Thread:
Bobby Simpson born 3 Feb 1936.
3664 runs as an opening batsman, averaging 55.51. #cricket#onthisday
Take a cut-off of 3000 runs for openers, and this is the order of merit - Sutcliffe, 4522 at 61.10; Hutton 6721 at 56.47; Hobbs 5130 at 56.37; and then there is Simpson, way ahead of the rest of the field.
There are Amiss, Hayden, etc who follow after this ...
If the bar is reduced to 2000 runs, Bruce Mitchell and Bill Woodfull come in ... Right, if you are missing a name you need to keep looking further down the list ..
Simpson played fierce attacks.
Heine and Adcock, Trueman and Statham, Peter Pollock and Procter, Hall and Griffith... Without helmet, in case you are wondering.
But Simpson was much more than just an opening batsman.
He was a canny captain as well, in two different phases.
He was also a good enough leg-spinner to capture 71 Test wickets.
And a slip catcher with few equals. 110 catches in his 62 Tests. #rarecricketphotos
In fact, in his first series, he caught 13, several of them half chances, including this brilliant one that gave Lindsay Kline his hattrick.
He became famous as Robert Simpson the slip fielder. Bobby the great batsman and captain came a lot later. #rarecricketphotos
If he had not been hauled back to lead a Packer-depleted Australia at the age of 42, his final figures would have been still better.
But in the first 5 comeback Tests, against India, he scored 539 runs at 53.00, outscoring batsmen from both sides. Significant given the Indian 'big guns' were facing a third-string Australian attack. He led a limping Australia to a 3-2 series win.
He was a saviour in other ways too. Coach Simpson teamed up with skipper Allan Border, took hold of a struggling team under reconstruction and turned them into a bunch of champions who would rule the world for years to come.
Bobby Simpson, Australian legend, was born on #onthisday 1936.
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Thread: 1991. Clive Rice was apprehensive about possible reactions when he toured India with his men.
However, what happened was beyond his wildest dreams. From the airport to the hotel, streets were lined with people who had turned up to welcome them.
Unlike widely believed, however, that was not the first time SA cricketers played in India.
1921. A team of soccer and cricket players made up of SA Indians from Durban, Natal, visited India on a two-month tour. Christopher’s Contingent.
Thread:
Andy Roberts, born #onthisday 1951.
He used to walk back to his mark, the eyes cold and calculating, the face expressionless and half hidden behind the beard, the shoulders hunched and alert, the mien brooding and ruthless.
Then he would turn and rush in, building up speed along the way, exploding as he reached the crease. His arm would come over, at right angles to his torso, but would reach a height as his shoulder dipped. He would glide along his right toecap, hit the crease with his full weight.
The leather streaked out of his hand in a blur of red, zooming towards the batsman at a rate rarely matched. The natural movement from off to leg, but sometimes away swing would flummox the best. Often the ball would lift sharply putting the batsmen in immense physical peril.
Thread:
At the precise moment when Monty Noble was being born in Sydney’s Haymarket, #onthisday 1873, a military band passed by playing loud music as if to herald his arrival in the world. Mother Maria immediately declared that her eighth and last child would be famous. #cricket
He was called ‘Mary Anne’ by the Sydney crowd because of his initials. His teammates called him ‘Boots’ because of the massive footwear in which he took the field.
History, however, cannot afford a flippant nickname for Montague Alfred Noble the cricketer.
A top-order batsman of pedigree, Noble could swing the ball prodigiously. With a grip borrowed from visiting American baseball players, he pinched the seam between his thumb & forefinger. The result was a medium-paced out-swinger carrying the threat of cutting back off the seam.
Thread:
Daniel Vettori (born #onthisday 1979) came in as a 18-year-old with scholarly looks ... and made his way to becoming a senior statesman of #Cricket
It was a long, long journey.
By the time he called it a day, half his life had been spent on the cricket ground.
There were changes on the way.
The long locks fell away early, the boyish angularity of the cheeks was filled up with the heaviness of experience; the glasses too changed from the light metal frames to rather forbidding, wide spectacles.
Thread:
In a team full of hardened men, who played the game with scary ruthlessness and earned the tag The Ugly Australians with deserving valour and pride, Kim Hughes (born 26 Jan 1954) arrived as a breath of fresh air. #cricket#onthisday#kimhughes
Effervescent, lovable, as charming in his game and as in his brilliant smile, with clean shaven boyish looks and golden locks on which sunbeams seemed to ripple, he perpetually looked the baby of the team — even when he led the side through the tumultuous late 70s and early 80s.
And he even went where no Australian captain had ever gone before, walking into the dressing room of the opponents and apologising after his pace bowler had unleashed a beamer.
One just had to close one’s eyes & the graceful, lithe run up could be seen, leap before delivery, head tilted to the left, right hand close to the chest left raised in front of the face, and then the left arm extended outwards as the right came around to send down the delivery
All through the 1980s with more cricket being telecast one found almost every cricket pitch, from coaching centres to school games, full of bowling actions that were almost exact replicas of the great man’s. Yes, Indians could bowl pace, successfully, and Kapil had shown the way