Worst player to ever play test cricket for England

Following on from the topic listing the best players that have never played for England, who in your opinion is the worst player to have ever played test cricket for England?

A few suggestions :

Mcgrath (the yorkshire player, not the rather better aussie fellow)
Salisbury
Schofield
Mike Smith

Phil Tufnell considering the length of which he played for England and his fielding was dire. On an expectations level Ramprakash who failed quite miserably. Mahmood possibly?

Tuffers is a great shout. Man I would have to look back in time to see who sticks out.

Darren Pattinson might be a candidate.

When he played one test for England Wiki reports Botham as commenting (with characteristic understatement):

"The most illogical, pathetic and diabolical piece of selecting I've seen."

If we are assembling a team looks like we already have a balanced attack

Tuffers? Really? Ok I agree his fielding and batting were woeful but his bowling surely wasn't that bad. Seem to remember putting in a few match winning performances from time to time - hardly the signs of the worst player to ever play for England.

Pattinson is a good shout

Indeed Italy, when it comes to "spin", surely Schofield has to be a far better candidate that Tuffers for this position!

I call as my first witness "DepressedSurreyFan". If there is even the slightest hint that Schofield might be selected for a county championship match, the Surrey posters have to offer therapy to help him cope with the situation.

Forget about Pattinson defiently a contender The BBC Text Commentary also sums him up well:

"Cloudy at Headingley. with swing in the air - so do England turn to home-town hero Matthew Hoggard, the in-form Simon Jones or even Steve Harmison? Nope - they go for a bloke who was working as a roof-tiler in Australia two years ago. "

Pattinson gets a rough deal. The guy has some talent, otherwise Victoria and Notts wouldn't have signed him.

LivinginItaly wrote:Following on from the topic listing the best players that have never played for England, who in your opinion is the worst player to have ever played test cricket for England?

A few suggestions :

Mcgrath (the yorkshire player, not the rather better aussie fellow)
Salisbury
Schofield
Mike Smith

What about Geoff Miller who was England's attempt at finding a spin bowling all-rounder in the late 1970's.

Gavin Hamilton!

Since I've been watching, I have no idea how Gareth Batty played a Test and then got recalled to the ODI team a couple of years ago.

Gareth Batty has to be a strong contender. At his best he is an average county spinner.

Sounds like England had a conspiracy to pick poor / mediocre spinners from Surrey, but of course Schofield was a Lancs player at the time. Salisbury was undone by his propensity to give away a free boundary per over - but apart from that I don't think he was a million miles off test match standards.

tuffers

Pleased (? ) to see Surrey players doing so well on this thread.

Batty is probably the strongest contender.

Of others with Surrey connections, you can also add to the mix Adam Holioake (a magnificent county captain but not a test player), Rikki Clarke (once over hyped and always under performing), Chris Lewis (talent but inadequate application) and Ian Greig (a scaled down version of his brother, Tony, with correspondingly less presence and ability).

I had a chat on another thread a couple of weeks ago with Dummy-Half and Hoggy-Bear about the number of players, like the above, England have played at number 6 over the years in a misguided attempt to replace Tony Greig, Ian Botham and Andrew Flintoff. I think most would acknowledge the following came closer to being amongst England's worst test playesr than true world class all rounders: Derek Pringle, David Capel, Gavin Hamilton and Ronnie Irani. There are certainly others but my memory is kindly blotting them out for now.

guildfordbat wrote:Pleased (? ) to see Surrey players doing so well on this thread.

Batty is probably the strongest contender.

Of others with Surrey connections, you can also add to the mix Adam Holioake (a magnificent county captain but not a test player), Rikki Clarke (once over hyped and always under performing), Chris Lewis (talent but inadequate application) and Ian Greig (a scaled down version of his brother, Tony, with correspondingly less presence and ability).

I had a chat on another thread a couple of weeks ago with Dummy-Half and Hoggy-Bear about the number of players, like the above, England have played at number 6 over the years in a misguided attempt to replace Tony Greig, Ian Botham and Andrew Flintoff. I think most would acknowledge the following came closer to being amongst England's worst test playesr than true world class all rounders: Derek Pringle, David Capel, Gavin Hamilton and Ronnie Irani. There are certainly others but my memory is kindly blotting them out for now.

You can probably add Mark Ealham to your list of inadequate all rounders.

David Capel?
Martin McCague?

LivinginItaly - yes, Ealham certainly makes the list. Useful for ODIs but never Test class.

Hoggy - McCague was one of the players I had temporarily forgotten. Good call. Utterly dreadful.

Pringle was a decent bowler in English conditions (decent , not that good) but he couldn't bat at Test level. Picking him as an all rounder was not fair to him really, but I guess he wouldn't have made it as a bowler alone...

Tuffers was certainly not anywhere near the "worst" player - he was a very handy bowler. Fielding was pretty awful (bit like Monty) though I remember one remarkable catch at Sydney in the outfield : the unfortunate Aussie batsman (Slater?) couldn't believe it. Not sure Tuffers could either

Ealham's bowling record wasn't too bad though, his batting wasn't up to test standard though, so he shouldn't have been playing.

