Everybody needs a villain. Utopia is boring. You need someone to blame, someone to hate, and someone to release your anger on.

That is why I am sad to see Sourav Ganguly leave cricket. I hate him. Oh yes, how I hate him. Almost everything about him rubs me up the wrong way.

I get angry watching him. I am angry now thinking about watching him. I am angry now writing about thinking about watching him.

Every now and then he did do something that I liked: the moustache, leaving Waugh out in the heat, shirtless behaviour and missing Warne’s wrong ‘un.

But that could never slow down the raw hatred I have for him as a cricketer. The reason I am sad to see him go is that he is a proper villain. That his on-pitch record has almost nothing to do with him being hated, shows this.

An average of 42 in the middle order with three hundreds in winning Tests (before this series), two of those against Zimbabwe, is hardly devastating.

It was his Princely nature that made him a proper villain.

Shaun Pollock has the record and the nationality to be a villain but he doesn’t inspire great emotion. He was just a good cricketer.

Ganguly has people who hate him, people who love him, people who want to have his babies, people who want to make sure he has no babies and no one in between.

That is special. That is rare.

These days so many cricketers play whole careers without making a ripple in most fans’ memories. So we need more Gangulys because cricket is at its best when provoking extreme emotions.

And don’t listen to George Lucas: hatred doesn’t lead to the Dark Side. Boring cricketers do.

Jrod is an Australian cricket blogger, his site Cricketwithballs.com won July’s Best of Blogs in TWC