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Sri Lanka's first Test captain Bandula Warnapura passes away
October 18 2021
Warnapura captained Sri Lanka in their first Test against England in 1982.
Bandula Warnapura, who led Sri Lanka in their maiden Test, passed away on Monday (October 18) while receiving treatment in a private hospital. The 68-year-old played four Tests and 12 ODIs for his country.
"Sri Lanka Cricket is deeply saddened to learn of the passing away of Bandula Warnapura, Sri Lanka's first Test captain," the release said. "We wish to express our condolences to the family at this difficult time on behalf of Sri Lanka's cricketing fraternity," the release added.
The former opener made his ODI debut in the 1975 World Cup game against the West Indies at Old Trafford. In his next game, he scored a brisk 39-ball 31 against the fearsome pace pair of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson. In the very next World Cup in 1979, he captained Sri Lanka to a famous victory against India. He notched up his highest ODI score of 77 versus Pakistan in the 1981-82 season but it went in vain as Sri Lanka slipped to an eight-wicket loss.
Warnapura went on to captain Sri Lanka in their first-ever Test versus England in Colombo in 1982. He faced Sri Lanka's first delivery and scored their first run in Test cricket. In that game, he also achieved the rare record of opening the batting and opening the bowling (second innings) in the same Test match. Warnapura soon decided to tour South Africa with the rebel side.
The 68-year-old made his first-class debut against the Indian Universities in 1970. The turning point of his first-class career came during the 1973-74 season when he compiled 154 against Pakistan Under-25. During that season, he also accumulated a fine 92 versus a Pakistan XI in a four-day game. The Pakistan XI had Test match bowlers like Asif Masood, Saleem Altaf and Intikhab Alam.
After retiring from the game, he served as the coach of the Sri Lankan set-up and then went on to become the Director of Coaching.
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https://www.cricbuzz.com/cricket-news/119641/former-australia-spinner-peter-philpott-passes-away-cricbuzzcom
3rd oz cricketer passes away in last 72 hours
Former Australia legspinner and coach Peter Philpott has died at the age of 86 after a long battle with illness.
Philpott's eight Tests came in the span of less than a year from March 1965 to January 1966. In a five-Test series against West Indies he took 18 wickets then he claimed his career-best 5 for 90 at the start of the 1965-66 Ashes series before being dropped after two more matches.
Overall in first-class cricket, where he played for New South Wales, he claimed 245 wickets at 30.31. He captained NSW during the 1963-64 and 1964-65 Sheffield Shield seasons. He also averaged 31.36 with the bat.
Philpott went on to become a notable coach, including with Australia during the 1981 Ashes, with stints at NSW, South Australia,Philpott retired at the age of 31 before turning into a coach. He has had stints at NSW, South Australia, Yorkshire, Surrey, Manly, Mosman and
SRI LANKA. Earlier in the week, Australia also lost former Test cricketers Alan Davidson and Ashley Mallett.
Alan Dividson Passes away
https://m.cricbuzz.com/cricket-news/119623/australian-great-alan-davidson-passes-away-at-92
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Australian great Alan Davidson passes away at 92
Oct 30, 2021
Davidson played 44 Tests for Australia.
Australian legend Alan Davidson has passed away at the age of 92, surrounded by his family on Saturday (October 30).
The bowling allrounder, who made his Test debut against England in 1953, represented Australia 44 times in the longest format. The left-arm pacer had finished his career with a stunning average of 20.53, having picked up 186 wickets. His career-best figures of 7/93 came against India in 1959.
Davidson was a handy batsman as well, registering five vital half-centuries in his career, including the 80 he hit in the first ever tied Test match in 1960 against West Indies. In the same game, he had also picked up 11 wickets.
Post retirement, Davidson ventured into administration and had served as the president of Cricket New South Wales for 33 years and was also an Australian selector between 1979 and 1984.
He was made a member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1964 and awarded the order of Australia (AM) in 1987. Davidson was also inducted into the ICC Hall of Fame in 2011.
"Alan Davidson's passing is a sad moment for Australian cricket and for cricket across the world," Richard Freudenstein, Cricket Australia Chair said. "Alan was a colossal figure in our game, not only as one of the finest players to have represented Australia and NSW, but for the positive influence he exerted across the game as an administrator, mentor and benefactor.
"The tremendous skill and the boundless spirit with which Alan embraced cricket and life embodied everything that is great about the game. He will remain a shining example for every player who follows in his footsteps."
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Another Great from Australia passes Away
https://m.cricbuzz.com/cricket-news/119610/ashley-mallett-passes-away-at-76
Mallett too good in India During i think
Early 70's
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Ashley Mallett passes away at 76
October 29 2021
Australia's spin bowling legend featured in 32 Tests and 9 ODIs for the national side
Australia's spin-bowling legend Ashley Mallett passed away on Friday at the age of 76, after battling cancer for a long time.
