| A Touch of Class |
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| Written by Mark Smith | |
| Sunday, 04 May 2008 | |
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Through the good services
of the extraordinary search engine on Cricinfo.com, I found out today
that - between June 1952 and June 1965, England played a total of 120
test matches.
I picked those parameters because they coincide exactly with the test career of Fred Trueman. Here's the staggering thing - of those 120 tests, Trueman - arguably one of the three greatest fast bowlers ever, and certainly the greatest English one, only played in 67 of them. That's less than two-thirds for those of you scoring at home.
Now admittedly, in his time, Trueman was considered 'difficult', 'hard to captain', 'troublesome', 'opinionated', - and any other number of perjorative descriptions that the establishment time-servers use to describe someone who doesn't quite fit in their rose-tinted, gin-sodden, view of the world. But to 'punish' him by leaving him out of over fifty tests seems like a textbook example of cutting your nose off to spite your face. It's like taking a big cannon into a medieval battle, but not firing it because it would make a loud noise. So we get sentences like this in Trueman's autobiography: - 'After getting nine wickets in the first two tests of the series I was dropped for the third and fourth tests with no reason being given, but then brought back in for the fifth test at The Oval after I took thirty two wickets in four games for Yorkshire.' Yes, I'm paraphrasing - but only just, and if you check the records you'll find it's pretty accurate. He took 307 wickets in those 67 tests, which transposes to over five hundred in 120. To my mind, leaving him out in over fifty test matches, and thus reducing the effectiveness of the England team in the process, is almost a treasonable offence. Before anyone suggests that he might have been injury prone, he was able to bowl over a thousand overs a year for Yorkshire without much trouble, and was actually notorious for not getting injured. Which set me thinking about any England quick bowler in the past fifteen years or so who hasn't got injured.... The ironic thing, for someone who was supposedly so 'anti-establishment', is that he was one of the biggest Tories ever to nail his political colours to the mast. For some reason that wasn't good enough for establishment bigwigs like Gubby Allen, the Duke of Norfolk, FR Brown, Dennis Compton, Sir Bufton Tufton and all - he spoke with a northern accent, drank beer, and his old man was a miner. Why am I pointing all this out now? Well, there's much talk at the moment as to why Mark Ramprakash can't get in the England side. Well, if you go back and re-read some of the descriptions applied to Trueman in the third paragraph, you might get an idea why Mark Ramprakash wasn't given the extended run in the team he deserved, whilst people like Mike Gatting and Graeme Hick were given every opportunity. It also might explain why Owais Shah wasn't picked ahead of Andrew Strauss last winter. Also, if Ramprakash's surname was 'Richardson' or 'Roberts' I reckon he'd be in the England team today. Let's face it, with an average of over a hundred in the past two years, and one ton already under his belt this year, he certainly justifies it on form.
(Click here to know more about Mark)
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