Cork and England's forgotten decade

Dominic Cork has retired from professional cricket. Barney Ronay pays tribute in the Guardian and says Cork renews the nostalgia for the 1990s, a decade of contrasts for English cricket.

If the 1990s was a period when everybody in the England team seemed to have wandered in from a different movie – the parping slapstick of Phil Tufnell, the lonesome John Wayne heroics of Mike Atherton, the cannon-fodder bit parts of all those endlessly machine-gunned one-Test extras – Cork at least found a franchise sequel in county cricket. Here he ossified into a reassuringly timeless figure, a constant of the Ceefax page and the buried county scores panel, a kind of modern pastoral sprite forever nosing his walnut-trim six-gear Ford Mondeo saloon around some county ground gyratory system.