Draft: The Worst of Test Cricket / Poll Up / Tournament Done

[Bevab]

Updated my initial post with further details on my pick.

@CerealKiller Rubel is an absolutely horrible pick. He is surely one of the factors for Bangladesh deciding to abstain from pacers for their home games. Who knew that selecting a bowler who could barely be accurate with the white ball for tests would ever be a smart option?

@VC the slogger Knew it was unlikely that I would get to pick him later, awful choice indeed. His treatment of Amarnath who could have been an incredible player without his interference makes my blood boil!

 

[Master Bates]

Mehrab Hossain
Normally I wont be doing write-ups but I would love to do it this time! Well a Bangladeshi player of the 2000s era was expected and here he comes with 9 tests, scoring 241 runs at 13.38 with the highest score of 71(his only 50 as expected)
@Bigby Wolf

 

[Willoughby63]

Seems we already have our captaincy candidate..

There are bad Test cricketers and then there is the Maharajah of Vizianagram or Vizzy as he was often called, who apart from being one of the worst Test cricketers of all time could also lay claim to being one of the biggest twats to ever set foot upon a cricket field. His selection in the Indian team for the 1936 tour of England was ensured mainly through his wealth and position in Indian cricket, which was enough to see him named captain of the team when India weren't able to secure the services of Nawab Iftikhar Ali Khan Pataudi who had played Test cricket for England due to poor health - in those days the thought of an Indian team being led by anyone but royalty was unthinkable. Something similar happened four years previously in 1932 when India made their maiden tour of England as a Test nation under the captaincy of the Maharajah of Patiala, who at least had the grace to hand over the captaincy for the only Test match to a proper player in CK Nayudu. Vizzy didn't possess any such grace and imposed himself upon the Indian cricket team as a captain and tail-end batsman who could neither bat nor bowl, effectively reducing them to 10 rather than 11 players. If that wasn't bad enough, his presence also caused a severe rift in the team in between the players and he was also to blame for Lala Amarnath, India's best player being sent home in disgrace from the tour; there was also a story of him offering Syed Mushtaq Ali a gold watch to run out Vijay Merchant, another opposer of his turbulent regime during a tour match, but the former reneged and ended up sharing a century partnership with him instead. Needless to say, India ended up losing the Tests 2-0 and Vizzy himself had a predictably poor series totalling just 33 runs at 8.25, which legend has it was fewer than the number of Rolls Royces he owned in his personal garage.

Overall, he totalled 1228 runs at 18.60 from all first-class matches with a highest of 77, a lot of them coming off deliberate full tosses and long hops from players he had offered gold watches or cash in return for giving him easy runs. He came within touching distance of touring with the Indian team in 1932 but for poor health getting in the way of his plans much to the relief of that team, which fared a lot better on paper. The 1936 batch weren't so lucky, and despite possessing arguably the most talented team India had ever sent over to the British Isles in their first 50 years as a Test nation with the likes of Vijay Merchant, Lala Amarnath, Amar Singh, Mohammad Nissar, CK Nayudu, Syed Mushtaq Ali to name a few, had an overall miserable time winning just 4 out of 28 first-class matches on tour, all owing to this man. Lala Amarnath, arguably the most talented Indian cricketer at the time and a man who had the potential to become the world's best all-rounder had his career greatly affected, as by the time he played his next Test in 1946 he was 35 and past his prime. Despite all this, Vizzy was still knighted during the King's Birthday Honours and remains to date the only active Test cricketer to ever receive a knighthood.


VC's XI

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7. Maharajah of Vizianagram
8.
9.
10.
11

@Sinister One​

My next pick is gone!

 

[Bigby Wolf]

Neil Fairbrother

One of England's finest ever ODI batsmen of all time Neil Fairbrother - who was a quite successful in white ball cricket and was a county cricket veteran scoring 20612 runs in 366 games with an average of 41.

Quite Impressive isn't it? His first class stats and and his ODI performance particularly in the early 90s. Well test cricket tells you a different story and it was tough on a player like Neil Fairbrother as he failed miserably in the first three tests he played and scored just three runs with his career spanning only 10 tests for England averaging 15.64 and scoring just 219 runs thereby making him in the list of unfortunates - the worsts of test cricket.

Bigby's XI :

1. Neil Fairbrother.

 

[Aislabie]

Neil Fairbrother

It's your pick again too; you have #8 and #9

 

[Bigby Wolf]

It's your pick again too; you have #8 and #9

Yeah working on it.

 

[Bigby Wolf]

Lawrence(Lawrie) Miller (NZ)​

M - 13 I - 25 Runs - 346 H.S : 47.
After Bangladesh the team that has poorer record in Test Cricket is New Zealand and have know to produce quite a few of them over the years and Lawrence Miller has to be topping the list for sure.Playing for Central Districts in the Plunket Shield Miller had a very good first record of scoring 4777 runs with 5 centuries in 82 matches and has won the Redpath Cup for NZ batsmen of the season in the 1950s thre times and consequently got a chance in the NZ national side after a fantastic 1952 - 53 season where he averaged 157 scoring 471 runs in the Shield.

