I shall say no more until I'm proved right :-)
Also, well played Sibley.
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I shall say no more until I'm proved right :-)
Also, well played Sibley.
Great win for Surrey. Looking good for back-to-back titles.
Do you remember that year Dessie Haynes came over and opened for us and we won the CC? I think I was at uni. Was it around 1990?
I loved him.
But imagine if we had Gordon Greenidge instead of Zak? That would be perfect. Could defend like Boycott or Sunni G but also Bazball a double ton in a day.
Him and Dessie are still my all time fave opening pair.
Won it twice with him 90 and 93 - he was there for five seasons. My favourite overseas player for Middlesex (with Wayne Daniel a very close second) - also a lovely guy.
Agree about Haynes and Greenidge though from a England point of view Strauss and Tresco weren't bad either
Yup. Tresco {and Strauss} could both Bazball, I reckon. Though according to Cricinfo, Strauss' strike rate was only 40. Cook's was 45 {and Tresco 55.} Never knew Cook scored faster than Strauss.
But 1990 for Dessie's first Middlesex CC makes sense. The summer after my first year. That was the summer we played India, no? Gooch's 333 and Sachin's first ton aged 17.
The next year, we were living in our student house and my best mate* and I made a cricket bat out of vacuum cleaner bits and some cardboard so we could play in the hallway.
We called it the "Kapil 24" - which we wrote in marker pen where the maker's name would be. In honour of him saving the follow on in the Lords test after Gooch's 333.
9 wickets down. 24 runs needed. The no.11 with a test average of five at the other end. With Angus Fraser - then the third best bowler in the world - to bowl the next over with one wicket needed for his five-fer. Eddie "Donkey" Hemmings to bowl against Kapil.
Forward defensive. Forward defensive. Two steps down the pitch and six over long on. Same again. EH bowls a bit fuller. One step down the pitch, six over long on. Eddie bowls even fuller. No steps and a six over long on.
Follow on saved. Hirwani lbw Fraser the first ball of the next over.
That's why we called our bat the Kapil 24.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzy_9I1heUE
Add in Azhar's ton at over a run a ball when he realised he'd ****ed up by putting England into bat, and you could say my boys were Bazballing back then.
But summer of '93 was when I got my first bus and was living on site so I didn't have a telly and wasn't able to buy a paper in the morning to check the cricket scores as we were living in fields and it was too far to walk to a newsagents in both places I lived that summer.
*After we graduated, my best mate and I moved into a squat in Hackney and 2-3 months later, the Bedlam sound system moved in and we got on the crusty free-rave scene. He was with my beloved for about five years - during which we had our first fling - before she dumped him for me permanently. We're still all good mates, though.