Mallett, who featured in 38 Tests for Australia, picked 132 wickets at an average of 29.84. His last Test appearance came against England at Lord's in 1980. Mallett also played nine ODIs.
Mallett's best bowling figures in Tests - 8 for 59 - came against Pakistan in December of 1972 in his home ground in Adelaide, that helped his side knock over the visitors cheaply and earn a big victory by an innings and 114 runs.
Another illustrious feather to his cap is his tally of 28 wickets on the tour of India in 1969-70, when Bill Lawry's Australia downed the hosts to secure the series 3-1. Mallett also had a fine home Ashes series in 1974-75, snaring 17 wickets.
The tall off-spinner retired from the sport in 1976-77, but made a comeback in Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket. That prompted him to even return to Test cricket for Australia in 1980, but it didn't last long. After retirement, Mallett dabbled in the world of commentary and cricket journalism, and has also been a spin bowling consultant.
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Ted Dexter, the old-fashioned modernist
The former England batter and captain was a man out of sync with his times in more ways than one
Ted Dexter, the last great amateur cricketer to play for England, has died, aged 86.
An embodiment of a passing age, Dexter's majestic batting thrilled crowds, and his aristocratic manner captivated the media as well as providing a touch of glamour for a country that was uncertain of its place in the world. Debonair, majestic against fast bowling, particularly when making full use of his tall, athletic frame to drive commandingly off the back foot, and rich enough to live life pretty much as he pleased, his career spanned a changing world.
As the 1950s ended, Britain was on the cusp of change as conservatism and tradition came under challenge. In the same year that Dexter made his Test debut, 1958, attempts to end the distinction between amateur and professional failed, but shortly after he captained England for the first time, three years later, it passed into history.
Dexter played 62 Tests for England between 1958 and 1968, the last two - entirely unexpectedly - coming after a three-year absence because of a serious leg injury suffered in a bizarre car accident. His average of 47.89 was exceeded, at the time of his passing, by only 12 England batters. He led England in more than half of his Tests, and Richie Benaud, an Australian adversary as captain, was just one prominent player to regard him as a "great".
But cricket was not enough to detain a man who, for all his detached air, possessed an agile mind. Dexter was too successful at his chosen sport - and possessed too many theories about its technique and its need for modernisation - to be fairly described a cricketing dilettante. But he revelled in many other pursuits, all of them rivals for his attention even with the cricket season at its height.
Dexter was an innovative captain, to the point that many thought that he often experimented on the field out of boredom.
He was a fine amateur golfer and would once have qualified for the Open Championship had a six-foot putt on the final hole of his last qualifying round dropped in. He flew a private jet and his love for gambling - for a time at least more accurately described as an addiction - led him into ownership of racehorses and greyhounds. He even stood for parliament for the Conservatives, for an unwinnable seat in Cardiff South East in 1964, finishing second to James Callaghan, who was to become a Labour prime minister. In one speech, Dexter allegedly suggested that Labour-voting households could be identified by their "grubby lace curtains and unwashed milk bottles on the doorstep". Having sampled a very different world, he immediately announced his political retirement.
To depict Dexter as a man out of his time is accurate, but not merely in the way one might assume. A throwback to an amateur age, he might increasingly have seemed, but his analysis of cricket's place in the world was often decades ahead. Dexter had championed one-day cricket before the arrival of the Gillette Cup (initially introduced as a 65-over competition in 1963), he argued for a one-day league, for England central contracts, and his advocacy of four-day Championship cricket began more than two decades before county cricket took the plunge.
Dexter was born in Milan, Italy, where his father, Ralph, had set up an underwriting agency. He was one of three brothers and had three half-sisters from a previous marriage of his mother, Elise. His education was a privileged one: three prep schools, one each in Scotland, Wales and England; Radley College, where he was head boy and where Ivor Gilliat, the cricket master, first conferred on him the nickname of "Lord Edward" in reference to a certain hauteur; and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he began two degrees but finished neither, being too consumed with sport and other leisure pursuits to give much attention to his studies. "I was to distinguish myself by failing to attend one lecture all the time I was there," he was to observe later. There were also two years of National Service, including a posting to what was then Malaya as a second lieutenant, which he found largely boring.
game in his first season at Cambridge came against Sussex when he deposited Robin Marlar, Sussex's amateur captain, who was later to become a trenchant cricket correspondent, for a mighty straight six. Marlar arranged for him to play a few games for Sussex once term ended but Dexter pulled out - a long-term relationship had recently ended, and as he put it years later, he had become obsessed by a girl in Copenhagen. But his Cambridge batting exploits soon attracted England's attention. They tried to pick him in 1957 but he was injured. The following season, he made a half-century on debut in an England innings win against New Zealand at Old Trafford, but shortly before he went out to bat, he had learned of his omission from the Ashes party in favour of Raman Subba Row.
