Beautiful to watch, frustrating to captain
Chris Lewis, the former England allrounder, has been accused of attempting to smuggle cocaine with an estimated street value of £200,000 into the United Kingdom
Jamie Alter
25-Feb-2013
Chris Lewis, the former England allrounder, has been accused of attempting to smuggle cocaine with an estimated street value of £200,000 into the United Kingdom. Mike Atherton, in the Times, says Lewis was the supreme athlete who underachieved; the intelligent man who more than once punctured a hole in his career through sheer stupidity; the warm, friendly face who was also a committed loner, for whom controversy was never far away.
In the Daily Telegraph, Derek Pringle recalls touring with Lewis.
Talented, narcissistic (he once posed naked in a magazine), frustrating, though never anything but unfailingly polite, Lewie, as he was then known, had the anti-social habit of ordering just about everything on the room-service menu, tasting a mouthful of each, and then leaving it to smell out the room. He also owned a hairdryer that gave off electric shocks, but he didn't tell me that until after it had made me and my hair stand to attention one day.
In the Independent, Stephen Brenkley offers another view.
He was one of many cricketers in the decade following Ian Botham's decline who was dubbed the new Botham. Lewis was one of the few who had the all-round gifts to succeed. He could bowl fast and with swing, his batting was swashbuckling, his fielding both in the deep and at gully was almost ahead of its time. But he never came close. Nobody seemed truly to know him in the dressing room. He was hardly aloof but he did not give much of himself; he was not unfriendly but he did not show much inclination to make friends.
Jamie Alter is a senior sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo