John Snow
There once was a son of a vicar;
a fast bowler known to bicker;
a rebel with or without a cause;
he was once pelted with cans of liquor
Perhaps some creative liberty was taken in this verse, but the poet inside the pacer would pardon the transgression. John Snow, not the one from Game of Thrones, was a lanky English pacer who had once sent Sunil Gavaskar tumbling to the ground with a shoulder tackle. He also refused to bowl in a county game saying he was being overworked; his captain, Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, had to report him to Sussex officials.
That was Snow to a tee―hero and villain in equal measure. He would stand up to anyone he thought was in the wrong, be it an opponent, the umpire or even his captain.
But that worked to his detriment, too, as authorities would wait in anticipation for the day he failed with the ball or, as with the Gavaskar incident, brought the game into disrepute.
The Terry Jenner episode was even more notorious. Snow bumped the helmet-less, lower-order batter, who crumpled onto the pitch holding his head. Such was the anger from the Australian crowd that later, when Snow was fielding in the deep, a passionate gentleman―with probably a few pints in―grabbed the Englishman by the shirt. He wanted to give Snow a piece of his mind, and fist. Ray Illingworth, the English captain, asked his men to vacate the field; play resumed only after the crowd had calmed down.
Snow was known to evoke such emotion in others, be it for his bowling prowess or his devil-may-care attitude. And it was perhaps this urge to defy authority that led him into Kerry Packer’s cigar-perfumed embrace. Snow was one of Packer’s early converts. He played World Series Cricket for a couple of seasons, before returning to England in 1980.
No wonder, then, that his autobiography, out in 1976, was called Cricket Rebel.
A year earlier, he had been part of the inaugural World Cup, at home. And in that tournament, he took six wickets at an average of 10.83, including both Chappell brothers in a game. He was also on the field to witness one of the most bizarre innings of all time: Gavaskar’s 36* off 174 balls.
But Snow was more than cricket―he set up a travel agency after retirement―and he knew life was more than cricket. Just try to get your hands on Contrasts, and Moments and Thoughts, his anthologies of verse. Or if you are not that way inclined, this snippet from the Wisden Almanack illustrates the same point: “At the England team’s Harrogate hotel during the fourth Test at Leeds last July, Basil D’Oliveira in an animated dinner-table conversation said to him ‘The ultimate thing in life is to play for England.’ Snow replied quietly ‘The ultimate thing in life is death.’”
Geoffrey Boycott
Geoffrey Boycott played the very first ball in One-Day cricket. There is no footage to check, but it would be safe to say he blocked or left it―he had a penchant for dead-batting.
Boycott had his spleen removed when he was nine, making him more prone to infections. Perhaps this led to the doggedness to protect his on-field life at any cost. Let’s just say a Boycott innings is to a T20 fan what a silent film is to a TikToker. The Yorkshire man gathered more than 8,000 Test runs and retired with one of the most impenetrable defences in cricket.
He also retired as a character who polarised the cricketing world. While some admired him for his skills and no-nonsense demeanour―he was a northerner and the son of a miner―there were others who called him a selfish player who cared only for his own runs.
But his batting or attitude are not why he is on this list. It is his work as a medium pacer in the 1979 World Cup. As a batter, he got only 92 runs in five matches. But, he took five wickets. In the match against Australia, Boycott got 2-15 in six overs, without even removing his cap or sweater to bowl. To be fair, his run-up was just a few steps and he was more Chris Harris than Shoaib Akhtar. He got another two-fer against Pakistan and one against New Zealand. It is amusing to think that one of England’s premier batters ended up doing more with the ball!
Almost 50 years on, and Boycott is seen, at least by some of the younger cricketing minds, as that cantankerous old man who refuses to keep up with the game. “If you’re going to just entertain, they might as well be a circus, that’s it. Go, be a professional circus around the world.” This was him tearing into Bazball, the new English way of batting aggressively in Tests.
Perhaps the most succinct way to sum up Boycott is this: On a clip from the touring show An Evening with Boycott and Aggers, English broadcaster Jonathan Agnew, who worked with Boycott for 20 years, said the most common question the audience wanted him to ask the batter was this: “Geoffrey, why are you such a difficult bastard?”