An injury crisis soon led to an SOS for Dexter, who was found in temporary employment in Paris, and felt obliged to announce his engagement to Susan Longfield, a fashion model, before making the journey. There began a debilitating five-day journey, affected by fog, technical trouble for a plane in Bahrain, and his own throat infection. Unsurprisingly, he began his first tour as 12th man, a job for which he was entirely unsuited; in the lunch interval, he preferred joining oyster parties rather than attending to his team-mates' needs. He failed in both his Tests as England lost 4-0 but responded with 141 against New Zealand in Christchurch. Largely ignored by England the following summer, and with his wife's career forging ahead, his gambling ran out of control. "I started on the road to near ruin," he recalled in Alan Lee's biography Lord Ted: The Dexter Enigma.
His worth remained under question when he toured the West Indies in 1960, before an unbeaten 136 in the first Test in Barbados stilled the argument. But it was the next Test, in Port-of-Spain, that lives in cricket history. The grandeur of Dexter's strokeplay in making 77 and defying the pace of Wes Hall was regarded by many as one of his finest Test innings. When Dexter ran out Charran Singh on the third afternoon, simmering racial tension erupted and tear gas was employed. He had a fine tour and Wisden was somewhat desirous of naming him a Cricketer of the Year. "No cricketer since the war has so captured the imagination," Marlar said of his county colleague.
As Sussex captain, a role he fulfilled until 1965, Dexter was initially ambitious to put his ideas into practice, and consecutive Gillette Cup wins in the competition's first two years had much to do with his innovative leadership. He proved himself an independent thinker and a good listener but a poor communicator, which his friends put down to shyness. He was more self-critical than they were, accepting that "aloof" might be a fair description. Team-mates often suspected he devised a theory in the field for no better reason than boredom. He was not a captain to let a game drift, and the less important the game, the more his experimentation was liable to become self-indulgent. On Derby day one year, a radio was brought out onto the field and a delayed start contributed to what went down into folklore as one of the longest tea breaks in county cricket history.
Dexter played in four Test series against Australia and failed to win one, but if his manner was viewed suspiciously in that country, his talent gained considerable respect from the moment he made 180 in the first Test at Edgbaston in 1961.
After the Ashes were lost and the captain, Peter May, had retired, Dexter took over the captaincy of a weakened tour party for a near five-month tour to India (where England lost a Test series for the first time), Pakistan and Sri Lanka, registering his sole Test double-hundred in Karachi late in the tour, by which time the wish to return home had permeated the entire party. He retained the captaincy role for an even longer tour in Australia in 1962-63 - proud of a victory in Melbourne, he rated his 52 as England pulled off a run chase on the final day as the finest innings of his career, a typically idiosyncratic choice. Others preferred to present his 70 from 75 balls against West Indies in the 1963 Lord's Test as his finest moment, when he dismissed Hall and Griffith from his presence. Hall was a fast bowler at the peak of his powers, and Dexter had condemned Charlie Griffith as a chucker: it was potent stuff. A famous Test was saved with England nine down and Colin Cowdrey batting with his broken left arm in a sling.
But his remoteness aggravated social tensions. "I liked the man a lot and he could bat beautifully, but he was no captain of England - he had more theories than Darwin," Fred Trueman chuntered during the 1962-63 Ashes defeat. Predictably, they were to clash again in Dexter's last series as captain - the 1964 Ashes series - when he refused to give Trueman the field he wanted to bounce out Peter Burge and Trueman bowled short all the same. England lost the series 1-0, and Dexter's final Test as captain coincided with Trueman getting to the 300-Test-wicket mark.
David Gower and Ted Dexter take a lap around the ground as part of the celebrations to mark Edgbaston's 50th Test in August 2017 Getty Images
Calamity then struck midway through the summer of 1965. Then 30, Dexter had spent the day at Newbury races, but his car ran out of petrol on a roundabout below Chiswick flyover in London. Trying to push the car off the road, he lost control and his leg was badly broken. Thanks to a boy passing on a bicycle, an ambulance was called and he underwent an operation later that night. That seemed that, but three years later he came out of retirement for Sussex and - perhaps the last throw of the dice for the amateur cricketer - England unsuccessfully recalled him for two Ashes Tests.
