Worst Player To...

[Smudge]

Worst test player ever: Patterson Thomson (WI)

Best KFC consumer though.

 

[gettingbetter]

Worst test player ever: Patterson Thomson (WI)

Unfortunately for you and luckily for youing Patterson, he misses the criteria stated in this thread by 48 Tests and 98 ODIs respectively.

 

[tooextracool]

Maybe if he's playing Test cricket for New Zealand, as a general sort of rule I think that anyone averaging under 40 has just been an average performer at Test level, but that is a very general sort of rule. There was a reason he was used as the scapegoat so many times, beacuse he was a poor performer at Test level. No real excuse for it IMO, he had all the potential to be one of England's greatest Test batsman but failed at the highest level.

Hick was as good a player as you could possibly be between 93-96, and i wouldnt be surprised if he was amongst the top 5 batsmen in that period during that time. If that makes him the worst player ever to play 50 tests, then i must really have not been paying attention.

 

[KiWiNiNjA]

Argh, pet hate, people judging players on statistics alone.

Lets just search through some stats and find a guy with a certain amount of caps and a low average and mention him, even though we have hardly heard of them or never seen them play.

Blah blah blah

Lies, damned lies, and..................

 

[Fiery]

Argh, pet hate, people judging players on statistics alone.

Lets just search through some stats and find a guy with a certain amount of caps and a low average and mention him, even though we have hardly heard of them or never seen them play.

Blah blah blah

Lies, damned lies, and..................

Which is what some people have done with Ken Rutherford I think

 

[Richard]

If Kim Hughes played 3 more ODis, he would certainly be up there. Suprisingly, his Test match record isn't all that bad and considering the situation he was facing, its even better than first thought.

Surprisingly?

Kim Hughes was one hell of a Test player, for very obvious reasons - he was a hugely talented batsman.

 

[Richard]

Worst test player ever: Patterson Thomson (WI)

Either him or K Eric Upashantha. Really a demonstration of taking the village-green to the Test arena. How on Earth either ever got anywhere near international cricket is beyond me.

BTW, it was Patterson Thompson.

 

[pasag]

Argh, pet hate, people judging players on statistics alone.

Lets just search through some stats and find a guy with a certain amount of caps and a low average and mention him, even though we have hardly heard of them or never seen them play.

Blah blah blah

Lies, damned lies, and..................

Says the man with a statistic in his sig

 

[Goughy]

A few notes on a few players mentioned here. I was going to write about more but couldnt be bothered

English batting was distinctly average during the 90's and these players illustrate that.

Ramprakash
Exceptional player with a fragile mentality. Suffered from nerves and needed a softly, softly approach which the England management didnt give. I was a major critic of his for many years as I believed he had far too many opportunities. In fact one of my stock articles was along the lines of 'Ramprakash is rubbish' as I knew it could be used with minor tweaks repeatedly. Ramps was a quality player that was just not able to handle the pressures and expectations of Test cricket. The experiment should have ended sooner than it did. Unfortunate that his talent didnt convert but even given the best handling it may not have.

Butcher
A very ordinary cricketer. Thats not to say he was poor but he wasnt anything special. He had an average career and the vast majority of players that play the number of innings he did were bound to play a few good ones. Butcher applied himself well but there was little to seperate him from a large group of county players apart from good family links to cricket (his dad, Alec and Mickey Stewart and his brothers) and playing for fashionable Surrey. Not required Test class but did an ok job.

Atherton
Over hyped and had more column inches written about him before becoming an England player than any other I can think of. Again, not a terrible player but nothing more than a servicable Test player with a huge reputation. Had good concentration but suffered from major techincal issues when playing the short ball. Much has been made about his long standing back problem impacting his success but that still doesnt avoid the fact that he had huge holes in his game.

 

[Richard]

Not terribly sure how Atherton had "huge holes" in his game, TBH - and if he did he did pretty damn well when playing with them.

There's no doubt Atherton was overhyped back in 1988, 1989 sort of time, people wrote him up as The Next Boycott which he emphatically never was and was never going to be. But he was a hell of a player who is very, very easily underrated as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Goughy]

Not terribly sure how Atherton had "huge holes" in his game, TBH - and if he did he did pretty damn well when playing with them.