Lance Cairns
The 1983 World Cup saw no magic from Lance Cairns; he took seven wickets in the tournament. Perhaps he had exhausted his quota of wizardry in Melbourne the same year, when he unsheathed King Arthur’s sword and whacked the Aussies for six sixes, including a one-hander off Dennis Lillee. He raced to 52 off 21 balls, the fastest 50 at the time, but all the commentators could talk about was Excalibur―the bat with its shoulders shaved off, which almost made it look like a club.
John Guy, a former Kiwi batter who designed the bat, said in an ESPNcricinfo article: “It was just a marketing ploy. Although if you have no shoulders, you can’t get caught off the shoulder of the bat.”
A bat is only as good as the man who wields it. And man, was he good. Cairns was an attraction. Not only did he bludgeon balls with the bat, he also bowled front-on, off the wrong foot. There was substance to go with the unorthodox style, though. He took more than 200 international wickets for New Zealand and used to partner the legendary Richard Hadlee for a time. He was raw, unvarnished talent that had not been coached a single day in his life. He credits his ability to swing the ball to the lack of coaching. If he had been coached into bowling side-on, he would have lost his swing, he reckoned.
As a kid, Cairns had been a promising hockey and rugby player, but he disliked the violence in the latter. He came closer to cricket through the radio, but hardly went to any matches before he started playing.
What makes his story more captivating is that Cairns started going deaf at 17. “I would scream for these appeals and all my team-mates would be silent as anything,” he said in a 2010 interview to Stuff. “Then it would work the other way, I would get a nick and the wicketkeeper would catch it and they would all scream the appeal and I wouldn’t appeal because I hadn’t heard the nick.”
The problems, of course, extended beyond the field. As he could not pick a lot of what people were saying, he would avoid social situations and stay in his room to watch television.
Cairns finally got a cochlear implant in 2010 and did something he had wanted to do for years―talk to his son, Chris, on the phone. Yes, Chris Cairns.
Eddo Brandes
Eddo Brandes had five ducks in his cricketing career; chickens served him better, though. At a time when Zimbabwean cricketers often had full-time jobs to supplement their earnings from cricket, Brandes was a chicken farmer back home. He later became a tomato farmer in Australia, but there is a lot in between.
Brandes was part of the Zimbabwean team for four World Cups. In 1987, in his debut ODI, he got run out on zero and pulled a quad. 1992 was much kinder, with him winning the man of the match award for his 4-21 and 14 (24). With Zimbabwe setting England a modest target of 135, most assumed that the second innings was a formality. But in stepped Brandes, plucking four of the first five wickets, as he would feathers off his poultry. He got Graham Gooch, Allan Lamb, Robin Smith and, his childhood buddy and former Zimbabwe cricketer, Graeme Hick. He had bowled an unbroken spell of 10 overs; running after hens had built his stamina.
He seemed to take a special liking to the English. In 1997, he took a fifer against them, including a hat-trick―the batters dismissed: Nick Knight, John Crawley and Nasser Hussain.
But perhaps the reason why cricket fans remember him the most is for his sharp retort to a Glenn McGrath sledge in a 1996 series in Colombo. After failing to knock over the lower-order Brandes, a fuming McGrath apparently asked him, “Oi Brandes, why’re you so fat?” Pat came the reply: “Because every time I shag your wife, she gives me a biscuit.”
McGrath had been anything but hospitable to Brandes, but his country was. After his time with the Zimbabwe team, he moved to Australia and started coaching the Sunshine Coast Cricket Club in Queensland. “I’ve found that if you put in the effort to say ‘G’day’ to people, they react positively, and once they find out I used to play cricket, things happen quickly for me,” he wrote in a 2009 ESPNcricinfo article. “Ian Healy (former Aussie wicketkeeper) was very kind, helping me with contacts in Brisbane and helping me find my feet.”
There, he turned from fowl to fruit, starting a tomato business. He produced around 50 tonnes a week for markets in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. But cricket was not out of his system. He was preparing to take on the likes of Carl Hooper and Jonty Rhodes for the over-50s World Cup (run by a nonprofit in Australia) in 2020, but the pandemic nixed those plans. No matter, there is an over-60s World Cup, too.
