Fabulous four who england IGNORED...
Peter Hayter is unsure why Glen Chapple, Darren Stevens, David Sales and Peter Trego did not get more England chances
They are the ones who got away; the players who impressed in county cricket year upon year, some earning cult status at their clubs, but who, despite frequent mentions in the days leading up to selection meetings, followed by just as frequent messages of sympathy and encouragement to persevere afterwards, never got a proper go with England. If they got a gig at all, that is.
Through the ages, bad timing, bad injury, bad selection and occasionally all of the above have conspired against a long list of cricketers who may have made the grade and were desperate for the chance to try but were ultimately denied the opportunity.
In recent times, that list has featured four players, Glen Chapple, David Sales, Peter Trego and Darren Stevens, each of whom, at one time or another, has been described by their backers as the best player never to have been picked by England.
And those feelings grew ever stronger as yet another of their rivals was tried and found wanting.
In the case of the pair still playing, Kent’s never-ending veteran Stevens and Somerset’s tattoo-warrior Trego, they have enjoyed the kind of start to the domestic season that has again raised questions like why not? And what if?
And in the past fortnight, as both men made centuries in the One-Day Cup, those who continue to champion their cause have once again had cause to wonder and to wonder.
Stevens eventually finished on the losing side for Kent against Glamorgan at Swansea on Sunday, but only after he had set a new List A record score for the club, bashing 147 from 67 deliveries, including 14 sixes and ten fours, to go one run better than their Australian star Andrew Symonds.
Stevens, in his 21st season in first-class cricket said afterwards: “It’s all a bit of a blur; it’ll take me the six-hour journey (home) to think about it. I’d say it’s my best knock, it’s just a shame we didn’t win the game.”
In the middle of his pyrotechnics, Stevens shared a stand of 131 in 15 overs with Sam Billings, who made 24 from 41 balls. Only one of them will be playing for England this summer. It is not the 41year-old all-rounder.
In fact, the nearest Stevens came to full international honours was nearly 15 years ago, when, as a Leicestershire upand-comer, he first won a place in the ECB’s National Academy Squad in Australia and Sri Lanka, alongside James Anderson.
Then his performances (“he scored his runs quickly” noted Wisden) earned him a spot in the provisional 30 for England’s 2003 World Cup squad and, err, that was it.
According to witnesses in Taunton, Trego was known to have greeted the regular Sunday-morning announcement of the latest England squad with an anguished cry of “I don’t believe it”.
When asked what it was that was beyond his comprehension, he replied: “They’ve left me out again.”
He did make the England Under-19 team against Sri Lanka in 2000 and should surely have won greater honours than representing them in the Hong Kong Sixes team in 2009, in which he was, by the way, the leading run-maker and made the tournament’s highest individual score of 65.
The century he made from 54 balls to help Somerset chase 476 to beat Yorkshire at Taunton in 2009 is still spoken of in hushed tones and his value to the club he returned to after trying his luck elsewhere and as a goalkeeper for Margate, Weston-super-Mare, Clevedon Town and Chippenham Town was again evident a fortnight ago when he scored 135 from 119 balls against Kent, with six sixes and six fours.
Several good judges, Anderson among them, rate Chapple as one of Lancashire’s best ever. In terms of statistics, he is only one of three of their players to pass 7,000 runs and take 800 wickets, alongside Jack Simmons and Johnny Briggs.
Yet, while he was called into the squad in 2003 for the Trent Bridge Test against South Africa, his international career comprised one ODI cap, against Ireland in Belfast in 2006, when he hit 14 from seven deliveries with one six and one four, then managed just four overs at a cost of 14 runs before injury brought his one and only appearance to a premature close.
Considered a master of his craft, in the piece celebrating his status as one of
Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year in 2012, the year after he captained Lancashire to their first outright County Championship since 1934, the club’s academy director John Stanworth was quoted as saying of Chapple that young batsmen would emerge from a net with him “shaking their heads about what he’s got the ball to do, and how comprehensively he’s worked them over”.
Sales shared the frustration of his supporters that he never quite seemed able to present an unanswerable case for promotion to the national side despite being one of the most destructive batsmen of his generation, especially in view of how his career began.
In his first innings for Northamptonshire, against Worcestershire in Kidderminster, the 18year-old debutant made a three-ball duck. In his second, he scored 210 not out, the first double century ever made by a player making his first-class debut in Championship cricket, and was the youngest to do so since WG Grace in 1866.
When he finally did enough for England to take a closer look, his involvement in the 2000-01 A tour to the West Indies was over before it started as, on the eve of the first match in Grenada, he twisted his knee playing beach volleyball, damaged cruciate ligaments and missed the whole of the next season as a result.
According to former chairman of selectors David Graveney, who, in his time would have considered the claims of all of the above: “All four of them were close and they represent many others over the years.
“There are all kinds of reasons why
Stevens shared a stand of 131 in 15 overs with England’s Sam Billings, who made 24 from 41 deliveries
players who you think should be given a go don’t get the chance.
“Sometimes it is down to getting an injury at the wrong time, sometimes there may have been others ahead of them and you can only pick eleven.
“Looking further back, selectors in the past were probably rightly accused of not moving round the country enough.
“Also, there did seem to be a link between the captain and the number of players who were picked from the same county.
“They may have been the best available, in which case, fair enough. But maybe there was an element of better the devil you know.”
Graveney added that the pitches that batsmen played on were also sometimes a factor while a lack of raw pace could count against a bowler.
“For batsmen, historically there used to be a feeling that if you batted mainly on flat tracks, you needed to score 30 per cent more runs than those who played on trickier surfaces,” he said.
“And from time to time a perception of what is required from a bowler in international cricket becomes a bit of an obsession; whether it be height, the ability to stop batsmen playing on the front foot against you or 90mph pace.
“Personally I never thought in terms of an age limit for selection. The lightbulb moment can happen at any stage.
“But there may be valid age constraints when it comes to certain disciplines. In the case of Darren, he looks like he would be a perfect T20 player, if he were a little younger.”
Thankfully the days of the one-Test wonders seem to have gone.
“There are many players who either missed out completely or got one or two caps and I would agree that, other than a player committing a catastrophic mistake, there is no logical rationale for someone to be selected for one Test and not playing again,” Graveney said.
“In the end, sometimes the door just opens at the right time. It can be as simple as that.”
Not much consolation to the unfortunate four listed here, nor indeed to those “countless” others.
But, when all’s said and done, it does appear that of all the elements that make up the arts and sciences of selection, equally as vital as any other is sheer, oldfashioned luck.