Re: George Headley

On Mon, 6 Oct 2003 19:02:16 +0100, "DDEckerslyke"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> tapped the keyboard and brought forth:


>Thanks. I came across the following from nearly ten years ago in which the
>correspondent laments the omission of Headley from several all time lists.
>He then writes a short biography. Seems this isn't a new phenomenon.
>
>http://tinyurl.com/pwpm

The difficulty with Headley is that he was a world-class player in a
very weak team. It''s not far different from the idea of Tendulkar
playing for Bangladesh: would anyone believe that this bloke getting
all the runs was actualy any good?

And because English teams touring the Caribbean before WW2 were not
the strongest possible sides, there has to be some question as to
whether Headley would have been able to do as well as he did against
the top bowling. Many people believe that he could have done - he got
a century in each innings at Lord's against a full-strength English
team, so the man could certainly play a bit.

WI didn't play all that many matches in his time and he didn't get all
that much opportunity to play outside the Caribbean, and the war ate
half his career, so he didn't have the impact that Hammond or Bradman
had in the same era. Which has the further consequence that he figures
in few lists of players with high aggregates, as he didn't play enough
matches to reach the cutoffs for most modern lists.

I think that if he'd been English or Australian, he'd have had the
same problem as Hammond, that of being an SOB.

Cheers,

Mike