Dermot Reeve
We have seen Joe Root drop his bat in celebration. He did so after a century against India. Dermot Reeve also dropped his bat; only, he did so while batting. It was a Warwickshire vs Hampshire match. Left-arm spinner Raj Maru was bowling into the rough outside leg stump and Reeve did not want to get caught bat-pad. His solution? He put his leg forward to defend the ball and dropped his bat to the pitch. He did so 15 times during that match.
It was such innovation, sometimes ethically complex, that Reeve was known for. He would reverse sweep with impunity and would vary the pace of his seam bowling before it became fashionable. Basically, he would employ any method to get into the opponent’s head. This included incessant chirping at batters, regardless of reputation. As Rahul Dravid would find out. “He told me, ‘You’re the only person who’s ever got under my skin,’” Reeve told Daily Mail in 2021. “I went on and on. And he got out. Things like that made me very disliked. But I wasn’t out there to make friends. We were there to win matches.”
He was not stingy with this ideology, lavishing it on teammates, too. As captain of Warwickshire, he thought star signee Brian Lara was getting special treatment and even called him a “prima donna”.
It was this antagonistic attitude, perhaps, that prevented him from getting a longer career. There was that persistent hip injury, too. Of his 29 ODI caps, 11 came in World Cups. The 1992 edition was more memorable―he took eight wickets at an average of 15.75, the tournament’s lowest. His best was a three-fer against India, where he got the captain Mohammad Azharuddin and Kapil Dev. He also hit four fours en route to an important 25* in that infamous rain-affected match that saw South Africa’s target being revised to 22 off one ball.
Reeve’s playing days morphed into coaching stints with a couple of teams, including Somerset and the Maharashtra Ranji side. He also took up commentary duties, but was let go from Channel 4 after news of his cocaine addiction broke. He says he is clean now. “I have no recollection of seeing the ball on Saturday and Sunday. I had to watch the match video to hear what I said,” he told The Mail on Sunday in 2005. It was the England versus New Zealand match at Lord’s in 2004. “They (others in the box) just said I was my usual self but chirpier―and kept doing Imran Khan impressions off-screen. They said it was the funniest commentary they had ever heard.”
Jack Russell
Wriddhiman Saha would sympathise with Jack Russell. The Englishman, whom many considered the best gloves-man in the country, would often make way for Alec Stewart, who was better with the bat.
But that is where Saha would stop. Though wicketkeepers are known to be an eccentric bunch, Russell would be a “bit too out there” even for them. Apparently, he once blindfolded construction workers coming to and leaving his house so that they would not know where he lived. Angus Fraser, his former English teammate, wrote this for The Independent in 2004: “There would be a box of cereal, tea bags and biscuits stuffed under his chair. Jack rarely trusted the food at grounds, especially on tour, and his lunch on match days consisted of two Weetabix, which had to be soaked in milk eight minutes before he came off the field. He would also use the same tea bag for the 20 or so cuppas he would drink during a Test match.”
If food on tours made him jittery, one could only imagine what he went through during the 1996 World Cup in the subcontinent. On the field, he pouched seven catches and affected a stumping, but off it he indulged in a passion that had grown out of the boredom of sitting in the pavilion when rain interrupted play. He would wander the cities to find subjects he could pour onto his canvas. There is a photo of him sitting―with his bushy moustache and baggy shorts―in the middle of a vegetable market in Peshawar, painting a fruit seller.
Russell ended his playing career with more than 2,000 runs and north of 200 dismissals. He then had coaching jobs in goalkeeping, with the Forest Green Rovers in the Conference National; and wicketkeeping, with Gloucestershire. Art, however, had him it its grip, and eventually led him to establishing the Jack Russell Gallery in Chipping Sodbury, South Gloucestershire. His collection includes landscapes, wildlife and sport, and portraits featuring the likes of Dickie Bird, Bobby Charlton and Eric Clapton. On his website, Russell tells the story of painting the guitarist. “When we sat down in his London home, I asked him how long he could sit for. ‘About 45 minutes,’ came the reply. I went white with panic. After an hour he had to leave. I wandered up the Kings Road, Chelsea, with a very incomplete portrait. Just an eyeball, a bit of chin, one ear, and half a nose! I sat down in a cafe with the picture beside me. A gentleman opposite peered over his newspaper, studied the painting for a minute, then remarked, “I see you’ve been to see Eric”. At that point I knew I had cracked it. I was delighted!”