Hamilton certainly, scored a pair and went wicketless at four runs per over, horrible. McCague is a good shout, completely inadequate unfortunately (for him), as is Schofield.

I think a story is told of an old time English player - can't remember the name - who made a duck and dropped a couple of catches , and then , in the words of John Arlott : "caught the flu and died a few days later. You could say he didn't have a very good week ..."

Alfie - an apparently true story to rival that from the early 1920s (even before my time).

Roy Park played only one match for Australia and batted only once. His wife at the ground to see his test debut missed his entire innings. She dropped her knitting and bent down to pick it up at the very moment poor Park was bowled first ball!

Amjad Khan
Darren Pattinson

I agree with Sonic-Boom's earlier comment that Pattinson too often gets a raw deal on these threads and from oafish commentators like Botham who find it easier to provide a cheap soundbite than a measured opinion.

Although Pattinson's selection and performance was certainly not an earth shattering success, it was hardly either the unmitigated disaster it is so often painted. Pattinson was in tremendous nick for Notts at the time whilst several of the usual suspects were injured (Sidebottom) or struggling for form (Hoggard). He bowled just over 30 overs and ended up with 2 - 96. Closer to adequate than embarrassing.

Worth noting that his bowling analysis in the match was better than Stuart Broad's. Incidentally, Broad had made his first test appearance in Sri Lanka about six months earlier and produced a worse bowling return on debut than Pattinson.

I'm not claiming Pattinson is a better player than Broad - he clearly isn't. However, he perhaps deserved a few of the chances given to Broad and certainly doesn't deserve to be amongst the front runners in the 'worst ever' category.

Pattinson shouldn't have been picked not because he was an average county bowler but the England side needed a test experienced bowler for that match instead. The people / idiots who picked him got it wrong. It's a bit like like fans moaning about Tony Pigott getting parachuted in 1984 for a test in NZ . It wasn't his fault the selectors didn't have a big enough squad or make sure the back ups were around .

My first round of picks would be early Derek Pringle , he was nowhere near ready for test cricket at 21 but admit he was passable 10 years later.

Also Les Taylor and Chris Balderstone of Leicestershire.

Hmm.

I love cricket but I'm Poopie at it. In my main sport I managed, once, to get selected at representational level (for Scotland!).

It was 3 weeks before Finals. I didn't do well. But I'm immensely proud I did my best for Scottish Students, and that can never be taken away from me.

So I think "the worst" player is the wrong way to describe this.

Perhaps "the most surprised and delighted to be selected" might be a better title for the thread?

For someone picked as a front line batsman, Mike Brierley had a fairly abject record - OK, so his captaincy skills were of great value, but can you imagine England today sticking with a player who averaged in the 20s just because he offered some good leadership.

Andy Lloyd must also get a shout, not so much for being not good enough but for being unlucky enough to be picked against the Windies on debut and get injured.

Pattinson is/was by no means a bad player but his selection was ill-thought through.

There was very little logic to it - he had only played a few first-class games despite being well into his 20s and yet he leapfrogged a host of bowlers to earn a call-up

mark lathwell was awful for england think he only ever played twice after all the all the hype about how good he was suppose to be.

Chris Cowdrey is another contender. Chosen as captain and then immediately jettisoned! Verging on humiliating.....

Maybe Lathwell was a case of being picked too early, and he never really recovered from the experience of being thrown to the lions.

Agree with quite a few of the comments. Mostly we are talking about selectors mistakes, inconsistency, pear shaped hunches and so on...

I had overlooked Chris Cowdrey, a dreadful test cricketer and, I'm sure coincidentally, godson of Peter May who just happened to be chairman of selectors

Good call, Corporal!

Don't see why Tuffers is getting any nominations - he was a more than capable spin bowler who had a number of match winning performances for England (particularly against the Windies for some reason).

Ashley Giles on the other hand has to be one of the weakest players to have played regularly in the last 20 years - a defensive spin bowler and OKish number 8 or 9 bat. Oh, I just realised I also described Robert Croft.

Tuffers is an extremely harsh call. A lot of it is to do with circumstance. Drop Ian Bell after the '05 Ashes series and some of you could be mentioning him, however that wasn't the case and he is now widely accepted as England's finest batsman. Some have had the rub of the green, others haven't been quite so lucky, so a degree of objectivity if required when describing someone as the 'worst' player to ever play for England.

May have had the talent, but didn't have the luck. Likewise, there may be some candidates that were less talented than others, yet their career is looked at in a better light, whether this was due to them coming up against weaker opposition, or being carried by better players.

There seem to be two types of nominations:

1) those that could play but didn't live up to expectations and finished with poor records.
2) those that should never have played in the first place and were simply out of their place on the international scene.

IMO if you say "worst" you have to be talking about 2), so players like Tuffnel (who was a damn fine talented spinner, but lazy and badly managed), Ramprakash and Lathwell (the latter was a very fine player who I still think could have done well at test level) shouldn't really be contenders.