His back foot technique was terrible. He squared up when playing defensively and became a sitting duck, he played off the ground (ie airbourne) more than most and develped into a compulsive hooker.

No doubt anyone would struggle with the quality of bowling around in his time but due to his back foot issues he became a walking wicket for tall quicks like Ambrose, McGrath etc.

 

[Richard]

But rarely because of the Hook - mostly it was being caught behind the wicket.

And as he said in his book - however many times Ambrose got him out, he also scored runs against attacks including him. Not to mention other fine bowlers like Donald, Waqar, etc.

 

[Goughy]

But rarely because of the Hook - mostly it was being caught behind the wicket.

And as he said in his book - however many times Ambrose got him out, he also scored runs against attacks including him. Not to mention other fine bowlers like Donald, Waqar, etc.

Still has no relevance to the holes in his technique. A technical deficiency still has to be exploited and it doesnt happen every innings. His massive faults have him found out, but that didnt mean he was incapable of scoring a run. It still has to be exploited and given the number of games he player he was bound to have scored runs and played a number of good innings.

The technical issues (which I repeat were considerable) meant that it couldnt be done consistenatly and impacted his career production. He had average career production because he had issues.

 

[KiWiNiNjA]

Says the man with a statistic in his sig

(quickly changes sig)



Nah, stats are all good and everything. I'm a big baseball fan, and baseball is all about stats.

But I hate it when someone just uses a resourse like stats spider or stats guru and finds some stats about a player they no nothing about. Then base their whole argument on why they are a bad player on their stats.

 

[pasag]

(quickly changes sig)

You should put his E/R in there. An amazing 2.58, much better than anyone else in the tournament.

 

[KiWiNiNjA]

You should put his E/R in there. An amazing 2.58, much better than anyone else in the tournament.

LoL, yeah but i don't want to be too much of a stats whore

Even though statistics and mathematics are a big part of my degree, i think its important not to get carried away with statistics.

Take Jimmy Franklin for example, in the Aus vs Nzl game he got 3 wickets that lowered his average a bit, but he deserved none of those wickets. Statistic are good, but it is how they are used that is the important part, and to use statistics on players you have never seen is a big no-no in my book.

Speaking of stats, McGrath and Malinga's S/R's are pretty handy for the tournament. Bond's S/R isnt that fancy but his Econ. Rate up for that giving him a handy lil average.

 

[marc71178]

Hick was as good a player as you could possibly be between 93-96, and i wouldnt be surprised if he was amongst the top 5 batsmen in that period during that time. If that makes him the worst player ever to play 50 tests, then i must really have not been paying attention.

He peaked at number 7 in November 1995.

At that point in time the top 6 were in order:

Lara
S Waugh
Inzamam
Thorpe
Tendulkar
Atherton

and England actually had 5 of the top 20 batsmen!

 

[Richard]

Shatters a fair few illusions about how poor our batting supposedly was in that time...

Yes, Ramps was terrible back then, and yes we had the stange compulsion to pick the likes of Gallian and Alan Wells (added to the letdowns like Knight and Crawley), but there were a large number of high-calibre English batsmen in the mid-1990s.

 

[Richard]

Still has no relevance to the holes in his technique. A technical deficiency still has to be exploited and it doesnt happen every innings. His massive faults have him found out, but that didnt mean he was incapable of scoring a run. It still has to be exploited and given the number of games he player he was bound to have scored runs and played a number of good innings.

The technical issues (which I repeat were considerable) meant that it couldnt be done consistenatly and impacted his career production. He had average career production because he had issues.

See, I don't think he did have average career production. I think averaging 41.55 over 10 years and 97 Tests (as he did between 1990 and the Pakistan tour of 2000\01, excluding the tours of Zimbabwe and Australia where he was never half-fit to bat) against bowlers of the calibre he was mostly facing is a damn magnificent effort. I couldn't give a hoot about 2 Tests in 1989 or his last 10 when he was on the way down (with, probably not coincidentally, the cortisone used to ease his ankyloising spondylitis [think that's how it's spelt] wearing off around that time).

Had his technique been better, he might have done even better, but I still think he did a darn superb job.