Year.
It has been a remarkable past 12 months for Amla who has scored four Test centuries including his first career double and also joined the distinguished ranks of those to score centuries in both innings of a Test match. In nine Test matches during the period under review he made 923 runs at an average of 65.9.
He also established himself as one of South Africa’s foremost limited overs batsmen, setting a national record when he scored more than 400 runs in the five-match series in the West Indies. De Villiers had a magnificent limited-overs year, scoring four centuries, three of which came in successive innings against India and the West Indies to equal a world record.
Langeveldt was South Africa’s standout bowler in the Pro20 format. He took 11 wickets in the ICC World Twenty20 in the West Indies at an average of less than 10 and with an economy rate of 6.50 — outstanding figures in this format of the game. — Sapa