Published: Dec 25, 2016, 03:04 PM (IST)
Edited: Dec 25, 2016, 03:45 PM (IST)
Is being born on Christmas Day a good thing? Would you receive twice as many presents, or get annoyed that people forgot your birthday because they were busy celebrating a different event? Michael Jones picks XI players who could tell you – all celebrate their birthdays on 25th December.
Alastair Cook (1984)
Cook may not be enjoying his birthday too much this year: although his absence from England’s limited-overs teams means that he gets to enjoy it at home — in fact he has an extended break, with no Tests on the schedule until the home series against South Africa starts in July — it comes at a time his future as captain is being widely questioned after a 4-0 series defeat and a mediocre run with the bat in which Ravindra Jadeja dismissed him six times and Ravichandran Ashwin three. Joe Root is seen as his natural successor, and the only question is when, rather than if, the baton will be passed on. Over his career, though, there is no doubting his value to the team: he is the highest Test run-scorer among players currently active, and England’s highest of all time. Not many players can claim to have been the driving force behind their team’s first series win in a generation in two different countries, but Cook scored 766 runs at an average of 127.67 as England registered their first triumph in Australia in 24 years, and 562 at 80.28 when they won in India for the first time in 28.
Marcus Trescothick (1975)
Although Cook has been a fixture at the top of England’s order for the last decade — the only problem being who should partner him there — he spent part of his early career at number 3, and the man who kept him waiting to bat was one who shared his birthday. Trescothick compiled 5,825 Test runs before his 31st birthday, and if he had continued at that rate he might well have surpassed Graham Gooch’s tally of 8,900 and been the first England player to reach 10,000. However, what was described at the time as “a stress-related illness”forced him home from the 2006-07 tour of Australia and ultimately ended his international career.
England’s loss has been Somerset’s gain, as he has continued piling up runs for his county: the 2017 season will be his 25th for them. Fans of the national team are left to savour the memories of his 219 against South Africa in 2003, which gave England a first innings lead despite conceding 484, then a second innings 69* to seal victory by nine wickets and draw a series which had seemed hopelessly lost; a century in each innings against West Indies the following year; and 90 on the first morning at Edgbaston in 2005, setting the tone for his team’s recovery from a thrashing at Lord’s to reclaiming the Ashes after 18 years. His autobiography, Coming Back To Me, broke a taboo by talking freely about his struggles with mental illness, encouraging other players to seek help for their own conditions.
Mansoor Akhtar (1957)
Mansoor had little success at international level, with an average of only 25 and a solitary century against Australia in 1982, but he was part of a world record: for Karachi Whites against Quetta in a BCCP Patron’s Trophy match in 1977, he and Waheed Mirza added 561 for the first wicket, breaking Percy Holmes and Herbert Sutcliffe’s previous record opening stand of 555; Mansoor played second fiddle, with 224 to Mirza’s 324. Only once has the record even been threatened since then, when Aaron Finch and Ryan Carters added 503 for a Cricket Australia XI against the New Zealand touring team in 2015.
Charlie Smith (1872)
The sparsity of First-Class matches Smith played — only 10 in a career spanning 11 years — was primarily due to the fact that most domestic matches in South Africa at the time were not awarded that status. His only Tests were his country’s first against Australia, a three match home series in 1902-03; his best score of 45 came in his last innings, and supporting a century from Jimmy Sinclair, he at least enabled the home team to avoid an innings defeat, although they still went down by ten wickets and lost the series 2-0. In between the first two Tests he scored 58 and 71* for Transvaal against the tourists, in a match which did not have First-Class status because the home team had 15 players.
Azhar Saeed (1970)
As a top-order batsman for UAE in their inaugural ODI and the 1996 World Cup that followed, Azhar had noticeably little success: he scored only 29 in his first 6 innings. More than half his career runs came in his final innings, but when he took 82 balls to score 32 when his team were trying to chase down a target against Netherlands, one has to wonder whether the run out which ended his innings was deliberately engineered by his partner Vijay Mehra. Fortunately for the team, Saleem Raza’s 84 off 68 balls, followed by Mohammad Ishaq’s 51* off 55, compensated for Azhar’s slow scoring sufficiently to allow UAE to reach the target of 217 with more than five overs to spare.
Mohammad Ramzan (1970)
A one-Test wonder: Ramzan was picked to play for Pakistan against South Africa at Rawalpindi in 1997-98, but was the only debutant not to make a century in the first innings: of the other newcomers, Ali Naqvi scored 115 and Azhar Mahmood 128*, while Waqar Younis and Mushtaq Ahmed both made their highest Test scores — 45 and 59 respectively — in helping Azhar to add 74 for the ninth wicket and 151 for the tenth, the latter equalling the Test record at the time. Ramzan’s contribution of 29 was the second-highest score among the top seven batsmen, and although he batted out 71 minutes in the second innings as Pakistan plodded towards a draw, he only scored 7 in the process. The home team reshuffled their batting order when Wasim Akram returned for the next match, and Ramzan was never picked again.