Miller had a very sorry International career even failing to score a 50 in the 13 tests he played scoring only 346 runs for the NZ Team.
​

Bigby's XI :

1. Neil Fairbrother
2.
3.
4. Lawrence Miller

​

@Sinister One you are up next.

 

[Master Bates]

Asoka De Silva
@VC the slogger

 

[Aislabie]

Some excellent picks so far; @VC the slogger's pick of Vizzy is someone who, for me at least, somewhat goes under the radar. Surprised you have him batting so high up the order though - if he slots in at his usual number nine, then he takes up the place of a valuable bowler, thereby weakening your side still further!

 

[A.P Haux]

Never knew maharaja's used to play cricket and were so mean and poor at the game. Pretty helpful draft. Thanks!

 

[Bevab]

Never knew maharaja's used to play cricket and were so mean and poor at the game. Pretty helpful draft. Thanks!

Not all of them were so poor though. The Nawabs of Pataudi were quite good batsmen, with the senior Nawab being good enough to play for England and the junior Tiger Pataudi being one of the greatest Indian captains, leading India to it’s first overseas victory.

 

[Yorkshireman]

Someone draft the whole tweaking ashes 2019 england squad please.

 

[A.P Haux]

Someone draft the whole tweaking ashes 2019 england squad please.

Agreed

 

[VC the slogger]

​

The younger brother of India's first Test captain, CS Nayudu was a gifted leg spinning all-rounder in the Ranji Trophy during a lengthy first-class career stretching from 1931/32 to 1960/61, where he scored 2575 runs at 30.20 with 4 centuries and claimed 295 wickets at 23.49 from 56 Ranji matches; and 5786 runs at 23.90 to go alongside 647 wickets at 26.54 with 50 five-fers and 13 match ten-fers from 174 first-class matches overall, playing for as many as nine state teams in total. Some of his more notable feats included becoming the first player to claim more than 40 wickets in a Ranji season in 1942/43, where he claimed a ridiculous 40 wickets at 12.85 from just 4 matches. This was followed by another impressive haul of 33 wickets at 23.93 in 1944/45 playing for Holkar, for whom he bowled a record 917 balls i.e 152.5 overs whilst claiming 11 wickets (6/153 off 64.5 overs in the first innings & 5 for 275 off 88 overs in the second) during the run-scoring orgy that was the 1944/45 final against Mumbai, where his team lost by a 374-run margin despite posting totals of 360 and 492 in the match, with Mumbai posting a gargantuan second innings total of 764 on the back of Vijay Merchant's 278. Decent enough figures perhaps suggesting an all-rounder capable of excelling at Test level? If anything one couldn't have been further off the mark.

He showed a great deal of promise on his Test debut against England in 1934, where he scored an attacking 36 in the first innings and later played a crucial hand scoring 15 runs in over 2 hours in the second innings to help India bat time, thereby staving off defeat in the process against Douglas Jardine's Englishmen. What few realized at the time was that this would be his highest Test score, as his Test career went from one awful performance to the next despite all his impressive feats at domestic level, reaching it's nadir during India's 1947/48 tour of Australia where he scored 18 runs at 4.50 from 7 innings and conceded at a rate of 4.87 per over with the ball without picking a single wicket throughout a hugely one-sided Test series that saw India outclassed 4-0 by Don Bradman's 'Invincibles'. Overall, he managed just 147 runs at an average of 9.18 with the bat and claimed 2 wickets at an average of 179.50 with the ball at an economy rate of 4.12 from 11 matches over the course of an 18-year Test career between 1934 and 1952, not once threatening to either score a half-century or pick a five-wicket haul. Perhaps a lot of this could be attributed to the fact that he played most of his Tests overseas in England and Australia, where he was handled somewhat poorly by the various captains he played under who never once trusted him to bowl more than 17 overs in an innings, thereby greatly underutilizing his bowling which was easily his strongest suit. But even more baffling was why the Indian selectors kept persisting with him for so many years despite his failures whilst ignoring several other potential Test candidates such as Bhausaheb Nimbalkar and AG Ram Singh. There have been several bad all-rounders in Test cricket, but few can boast such godawful statistics with both bat and ball, and still claim to have enjoyed a career spanning almost two decades.

VC's XI

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7. Maharajah of Vizianagram
8. CS Nayudu
9.
10.
11

@CerealKiller​

 

[CerealKiller]

My second pick is Devon Smith, the West Indian opener. He made his domestic debut in 1999, and for his first 3 seasons his average didn't surpass 25. For some reason he got selected for West Indies A, and performed miserably in his solitary outing. In his next two seasons, however, he did excellently, earning a Test call-up in 2003 against Australia. What followed was a stop-start international career, with Smith actually being consistent, in not scoring too many runs. He got dropped, scored some runs in domestic, got recalled, and the cycle started again. He finished with 1593 runs at 24.50, playing a mind boggling 38 Test matches, with the last one coming in 2018.

@Bevab