A total of 241 men have taken the gloves in Test Match cricket and 203 in One Day International cricket. Historically it has always proved very difficult to combine both jobs of batting well and keeping wicket. However, a number of players have bucked the trend in these forms of the game and here we pay tribute to them.

The rapid onset of the one-day game in the recent years has persuaded international teams that they need to consider their wicket-keeper more as a front-line batsman, with the admission that they wouldn’t necessarily take the chances that the pure stumpers of old may have done. Long gone are the days of the wicket-keeper hidden away down the batting order in case of emergencies.

One of England’s finest glovemen was Bert Strudwick who played 28 Tests between 1910 and 1926 but ended with a Test batting average of 7.93 and a highest batting rating of just 104. George Duckworth replaced him in the team and held his place for most of the next decade but he ended with an average of 14.62 and a highest rating of 127. Other examples of the ‘all-field, little-bat’ keeper include Ken James (highest rating 41 in 11 Tests), Gil Langley (highest rating 223 in 26 Tests), and Narendra Tamhane (highest rating 251 in 21 Tests).

To illustrate this paradigm change, in the 1980s Test wicket-keepers averaged 23.61 with the bat. In the 1990s it was 27.29 and in the 2000s it had risen to 30.76.

Of course, some have flourished despite keeping wicket for the vast majority of their careers. Andy Flower managed to combine his role as key batsman and wicket-keeper and became the first keeper to reach the number one spot in the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings for Test batsmen in 2001. He was followed the following year by Adam Gilchrist, who hit 17 Test centuries and single-handedly revolutionised the way wicket-keepers are viewed in the longer format Read more…

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The debate goes on, after Mike Atherton’s article (Grey Clouds Lie Over Moral High Ground) calling for the preamble to the laws of the game, entitled The Spirit of Cricket, to be given out. Simon Barnes has joined in by writing that cricketers lost in the finest and most complex of moral mazes are desperate for clarification, something made more difficult by the laws and the spirit of cricket being two quite different things. Cricket is not an easy game at which to cheat, but it is easily tarnished.

The interpretation of the spirit of the game generally considered to mean what is thought of as being honourable and less than honourable is essentially a matter of personal discernment, and highly susceptible to changing times. That cricket is a game to be played according to written laws, and at the same time within a code that is not written, lays it open to dispute.

In one of several examples given by Atherton, when a batsman might or might not have been done a favour by the fielding captain, his view and mine of the outcome are diametrically opposed. Like me, he can have seen the incident, which took place in a recent Champions Trophy match between England and New Zealand, only on television; but that provided more than enough evidence on which to form an opinion.

The batsman was Paul Collingwood, who, having played and missed at the last ball of an over, started, after a brief pause, to walk down the pitch for the now customary between-overs chat with his partner, to be concluded no doubt by the modern fad of touching each other’s gloves in that peculiarly demure way. Nothing could have been clearer than that Collingwood had no intention of stealing a run.

The square-leg umpire was already moving in to take up his position for the next over when Brendon McCullum, the New Zealand wicketkeeper, threw down the batsman’s Read more…

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