You can buy a print of this portrait from the gallery website at just ￡2,500 (about Rs2.5 lakh).
Andrew Flintoff
Andrew Flintoff took his role as cricketing all-rounder and applied it to life in general. After his playing days, the Englishman has been a boxer, host, podcaster, author, reality TV contestant, theatre artiste and, most recently, unpaid assistant coach.
Let’s explain the last bit first. In December 2022, Flintoff was airlifted to a hospital after crashing his car while filming for Top Gear. He has been a host of the famous television show for a few years now. Out of the public eye for months, Flintoff returned to cricket, albeit as a volunteer assistant coach for the national team during their recent New Zealand series.
There has been no confirmation of a relationship going forward, but if Flintoff does get the coaching gig, he would return to an arena where he might have some unfinished business. For all the greatness that oozed out of Flintoff―especially in the 2005 Ashes―he could never perform to potential in a World Cup. There were fitness issues in 1999; he made 15 runs in two innings and took two wickets. It was better in 2003―156 runs and seven wickets―and 2007, in the Caribbean, was good in terms of bowling. He took 14 wickets, but made only 92 with the bat.
What 2007 did give us was the story of the pedal-operated boat. Drinking into the wee hours with some of his teammates, Flintoff decided he wanted to meet Ian Botham, who he thought was on a yacht. He knew swimming would be dangerous, so he got a pedal boat. “I couldn’t find the oars, so I dragged this pedalo into the water,” he told Piers Morgan years later. “The next morning, I woke up, I was on my bed… still wet and… [there was] sand between my toes.”
It could be one of those stories that add to the “legend” of a man, or it could be a cautionary tale. Flintoff chose the latter, quitting alcohol a few years later. He also talked openly about having depression and bulimia, setting the tone for the Ben Stokes’s of today to do the same.
He has also done his part to grow the sport in his country, taking it from the elite to everyone. In his highly rated show Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams, for instance, he goes about making a team from a group of eclectic teens from his hometown of Preston.
Being around the boys really seems to help Flintoff, and vice versa. So, do not be surprised if you see Freddie at the Wankhede in a few days.
Collins Obuya
Kenya was the story of the 2003 World Cup. And Collins Obuya was its most popular chapter. The African nation made it as far as the semifinals―only to fall to India―on the back of some inspired performances by the leg-spinner. In the match against Sri Lanka, Obuya took 5-24, foxing the likes of Aravinda de Silva, Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara.
He had taken lessons from the greatest craftsman of leg spin, Shane Warne, who gave him tips on how to bowl the flipper and the wrong one. With these new arrows in his quiver, he took 13 wickets in the tournament at an average of 28.76, eventually earning a contract with Warwickshire for the 2003 season.
For a boy who earned most of his money selling tomatoes in his mother’s market, the sudden fame was dizzying. He used to earn $1,000 a year from cricket before the World Cup; his team got a payout of $5,00,000 at the end of it.
But the spotlight vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Obuya could not impress in his county stint because of a knee injury, had a fallout with the Kenyan board, and was ruled out of the 2004 Champions Trophy because of appendicitis.
The following year, he went to Australia to seek guidance from Terry Jenner, who had coached Warne into prominence. Sadly, that partnership went nowhere and Obuya began transitioning into a batter’s role.
It was a slow burn, but the results showed in the 2011 World Cup. In six matches, Obuya collected 243 runs at an average of 48.60, which included a 98* against an Australian attack that featured Brett Lee, Mitchell Johnson and Shaun Tait.
More than a decade later, Obuya has not given up the dream. Now 42, and a father of two, he is till part of the Kenyan team and wants to play abroad one last time. “If we manage to qualify (for the 2024 T20 World Cup), it will be a great privilege for me,” he told The Nation this June. “You never know, if I perform well, I may even get a call-up by an IPL team. It has been my dream to play in the IPL, so I will seize the opportunity even if it for a short time.”
As his Kenya teammate Pushkar Sharma said in an interview earlier this year, “He is like Virat Kohli to us.”