I agree about Pattinson getting a raw deal. Certainly his record is better than say Salisbury.

Personally I can't see beyond Martin McCague and Chris Schofield, the latter in particular is not really good enough to play county cricket...

I think Schofied could have been a decent player but was fast tracked hugely into the England set up (in a desperate attempt to find our Warne) - in the long run it was probably bad for his game overall.

Lathwell had a very solid county record but again was brought in to a failing England side too early and was given insufficient time to grow into the Test side (something that could be said about a number of batsmen during the late 80s to mid 90s).

Ramprakash and Hick were slightly different - geniunely great at county level and given plenty of opportunities at Test level with varying degrees of success but overall not living up to expectations. Pity neither of them had Collingwood's mentality, because they were both blessed with far more natural talent.

Just looking at WIki, I'd forgotten just how many players got between about 1 and 4 caps during the 80s and 90s. Did we have a selection policy or just a tombola with every first class player's name in it?

Alan Wells has to be statistically one of the most insignificant players in test history - one match, scoring 0 and 3 not out, not bowling or taking a catch.

guildfordbat wrote:I had overlooked Chris Cowdrey, a dreadful test cricketer and, I'm sure coincidentally, godson of Peter May who just happened to be chairman of selectors

Good call, Corporal!

Guildford - I had forgotten that angle. Nevertheless, I am sure you are spot on that it was just one of life's coincidences....

Here's a question. Who would win a match between the best players never to play for England and the worst players to have played for England?

I reckon the match would be won by the "best players" side provided that the "worst players" was restricted to those who clearly were never international potential in the first place (eg Schofield, Batty, Chris Cowdrey).

But I believe the match would be won by the "worst players" if it includes players who under performed against potential, such as Hick and Ramps.

Neil Fairbrother had a very decent ODI record but was regularly picked as a "batsman" while having a test average of single figures.
Downton was also one of the Wicketkeeper batsman types who didn't convince st either.

Ok, so how about this for a team of the 'worst ever' (ie clearly not international standard) England players? I've tried to put players in as near to normal positions as possible. I'm not sure if the abundance of 'all rounders' makes that easier or more difficult!

Mark Lathwell
Paul Downton (wicket keeper)
Chris Cowdrey (capt)
Rikki Clarke
Gavin Hamilton
Ronnie Irani
Chris Schofield
Martin McCague
Gareth Batty
Amjad Khan
Les Taylor

Several very bad players can consider themselves (un)fortunate to miss the cut.

Ian Salisbury loses out to his fellow Surrey 'spinners' Schofield and Batty.

If only Derek Pringle had maintained his woeful early years form, he would have been a real contender.

Still disappointed that I couldn't find a place for David Capel.

And, yes, Paul Downton did once open for England!

GB
A bit bowler (or bowling all-rounder) heavy in that line up. There are plenty of possibilities (can I propose Wilf Slack as an opener?)

i think rikkie clarke is a bit harsh

yeah and if we're looking for batsmen, how about guys like Chris Adams or Darren Maddy?

Guildford - a "good" side. As Trevor Bailey might have said, it looks distinctly ordinary.

Openers - both Slack and Paul Terry could be candidates - maybe push Downton down the order a bit.

I would propose Richard Blakey as a rival candidate to Downton as the keeper. He was selected as a decent county batsman who could also keep. But in the few tests he played he barely scored a run, and clearly didn't justify selection as a wicket keeper alone....

Of course it would be possible to construct an entire team of all rounders.....

One thing clear beyond doubt, Schofield and Batty are shoe ins for selection.

Rikki Clarke looks a tad high up at No 4 - a recipe for a mid innings collapse.

Mad for Chelsea wrote:yeah and if we're looking for batsmen, how about guys like Chris Adams or Darren Maddy?

Had forgotten all about Darren Maddy and Chris Adams. Maybe Adams was unfortunate to not be given a longer run, but Maddy was definitely not test class.

Chris Adams could also be an option as the manager. I am sure he would be "immense in the dressing room" - to coin a phrase much used by the said gentleman.

BTW Les Taylor is an excellent selection

who was Les Taylor? Before my time obviously. I like the balance of the bowling attack otherwise. You've got the waywardness of Khan to compliment the gentle non-swinging (but straight) half-volleys of McCague and Hamilton, backed up by the "spin" of Batty and Schofield. Beautifully balanced attack.

I'd go for
Lathwell
Slack
Downton (wk)
Cowdrey (capt)
Maddy
Hamilton
Schofield
Batty
McCague
Khan
Taylor

trusting you guys on Taylor...

"I like the balance of the bowling attack otherwise. You've got the waywardness of Khan to compliment the gentle non-swinging (but straight) half-volleys of McCague and Hamilton, backed up by the "spin" of Batty and Schofield. Beautifully balanced attack."

Indeed, the captain would be spoilt for choice - of mediocrity

haha