Tich Cornford (1900)
Walter Cornford earned his nickname for a reason: he remains one of the shortest players ever to appear at international level, although Wisden was somewhat vague as to his exact height, stating only “not much more than five feet” [1.53m], leaving the possibility that he may have been slightly taller than others such as Mushfiqur Rahim. Cornford only played 4 Tests, all on the 1930 tour of New Zealand while another England team played a concurrent series in West Indies; his first catch, of his opposite number Ken James, helped Maurice Allom to a hat-trick on debut. In an era when ’keepers were not expected to be able to bat, he never made a First-Class century, but his total of 1,017 dismissals places him 24th on the all time list — and he rises to sixth place in the list of most stumpings, with 342.
Clarrie Grimmett (1891)
The greatest spinner ever to come from New Zealand, it was his birth country’s bad luck that he represented Australia instead; his partnership with Bill O’Reilly was perhaps the finest leg-spinning duo in the game’s history. Grimmett did not make his Test debut until he was 33, but made up for lost time, becoming the first player to take 200 Test wickets. Not for nothing was he known as ‘The Fox’: on hearing that batsmen had learned to pick his flipper by the flick of his fingers as he released it, he soon started bemusing them with a leg-break which they thought was a flipper — at the moment of release, he made the ‘giveaway’ sound with the fingers of his other hand.
Grimmett was one of numerous team-mates who developed an enmity with Don Bradman, whom he accused of prematurely ending his Test career by ensuring he was not selected for the 1938 tour of England — despite being 46, his performances in the Sheffield Shield showed he was still more than good enough. An episode during the previous home season had probably not helped his cause: Bradman had been rash enough to suggest publicly that Grimmett spent so much time on his variations that he could no longer bowl a leg-break.
The next time they met on the field, Grimmett bowled Bradman for 17 and sent him on his way with the comment “That’ll teach him I can still bowl a legbreak”, loud enough for the batsman to hear. It earned him an earful from his captain Vic Richardson — the match was a joint testimonial for Richardson and Grimmett, and in the interests of maximising the gate receipts Richardson had intended to keep Bradman at the wicket for as long as possible. By dismissing him cheaply, Grimmett had certainly deprived both himself and Richardson of a considerable income — but perhaps, for him, settling the personal score was more important.
Simon Jones (1978)
Jones’s father Jeff had seen his fast bowling career cut short by injury, and his own followed a similar story. On his Test debut against India in 2002, he hit a-run-a-ball 44 at number 10, then dismissed Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman as India chased a notional 568 for victory, Ajit Agarkar’s improbably century only delaying the inevitable.
In Brisbane a few months later he had picked up the wicket of Justin Langer early on, but then attempted a diving stop on a sandy outfield and ruptured ligaments in his knee. It was 16 months before he returned to Test cricket, but he went on to form one prong of the pace quartet which did much to seal the 2005 Ashes victory, including Test-best figures of 6 for 53 at Old Trafford. He took a further 5 wickets in the first innings at Trent Bridge, but limped off the field in the second innings with an ankle injury. His county appearances over the following seasons were sporadic, and he failed to make a second international comeback.
Tapash Baisya (1982)
One of many Bangladeshi players to find the going tough when they were first admitted to Tests, Tapash ended his career with a batting average of 11 and bowling average of 59: swap those around, as one commentator once observed of another player with similar statistics, and you’ve got an incredible allrounder. He made 52* against Sri Lanka on debut, which enabled his team to recover at least partially from 86 for 7 to a total of 164, but was ineffective with the ball. His career highlight came at Cardiff in 2005, when he dismissed Ricky Ponting, Damien Martyn and Michael Clarke before Mohammad Ashraful’s century took Bangladesh to a famous win over Australia, but he missed the team’s other most notable victory during his career, against India in the 2007 World Cup, and — at the age of only 24 — his time in international cricket was over, although he made two appearances in domestic List A matches earlier this year.
Hedley Howarth (1943)
Like an earlier namesake of his, Howarth bowled slow left arm, but never quite matched the feats of his predecessor. He had an unspectacular start to his Test career in England in 1969, but found the subcontinental pitches to his liking a few months later, taking 12 wickets at an average of 18 in India and 16 at 20 in Pakistan, where a five wicket win in Lahore followed by a tense draw in Dacca (the last home Test Pakistan played there: Bangladesh declared independence little more than a year later, and subsequently changed the spelling of the city’s name back to the historical one of Dhaka) which brought New Zealand their first series victory, either home or away, almost 40 years after their inaugural Test. That was the peak of his career, though, and the one five-wicket haul he took in each country remained his only ones in Tests. He also worked for his father’s fish-processing company, and his team-mates often noticed that by the end of a long spell from Howarth the ball had acquired something of a fishy smell. His younger brother Geoff also played for New Zealand.