Dwayne Leverock
Conde Nast Traveler lists Horseshoe Bay Beach and the Crystal Caves among places to see on the island of Bermuda. Fans of cricket might want to visit another spot―Dwayne Leverock’s home. As a recent Reddit story goes, Ahsan Shaikh, a cricket fan, was on vacation on the isle and struck up a conversation with his taxi driver. Cricket came up and the driver was shocked to know that people outside Bermuda still remembered Leverock and that moment.
It was the 2007 World Cup. India were batting and Robin Uthappa was on strike. Malachi Jones ran up to bowl and pitched it a bit wide of off stump. Uthappa, trying to run the ball down to third man, got an edge and the ball flew. Waiting at slip was the rotund Leverock who, in a moment of brilliance, dove to his right and plucked the ball out of the air. He was 127 kilos at the time. The moment became a part of cricketing folklore and, for many Indian fans, was the only piece of amusement from a dismal World Cup.
“The catch itself was funny,” he told ESPNcricinfo in 2015. “I was going to give Malachi a high-five but when I saw the group of guys who were running towards me, I changed direction and went the opposite way. When I looked behind, quite a few of them were running after me. I thought that was very funny.”
Back to Shaikh. The driver somehow got Leverock’s number and called him up. To the fan’s disbelief, Leverock shared his address and told them to come over. They had a wholesome meeting and even recreated the catching pose for a photo.
Leverock was always that large-hearted, beef korma-loving jovial figure, but he was fiercely competitive on the field. Once, in a warm-up match against England, Leverock noticed Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff chuckling at some of his deliveries. Later, when KP was batting, Leverock lured him out with his crafty left-arm spin and had him stumped. He also accounted for the wickets of Kumar Sangakkara and Yuvraj Singh in the 2007 World Cup.
Leverock knew how to deal with disrespect. As with many players from associate nations, he had a full-time job; he was a jailer and used to drive hardened criminals to and from prison. Answering a question on a BBC message board about which was harder―bowling to Pietersen or dealing with felons, he said, “Bowling to KP; he’s more unorthodox!”
S. Sreesanth
Sreesanth wore his emotions on his sleeve. Maybe both sleeves. The pacer was known to get in the faces of the batters, even towering hulks like Matthew Hayden, and was often warned for his on-field antics. The most famous of these was the confrontation with South African pacer Andre Nel, where, after being taunted for not having enough courage, he stepped out and hit Nel for a six in a Test. And then twirled his bat and hips. Also, the infamous slap from Harbhajan Singh for apparently needling him after an IPL match.
He was, for a while, the wild child of Indian cricket and was even banned for life for his involvement in the 2013 spot-fixing scandal. The Supreme Court eventually set aside the ban in 2019 and he returned to the Kerala Ranji team in 2022. It was in the run-up to his comeback that Sreesanth took online mental conditioning classes from mind coach Tim Grover, the man who had earlier worked with basketball legends Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant.
As for World Cups, he played only the 2011 edition at home (he was part of the 2007 T20 World Cup), but got only two games. He was, however, part of the final and went wicketless in eight overs.
For all the drama he created on the field, his life off it has been equally entertaining. Most people know of his dancing skills, but he added acting to his resume in 2017, with the films Team 5 and Aksar 2. In 2019, he even got the ‘Best Villain’ honour at the Santosham Film Awards for his role in Kempe Gowda 2. “Didn’t many of my teammates always use to say that I was an actor?” he said in an interview to The Indian Express in 2022. “I think you need to be a good actor to get by in life. I am not talking about faking it. I mean not showing your vulnerability. I hate sympathy; I don’t want it in my life anymore. I don’t want to show it to anyone that I am down. That’s what I mean by acting.”
Sreesanth has also been part of several reality shows like Ek Khiladi Ek Haseena and was the runner-up in the 2018 season of Bigg Boss. He would regularly pick fights with other contestants and host Salman Khan joked that Sreesanth had threatened to leave the house 299 times.
He also contested elections as a BJP candidate in 2016, but lost to his Congress opponent V.S. Sivakumar by more than 11,000 votes. That, however, has not crushed his ambition. “I am a huge fan of [Shashi Tharoor] as a person who had stood by me,” he said in the same Express interview. “But I will defeat him in the elections in Thiruvananthapuram.”
