Graeme Hick

Graeme Ashley Hick (born 23 May 1966) is a Zimbabwean-born former England cricketer who played 65 Test matches and 120 One Day Internationals for England.

He was born in Rhodesia, and as a young man played international cricket for Zimbabwe.

He was also more of a bowler than a batsman, but in 1979 he began to make big scores regularly, averaging 185 for the school side.

He suffered from a mild form of meningitis in 1980, but he nevertheless progressed to become captain of the national Junior Schools team, and before long to play for the Senior Schools side.

He attended Prince Edward School.

Aged just 16, Hick played three minor one-day games for Zimbabwe Colts and Zimbabwe Country Districts against Young Australia in 1982–83.

He had no success with the bat, being dismissed for 0, 2 and 1, although he did bowl Dean Jones in the second match at Mutare.

Hick was included in the Zimbabwean squad for the 1983 World Cup, the youngest player ever to achieve such a status,

but was not selected to play in the tournament.

The following Zimbabwean season, on 7 October 1983, Hick made his first-class debut for Zimbabwe against Young West Indies at Harare.

Coming in at number eight in the first innings, he hit 28 not out to help set up a narrow three-wicket victory.

Eight days later Hick made his List A debut against the same opponents, batting one place lower still and making 16* in a game decided (in Zimbabwe's favour) on run rate.

On 7 December 1983, Hick took his maiden first-class wicket, bowling Sri Lanka Test batsman Susil Fernando while playing for Zimbabwe against a Sri Lanka Board President's XI.

Four days later, Hick made his maiden first-class fifty when he scored 57 against a Sri Lankan XI, and in March 1984 he achieved the same in a one-day match by hitting 62* against Young India – a performance for which he was named Man of the Match for the first time.

Looking back on this period two decades later, Steve Waugh considered that at 18 Hick was as good a player as anyone of that age in the history of cricket.

In 1984, Hick came to England on a scholarship from the Zimbabwe Cricket Union.

For Worcestershire's Second XI he was impressive: he twice took five wickets in an innings, and a prolific sequence of 195, 0, 170 and 186 gained him a first-team debut against Surrey in the last match of the 1984 County Championship.

Worcestershire declared in their first innings, and Hick did not get to bat, but in the second – coming in at nine – he made 82*.

He also played club cricket for Kidderminster in the Birmingham League.

He hit 1,234 runs for the club that year, a Kidderminster record.

Hick spent the winter playing for Zimbabwe, his highest scores being 95 and 88 in separate matches against Young New Zealand.

Hick's good year in 1984 encouraged him to continue playing in England,

and in the English summer that followed, Zimbabwe toured England, and Hick played both for them and for his county.

He enjoyed a successful season, ending with a batting average of 52.70, and scoring his first century: 230 for the Zimbabweans against Oxford University.

This was to be the first of six successive English seasons in which Hick averaged more than fifty in first-class cricket.

Playing that winter in Zimbabwe, he made 309 in under seven hours in a minor match against Ireland, the highest score ever made in any form of cricket for either Zimbabwe or its predecessor Rhodesia.

The 1986 English season was the first year in which Hick was notably successful in the one-day game: he hit 889 List A runs that year at an average slightly over forty.

He is the only cricketer who scored first-class triple hundreds in three different decades (1988, 1997 and 2002).

He is the second highest run scorer of all time after Graham Gooch, and the second highest century scorer after Jack Hobbs.

Despite these achievements, he is commonly held to have underachieved in international cricket, a view based on comparison of Hick's overall first-class batting average of 52.23 vis-à-vis his Test average of 31.32.

At one time Hick's bowling was a significant force, and his off-spin claimed more than 200 first-class wickets.

Hick was granted a benefit season by Worcestershire in 1999, which raised over £345,000;

However, after 2001 he rarely bowled, and took only one first-class and two List A wickets; indeed, after the 2004 season he did not bowl a single ball in either form of the game.

Throughout his career he was an outstanding slip fielder: Gooch wrote in his autobiography that his ideal slip cordon would comprise Mark Taylor, Ian Botham and Hick.

he was also awarded a testimonial in 2006.

He played English county cricket for Worcestershire for his entire English domestic career, a period of well over twenty years, and in 2008 surpassed Graham Gooch's record for the most matches in all forms of the game combined.

He scored more than 40,000 first-class runs, mostly from number three in the order, and he is one of only three players to have passed 20,000 runs in List A cricket (Graham Gooch and Sachin Tendulkar are the others) and is one of only twenty-five players to have scored 100 centuries in first-class cricket.

Hick retired from county cricket at the end of the 2008 season, to take up a coaching post at Malvern College.

For the remaining part of the season, he joined Chandigarh Lions of the Indian Cricket League.

Born in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe) into a tobacco-farming family, Hick was at first more interested in hockey than cricket, and indeed went on to play for the national schools hockey team.