Keepers? How WI keepers match up with di rest
Posted: Fri Jun 11, 2010 12:24 pm
Runs scored 447 1568
Batting average 18.62 17.42
100s/50s -/2 -/9
Top score 64 82
Balls bowled - 52
thats jackie Hendriks a name I could not find on that list. a stop start career nevertheless revealed one of the greatest pure keepers in the history of the game. utterly brilliant to any kind of bowling and usually 100% efficiency even when keeping to toals in excess of 600 runs which in 1968 he frequently did for the westindies.
do you know what it is to keep to 600+ runs and make no mistakes. that was Hendriks!
a list like that on this page makes little sense to me. the most sense that list makes is flower at the top. andy flower was a truly great player.
but take alexander for example! he had played in jamiaca and gone on to cambridge university where on graduation he came into the westindies side for 2 tests in 1957.
in 1958 with just those 2 tests he was made westindies captain and just 4 years and 4 series later he had developed into a batsman not quite as good as flower but was on his way.
the mighty Oz attack could not get Alexander out under 60 runs for a whole series! try understand that! had Alexander continued the sky was the limit but he quit under pressure of career which I am sure was the final arbiter in his decision. after all he was a doctor of veterinary medicine and he had to get on with it if he had to get a careeer going.
you see starting from a very moderate batsman, a grafter and a hard fighter, Alexander grew into an open and confident batsman scoring at will agains the best in just 4 years with limited opportunity for there was a mighty line-up ahead of him that usually scored the runs, leaving little opportunity for him to score.
but when he wasnt captain anymore, and the ioppostion contained the hifher up batting leaving every opportunity for Aleaxander to flourish that is exactly what he did and the world saw a veru fine batsman indeed, shots all round, rearguards every tiem, shepparding the tail. incredible.
the list does not tell all that! all it does is assign alexander a number, which number does not flatter him, but hurts his standing as one of the very greatest keeper batsmen of all time...among the first 5 for damm sure
another example is Dennis Lindsay who beat the hell out of the best bowling in the world, even more than flower did but the tests werent recognised. what is shown of lindsay in that list is very hardly what he actually was...an excellent keeper and a mighty batsman. mighty, mighty batsman...better even that andy flower and prolly sangy too!
the thing with lindsay is that he was an attacking batsman, who did not wait for things to go his way but made them go his way. he scored huge tons, big tons!
I secretly wish I was him as a cricketer but he was saffie and we hated those. but he was a great one, in a great side, unfotunately a racist one.
