Trimble innings ends at age 84
TO QUEENSLAND cricket, Sam Trimble was the gift who just kept giving.
Opening batsman Trimble, who died in Brisbane on the weekend aged 84, was known as one of the finest Sheffield Shield cricketers to never wear a Test cap.
Few have come closer. Trimble was 12th man for the first Test against the West Indies in Jamaica in 1965 and he also captained an Australia Second XI to New Zealand in 1969, making a double century.
The duo of Bob Simpson and Bill Lawry were the wall that stopped him from making the Test side but had he been playing today he would surely have made the team.
The Sheffield Shield centuries which are so elusive to modern players came readily to him in 1963-64 (five), 1964-65 (three) and 1965-66 (three).
Trimble eventually retired from first class cricket in his early 40s but still appeared for the Wanderers in his 60s.
“You don’t forget how to play,” he once told a reporter. “You just get slower.”
His 144 match first class career reaped 10,282 runs at 41 and he was Queensland’s leading first class run-score before Stuart Law and Martin Love passed him.
“He was the best player I saw who never played a Test for Australia,’’ said former Test keeper John Maclean, a long time Trimble teammate.
“He was a lovely fella – a quintessential Australian.
“I remember years after we retired I met Bob Hawke and one of the first things he said to me was ‘how’s Sam Trimble?’.”
Trimble’s coaching camps at the Gabba, which continued for decades after his retirement, helped to mould future stars and were once visited by a nine-year-old boy from Kingaroy called Matt Hayden.
Trimble was born to farm life at Booyong outside Lismore but moved to Queensland to maximise his chances of playing first class cricket.
He loved the game from all angles and spent a year as curator at Souths home ground Fehlberg Park from the mid-1990s, once having to get a new mobile phone after one slipped from his pocket into a bucket of white paint.
Trimble’s best moments proved he was Test class.
His 177 for Queensland against John Snow, Ken Shuttleworth, Peter Lever, Ray Illingworth and Derek Underwood in 1970-71 was a triumph against an attack which defeated Australia that summer.
Trimble never got his heart’s desire – a Shield win – but he signed off from cricket with a memorable punchline in 1975-76.
Given just 17 minutes and 15 overs by NSW captain Doug Walters to chase down a seemingly out of reach 165 runs for outright victory, they roared home, with 41-year-old Trimble making 66.