Defending Martin McCague
"In sport, we often hear that a team are not as good on the pitch as they look on paper
George Binoy
25-Feb-2013
"In sport, we often hear that a team are not as good on the pitch as they look on paper. For sports writers it's the other way round: a piece rarely looks as good on paper as it does on the pitch. This piece might be the exception, in that it looks awful on the pitch as well. Defending the career of Martin McCague, the spiritual predecessor to Darren Pattinson, makes devil's advocacy seem like the dream job," writes Rob Smyth in the Guardian.
McCague's Test record (three Tests, six wickets at a cost of 65 runs apiece) is clearly mediocre, but he is barely alone in that. Others from that 90s group who were even further out of their depth, such as Gavin Hamilton, Min Patel, Aftab Habib and Richard Blakey, were allowed to slide peacefully into anonymity. What makes McCague different? There's his Australian upbringing, although this is barely relevant in view of what has gone before and since, his perceived lack of fibre (he pulled up lame in two of his three Tests), his fuller figure, but most of all the fact that, like Pattinson, he was picked ahead of a hugely popular English workhorse who was controversially perceived by the selectors to have lost his nip.
George Binoy is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo