Broad Favourite To Win Overall MVP Title - 31/03/2009 - The Professional Cricketers' Association

Broad Favourite To Win Overall MVP Title - 31/03/2009

There's just one more match, the one-day international in St. Lucia, to decide the winner of this year's England MVP and barring a miracle it looks like being a straight shoot-out between Stuart Broad and Kevin Pietersen. Pietersen has led for much of the winter but Broad, who has performed consistently across all forms has refused to go away. The young Nottinghamshire tyro pulled level with Pietersen after the first one-dayer in Barbados before nudging ahead by taking 3-62 in the second match, a haul which included the key wickets of Chris Gayle and Dwayne Bravo.

Broad has scored 464 runs and taken 63 wickets across all cricket and is also ranked top of the ODI MVP, where he is by some distance the leading wicket-taker with 31 scalps. His best performance came against South Africa on his home ground of Trent Bridge, where he took 5-23 to earn 31 bowling points. Broad currently leads the overall MVP table by 11 points.

Pietersen has found the going tough during the one-day series against the West Indies with a top score of just 17. He has two one-day centuries in this MVP campaign, against New Zealand and India, while as captain he oversaw the demolition of South Africa. He has scored 1741 runs across all cricket, 525 of which have come in the one-day arena at the strike rate of 0.88. Widely regarded as England's best player, Pietersen is in danger of finishing the calendar year with only the title of Twenty20 MVP.

With Broad out of reach at the top of the ODI MVP, Pietersen, Andrew Flintoff and Owais Shah will fight it out for second place. None of them got to the crease in the second match in Barbados as Andrew Strauss saw his team comfortably over the finish line, an innings which further endorsed his credentials to lead the team in all forms for a long time to come. Strauss silenced his critics with a brilliant 79 off 61 balls in what was effectively a Twenty20 innings to earn 22 points and an ODI points-per-game average of 14 - the highest by any England player by three points.

Strauss' efforts saw him close to within 26 points of Jimmy Anderson in the overall race. Anderson, who led for so much of the campaign has been reeled in by Pietersen and Broad but having been ambushed by Strauss to lose the Test MVP by a solitary point , he will be extra keen to stave off another challenge from his captain as he tries to hang on to bronze medal position. Anderson has taken 63 wickets across all cricket but only 13 from 19 ODIs. As a consequence he lies 8^th in the ODI MVP.

For more information and to see the full tables and leaders in individual competitions click on the links below.

Overall Rankings - MVP
LVCC Rankings
Friends Provident Rankings
Twenty20 Rankings
NatWest Pro40 Rankings