Graeme Hick - Playing For England

Playing For England

By the time the 1986 season was out, the possibility of Hick's playing at Test level was being taken seriously, and the debate was shifting from whether he would play international cricket to which country he would represent. At the time, Zimbabwe seemed a long way from Test status, and so — with some reluctance — he set himself instead to fulfill the residency requirements for England qualification, and despite an offer of a four-year qualification period from New Zealand he opted to take the longer path of a seven-year wait to play for his newly adopted home. By the time he became eligible, public interest in his seeming destiny as a great batsman for country as well as county was intense; David Lloyd was later to write that he doubted "any cricketer ever come into the international game burdened by such impossible expectations". Hick's Worcestershire team-mate Graham Dilley had been in no doubt that he would succeed, perhaps ironically given what was to follow writing that Hick exerted "psychological pressure on the bowlers, like Viv Richards or Javed Miandad."

Hick made his first appearances as an England batsman in a three-match One Day International series against West Indies, the first being played at Edgbaston on 23 May 1991. He made only 14 in a low-scoring game, but a few days later, in the third and final match of the series, he hit 86* and shared in a match-winning stand of 213 with Neil Fairbrother. The stage seemed set for Hick's Test debut at Headingley on 6 June, and Hick was even pictured on the cover of the Radio Times. He was given a hero's reception by the crowd as he came out to bat, but a tortured 51 minutes later he was back in the pavilion having made only six, and he could do no better in the second innings. After further innings of 0, 43, 0, 19 and 1 he was dropped before the last match of the series. Although Worcestershire did win the Benson & Hedges Cup, in first-class cricket Hick finished with an average for the season of just 32.91, which remains his lowest in any English summer.

He then played all three Tests in New Zealand, but apart from a marathon bowling performance in the first innings at Wellington where he and Phil Tufnell shared 140 overs almost equally (Hick's 69-27-126-4 was to be his best in Tests), he again had little to smile about. Considerably more enjoyable for him was the 1992 World Cup which immediately followed: England reached the final, thanks in no small part to Hick's three half-centuries. The most important of these came in the semi-final against South Africa at the SCG. Although this game is now more often remembered for the rain-related fiasco which left South Africa needing an impossible 22 runs from one ball, it was Hick's Man-of-the-Match-winning knock of 83 (in an innings where the second top score was 33) which made England's victory possible in the first place. He could not replicate it in the final, being lbw to Mushtaq Ahmed for 17.

In 1992 Hick finally made a Test half-century, 51 against Pakistan, but as with the West Indian series he was dropped before the end of the summer. This time at least he scored heavily for Worcestershire, averaging nearly seventy for his county. This domestic form, together with his ability against spin bowling, secured Hick a place on the 1992-93 tour of India, and in a generally disastrous tour for England (they lost two Tests by an innings and the other by eight wickets) he was one of the very few bright spots; indeed, he topped both batting and bowling averages for his country, as well as scoring 249 runs in the six ODIs. The personal highlight for Hick was his long-awaited maiden Test hundred: 178 in the third Test at Bombay; he added another 47 in the second innings. He then scored 68 and 26 in the one-off Test against Sri Lanka which immediately followed. For his achievements in the subcontinent, he was named one of Indian Cricket's five Cricketers of the Year in 1993.