Saluting the equivocal Englishmen

Caddick and Hick. Sounds like a shady law firm. If talent was the only passport required for entry into sport’s promised land, their Test curriculum vitaes would be festooned with 400 wickets and 10,000 runs, and a century of caps apiece.

As it is, notwithstanding the fact that Andrew Caddick and Graeme Hick are the leading active first-class performers in their respective disciplines, one is generally regarded as a byword for nerdiness and prima donnaesque truculence, the other as the flat-track bully who couldn’t stop Australians kicking sand in his face, the underachievers’ underachiever. Flags of convenience never were entirely convenient.

At 38 and 41 respectively, Caddick and Hick are now the grand old men of county cricket, as much a part of the furniture as Hove’s deckchairs. Indeed, Caddick, who played his 62nd and last Test in January 2003, has defied virtually every rule in the book by keeping his mojo working for as long as he has: only Danish Kaneria has taken more first-class wickets this summer than his 44. Yet unlike Hick, who at international level wore an uncertain heart on both sleeves and hence stirred sympathy, he has never quite inspired affection: that sensitivity about his ears and a certain social gauchness proved difficult to overcome. Has any England cricketer with 200 Test wickets to his name been so unloved?

When they chose England over New Zealand and Zimbabwe (to be fair, Caddick insists his native land showed scant interest after he played for them in the 1987-88 Youth World Cup while the prospects of Harare becoming a major international venue were pretty dim in the mid-1980s), Poms rubbed hands in gleeful anticipation. Caddick, we were assured, was Richard Hadlee on stilts, Hick a high-heeled Bradman. Most were quite happy to sheath their objections to so-called “equivocal Englishmen”.

Unfortunately, expectations were pitched so high that instant damnation followed early struggles. Hick’s first, fatal faux pas was not to score quadruple Test hundreds from the get-go; Caddick’s was to mosey into the pressbox in the Caribbean and call home without permission. In time, both recovered, albeit to varying extents.

Caddick forged a highly fruitful alliance with Darren Gough that helped reboot the Test side under Nasser Hussain and Duncan Fletcher. Yet even then he was chastised as a second-innings bowler – 103 scalps at 20.81 compared with 131 at 37.06 in the first. Which always struck me as a tad absurd, not to mention grossly unfair, not least because, with draws increasingly scarce, second-innings wickets became more valuable as his career evolved. In all he took part in 21 Test victories, in which he claimed the not insignificant matter of 114 victims at 19.67.

While Hick’s 65 Tests saw him average an under-par 31, he saved his strutting for the ODI stage, where restraint is actively discouraged and meekness intolerable. Among Englishmen with 3000 runs, only Nick Knight, Allan Lamb and Marcus Trescothick have averaged more than his 37.12; for St George, only Lamb and Graham Gooch have surpassed his 635 World Cup runs. It was his 83 that won the 1992 semi-final against South Africa: the sight of Zimbabwe’s big brother so often spurred him to his best. The pity was the neglect. With an average of 34.20 and a strike rate of 41.20 balls/wicket, he leads all England spinners who have pocketed more than 13 scalps. Yet over the span of his 120 internationals he averaged well under two overs per game. If only he’d had Kevin Pietersen’s disdain for self-effacement.

Hick, much the more modest of the pair, has no such illusions, but it says much for Caddick’s seemingly untarnished self-image that he still believes he is good enough to play Tests. With his endlessly repeatable action and undiminished capacity for generating lift from a good length, a straight swap for Steve Harmison or Liam Plunkett against the West Indies would certainly have been beneficial to the efficiency of England’s attack. Nor would it have been at all incongruous but for the ruthless tyranny of age and the undue importance selectors place on the least significant numbers.

Instead, he has walked the walk for Somerset. At the mid-point of the County Championship campaign, Somerset sit atop Division Two courtesy of a multitude of factors: Justin Langer’s leadership and runs, a Taunton square that can play even the biggest duffer into form, six regulars with batting averages in excess of 60, and the circuit’s most venerable and dynamic new-ball duo. Last year, Caddick and South African Charl Willoughby (32) combined for 129 first-class wickets, a figure they are on schedule to exceed. In their most recent outing, they sealed a thumping of Gloucestershire with 19 of the 20 wickets. Caddick’s match haul of 12-71 was a career-best; no active non-spinner comes within a country mile of his 1114 first-class victims.

Hick is some way from his pomp, but he has just become the fifth-fastest player to 40,000 first-class runs. His two centuries this term, meanwhile, have hoisted his career tally to 134, eighth on the all-time list. He and Worcestershire are talking about another contract, and provided his appetite remains hearty, Frank Woolley, seventh in that chart with 145, may not be beyond reach.

Currently on a one-year deal at New Road, he insists he is “really enjoying it” and has no desire to heave his coffin into the attic just yet. “There will be somewhere along the line, whether it is this year or next year, that will suddenly make me think, ‘I am letting myself and other people down’ and it will be time to go. At the moment I am not thinking that way. I’d like to be here one day and gone the next.”

It is hard to imagine Caddick expressing those sentiments. They’ll have to wrench the ball from his hands and force him to sign an undertaking to spend the rest of his days flying that beloved helicopter. Instead, another quote rings long and loud. Talking to David Foot after being named one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year for his exploits in 2000 – the piece de resistance four wickets in an over against West Indies at Headingley – he thanked Hussain and Fletcher for the way “handled and encouraged” him. “I’m a quiet person, someone who needs his own space. I don’t like hassle.” His first 50 Test wickets came at 36 apiece, the next 110 at a jot under 24. That Fletcher and, to a lesser degree, Hussain were also geographical outsiders does not seem in any way coincidental.

How easy to imagine Hick uttering those very sentiments. In his 20s, he was too gentle by nature to impose himself on a dressing room chocabloc with larger-than-life personalities full of scepticism about a wunderkind from Africa for whose express benefit the registration rules had been revamped. Only latterly, like Caddick, did he feel a sense of belonging.

Now it’s Jonathan Trott’s turn to make the leap from imported fruit to national asset. How fortunate the young South African is to be selected in more enlightened, multicultural times, an age when Polish waitresses, Slovakian travel agents and Somalian shop assistants are part of the everyday scenery, when Team England newcomers are ushered into group hugs instead of being subjected to silent sneers and whispered resentments, when Kevin Pietersen can be twice as brash as Tony Greig and no-one bothers with phrases such as “equivocal Englishman”.