THE GOOGLY: Matt Prior hit out at a lack of ambition… but let’s celebrate county cricket’s plodders

HUW TURBERVILL: You are never going to get 200 county cricketers all banging down the selectors’ doors simultaneously

The world needs plodders… discuss!

I had mixed feelings when Matt Prior recently hit out at county cricketers who lack drive.

“There are too many players floating around in county cricket with very little ambition,” Prior told the BBC. It was not as scathing as Kevin Pietersen’s comments in 2015, when he talked about “all the muppets who are on £18 grand, £15 grand” in our domestic game, but it was still a bold call…

On the one hand, one has to agree with him; if there are too many players like that, then England teams will suffer (especially if you factor in all the players who are now deserting red-ball cricket).

On the other, surely every walk of life has people like that… and every walk of life needs people like that, even…

It's a very British thing to celebrate the people who make up the numbers.

I recall Kent’s Mark Benson’s one and only Test appearance in 1986. It was against India at Edgbaston. He scored a distinctly respectable 21 and 30, and I spent the next 27 years thinking he had been hard done by. Until I interviewed him.

^{Alan Wells, right}

Had he been badly treated, I asked him? “God no!” he told me. “There were some good openers about. Graham Gooch had one slot most of the time, and then there was Chris Broad, Tim Robinson, Wayne Larkins, Martyn Moxon, Graeme Fowler, Kim Barnett and Gehan Mendis.”

I was taken aback by what I perceived to be his lack of ambition, I must admit. But then I figured… Raised in Lagos, Ghana, Benson did not start playing cricket until he was 12/13. 

To then go on and represent his country (not to mention being a fantastic performer for Kent, with 99 half- and 48 first-class centuries) was a phenomenal achievement.

There was also the case of Sussex stalwart Alan Wells.

He waited 14 years for his Test debut. It was against West Indies at The Oval in 1995. I was there with my mum. Two proud Sussex fans. First ball – delivered by Curtly Ambrose – he just helpfully guided, via his thigh pad, a back-of-length ball into the hands of Sherwin Campbell at short-leg. It was surreal, sad, anticlimactic and tragicomic all rolled into one.

He said he had thought at the time: “This can’t be right, I’ve waited 15 years for this to get out first ball.  I’d never got out like that in my life and if I had been able to rewind I wouldn’t have got out like that again.”

He made three not out in the second innings and was stuck on one cap forever.

^{Mark Benson}

I read a quote from him at the time saying he was proud of his cap, however, and would sleep with it under his pillow.

He is not quite as forgiving now as he was then, saying: “I feel I should have had more of a chance. Being one of the leading run-scorers in county cricket for five years I had hoped to get my debut before the age of 33.”

He was undoubtedly unlucky to win only one Test cap, but was he good enough to win stacks? Who knows.

Identifying cricketers is not an exact science. Duncan Fletcher picked Michael Vaughan and Marcus Trescothick on the back of modest county records, and no one really expected Dawid Malan to have such an excellent Ashes series this winter.

My point is that there are some players who win one cap, some 11, some 111. And there are plenty who never win any at all, or even come close. There is a still a place for them, though.

You are never going to get 200 county cricketers all banging down the selectors’ doors simultaneously. The England wannabes still need people to bat against, or bowl at… County cricket has some superb players who have not won full international honours. Chris Nash. James Hildreth. Darren Stevens. Steven Croft. And so on.

It is uncertain if Benson and Wells would be picked now. Selectors chop and change much less. What is certain, though, is that if they were picked, they would be given an extended run. The England selectors at the time were notorious for expanding the one-cap-wonder club. There was also Andy Lloyd, Arnie Sidebottom, John Stephenson, Paul Terry and James Whitaker to name a handful.

As the current chairman of selectors, Whitaker will know how Mason Crane would feel if he was left in that club. At least he could swap notes with Scott Borthwick, I suppose.