Chris Gayle
Remember Prasanth Parameswaran? His career went poof in seven balls. The reason: A marauding Chris Gayle. In a 2011 IPL match in Bengaluru, Gayle ripped into the Kerala pacer, hitting 37 runs off one over (there was a no ball). Royal Challengers Bangalore reached the target of 125 in the 14th over.
Gayle was known to unleash such violence on the pitch. Hailed as arguably the greatest T20 batter of all time―he has more than 14,500 runs and has played for a staggering 39 teams―Gayle often brought this carnage to ODIs as well. Take, for instance, the 2015 World Cup. In the match against Zimbabwe, Gayle hit 16 sixes in his innings of 215. It was, at the time, the only double ton in World Cups. Overall, he has played five editions, amassing almost 1,200 runs and picking 16 wickets with his off spin. Off the pitch, though, Gayle was the epitome of chill, looking like he had spent all his days with Snoop Dogg. At this year’s IPL, when he made his commentary debut, there was more laughter than analysis. He even went over to the Bhojpuri panel and spoke a few words in the language.
But this casual vibe is not without its pitfalls; in 2016, Gayle was pulled up for flirting with an Australian anchor on air. Watching it could make you either cringe or validate your support of the six-pack-flexing, alpha male ‘Universe Boss’ persona he has created on social media. This version of Gayle once installed a stripper pole in his Jamaican house and told his followers that, without one, they were not cricket “players”.
But perhaps this need to revel in his success comes from his past. In 2005, he had to undergo a heart surgery. In the years to follow, he was periodically at loggerheads with the cricket board. Also, having made the most ODI runs for the West Indies―10,425―and also being the most capped player in the format, he is at times left out of conversations that feature Brian Lara and Viv Richards.
So Gayle is in a world of his own, and his latest goal is to win a Grammy. He has sent his album Tropical House Cruises to Jamaica: Asian Edition for Grammy consideration. He is featured on two of the tracks.
Oh, there is also speculation that Bollywood may be calling.
Imran Tahir
The fall of a wicket was like a starter pistol to Imran Tahir. It was a signal to run. No matter the batter, the leg-spinner was off, celebrating as if it were his last scalp. It is a childlike joy that lasts to this day. At 44, Tahir led the Guyana Amazon Warriors to their maiden Caribbean Premier League title on September 24.
In the 2019 World Cup in England, Tahir became the oldest cricketer to play for South Africa in the tournament. He was also the first spinner to bowl the starting over in a World Cup, and dismissed England’s Jonny Bairstow off the second ball. A T20 giant, Tahir was great in ODI World Cups, too, taking 40 wickets in three editions at an average of 21.17.
“It hasn’t been an easy ride for me as I remember working at the Pace Mall in Lahore at a retail shop where I used to earn Rs3,000 per month when I was 16,” he told The Express Tribune in 2015. “Since I was the eldest, I had no choice but to do what was required to support my family… I spent five years in South Africa playing domestic cricket and had to live hand-to-mouth for the first two years.”
Inspired by the legendary Abdul Qadir, Tahir had made it to the Pakistan Under-19 team. But progress was slow. He then moved to England for county cricket and eventually landed in South Africa. There, he became a valuable commodity. An attacking leg-spinner with a heart that would never quit. He served the country well for years, eventually becoming one of those nation-hopping talents who played T20 leagues around the world.
And not only did he play, he enjoyed every bit of it.
In the Pakistan Super League final in 2022, Tahir bowled a yorker to Mohammad Hafeez, who brought his bat down just in time. Tahir convinced his captain Mohammad Rizwan to take the review. He did. DRS showed the ball hitting the middle of the bat. The next ball, Hafeez played and missed; Tahir thought there was an edge and started running. There was no edge. Hafeez and Tahir squared up in the middle, both smiling and arguing, and separated after a fist bump. It was a final, but there was fun to be had. And by God, Tahir would have it.
It was in this T20 journey that he helped M.S. Dhoni’s team of veterans, affectionately called the ‘Dads’ Army’, to the IPL title in 2018. Going by his current run, he might soon be looking for a granddads’ army to join.