After his retirement Dexter dabbled in public relations (lacking an ability or even desire to engage in mass communication, he hardly seemed the sort for it), as a newspaper cricket pundit, and spent 1978 on the European amateur golf circuit - the year he missed the cut for the Open by the lip of the 18th hole. That he would also serve as president of MCC was almost a given, but he showed independent thought there too, championing women's equality.
There were five years, too, in cricket administration when he became chairman of selectors with England's fortunes at a low ebb in 1988. He again ached to modernise thinking, introducing specialist coaches, overseas tours for England A and Under-19s, and demanding that players reported two days before a game. But impatience with England's failings was widespread, and although Dexter proved more engaging than some who had gone before, his attempts to deal with the media could seem both vague and insouciant, and as such, were doomed to failure. Whether it was explaining away a defeat by suggesting, in mock astrologer's terminology, that "Venus was in juxtaposition to somewhere else", announcing a study into Kolkata's smog levels, or revealing, straight-faced, that there would be an enquiry into facial hair, his mild eccentricities were easily lampooned and did him no favours. He retired again, hurt rather than resentful, a little unfulfilled and not entirely understood.
Barry Jarman
RIP
Former Australia captain Barry Jarman dies aged 84
July 18 202
As a match referee, Jarman took the call to abandon the 1998 Jamaica Test between England and West Indies.
Former Australia Test captain Barry Jarman has passed away aged 84 with an illness. The stocky wicketkeeper played 19 Test matches for the country between 1959 and 1969 and was a mainstay of the South Australia side, for whom he played the bulk of his 191 first class appearances across 13 seasons.
Jarman made his Test debut in Kanpur during the tour of India in 1959. However, his appearances in the white flannes of Australia were sporadic given the selectors' preference for Queensland stumper Wally Grout. However, Jarman toured regularly as Grout's understudy and was an important voice in the dressing room.
It was in the 1967-68 season that Jarman became a regular in the side. On that winter Ashes tour of England, he was even named captain for the Headingley Test after Bill Lawry missed out due to injury. Incidentally, Tom Graveney too filled in as skipper for the regular England captain Colin Cowdrey.
Jarman played his 19th and last Test match at his home ground in Adelaide against West Indies before calling time on his international career, coinciding with the emergence of the prodigious Rod Marsh. He would then go on to join the ICC as a match referee and oversaw 25 Tests and 28 ODIs until 2001. Jarman took the call to abandon the 1998 Jamaica Test between England and West Indies due to a dangerous pitch.
He also officiated in the Centurion Test between South Africa and England that saw two declarations at 0 for 0 with Hansie Cronje later confirming that he'd been influenced by bookies to get a result from a rain-affected game. Jarman, however, said he had not been aware of any devious undertones to that game.
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Sir Everton Weekes passes away aged 95
July 01 2020
The West Indies legend played 48 Tests and scored 4455 runs at an average of 58.61, with 15 centuries to his name
Sir Everton Weekes, the legendary West Indies cricketer, has passed away aged 95 after prolonged illness at his Christ Church home in Barbados. Weekes played 48 Tests and scored 4455 runs at an average of 58.62 with 15 centuries to his name.
Weekes had suffered a heart attack in June last year and had been keeping ill since then.
He made his debut against England in 1947-48 and while he didn't do anything remarkable in that match, he soon delivered on his early promise with five consecutive centuries - one against England and four against India - later that year. He could have gone on to notch up his sixth consecutive ton, but a questionable run-out decision in Madras resulted in him losing his wicket for 90. Some newspapers even carried the headline: "Weekes finally fails - out for 90."
Windies Cricket
Our hearts are heavy as we mourn the loss of an icon. A legend, our hero, Sir Everton Weekes. Our condolences go out to his family, friends and many fans around the world. May he rest in peace. ??
06:42 PM • Jul 07, 2020
Weekes was one of "The Three Ws" of the West Indies cricket team along with Frank Worrell and Clyde Walcot, who in many ways revamped the landscape of the game with their cricketing skills. The short and stocky Weekes picked the length early -- his feet, his bat and his body seemed to instinctively know where they should be. By getting into near-perfect position and with perfect balance, he seemed to have more than a few options to every delivery that he faced. Cricket pundits in Australia at the time even reckoned that, in terms of style, Weekes was the closest to Sir Don Bradman.
Weekes left school at the age of 14 to focus on cricket and football. He was also part of the Barbados regiment and made his first-class debut for Barbados against Trinidad and Tobago at Port of Spain in February 1945. In his 152 first-class appearances, he made 12010 runs at an average of 55.34 and bagged 36 tons.
After walking into retirement life, Weekes worked as a commentator and played a key role in helping out young players through the ranks. He also served as a match-referee in three ODIs in the India-Sri Lanka series in 1994. He was knighted in 1995.
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