Sport

Sad tale of shattered dreams

Telegraph

By Mike Atherton
(Filed: 03/10/2004)

After Wayne Rooney's remarkable debut for Manchester United last week, his surrogate parent for the next few years, Sir Alex Ferguson, said that he wanted to make Rooney "as ordinary as possible". It seemed a strange comment in the circumstances because, on the pitch, Rooney is as extraordinary as it is possible to be. Ferguson, though, is experienced enough to be aware of his responsibilities towards Rooney off the pitch: that is, to get him to lead as ordinary a life as is possible in order that he may truly fulfil his extraordinary talent.

Many an unfulfilled sportsman knows about the hurdles that confront precocious talent; obstacles that if not successfully overcome almost inevitably result in some rueful head-shaking at the end of it all and that damning question 'what if?' Two such cricketers, albeit neither of them as talented as United's wunderkind, may have nodded knowingly this week when Ferguson made his pitch for normality.

Alex Tudor and Chris Schofield, both capped by England at 21 amid much ballyhoo, were released by their respective counties, Surrey and Lancashire. The news received little attention, partly because of the tedium that is Zimbabwe and partly because both have slipped so far away from the cricketing limelight. Between them, they played just four championship matches this year.

Neither is at the end of his career: Tudor is just 26 and Schofield a year younger and both are looking to start afresh at another county. Yet their release by counties who had nurtured them, Tudor after winning 10 Test caps and Schofield just two, is a reminder of just how fickle sport can be. Right now they'll be feeling more Mickey Rooney than Wayne.

Of the two, Tudor made more of an impact at international level. He gave the Australians such a hurry-up on his debut at Perth on the 1998-99 Ashes tour that it was possible to believe that England had discovered a fast bowler to lead the attack for years to come. He could bat, too, as he demonstrated during the first Test of the following summer against New Zealand when he was left stranded on 99 at the moment of victory.

His driving through the off side that day off the back foot left no doubt as to the influence of his father's Caribbean roots: definitely more Kensington, Barbados, than Kennington, London.

If Tudor's selection was justified by talent and promise and by the fact that England have often taken a chance on raw fast bowlers to Australia, Schofield's promotion, after fewer than 20 first-class matches, was harder to understand. Ultimately, it did him no favours at all. Schofield was a recipient of one of the first batch of 11 central contracts handed out by the ECB in 2000: it remains one of the few errors of judgment by Duncan Fletcher.

Schofield had some ability: he gave the ball a decent rip, had a certain amount of instinctive flair with the bat and was an athletic mover in the field. He was, however, as green as grass. There were fundamental errors in his bowling technique and, at 21, he was one of the most immature cricketers that I have come across. Those Test matches in the cool conditions of May 2000 were asking too much of him, and unsurprisingly his international leg-spinning career lasted just 18 wicketless overs.

To analyse why they failed to kick on is to see where their stories start to diverge. Tudor's failings seem more bad luck than bad judgment, suffering as he has from a persistent and recurrent hip injury. The whispers that Tudor is a soft slacker may have more to do with racial stereotyping than reality. In my experience Tudor was a committed professional.

Fast bowling is both hard work and an unnatural process for the body, and some bodies are just not made for bowling fast for long periods. Craig White fitted into the same category. With a year left to run on his contract, Surrey simply lost patience with a player who had taken only 84 championship wickets in the past four years, and who was one of the highest-paid players at the club.

Schofield's problems are more complex. His premature promotion both increased expectations and added pressure at an unnecessarily early stage. It deluded him into thinking that he had made it and that his game was at the finishing post rather than starting stalls. To watch him bowl this year was to see a cricketer with the same technical flaws of four years ago: an action that is open-chested with little use of the front arm so that spin is imparted from the wrist and fingers alone with no body action to give it impetus.

Schofield felt that too few people understood the peculiarities of leg-spin. It is true that there is precious little knowledge around the English circuit. But, over time, he had the help of former Australian Test leg-spinners Peter Philpott and Peter Sleep. Ultimately, a professional cricketer must take responsibility for his own career and Schofield's failure thus far highlights the old adage that nothing is achieved in sport without hard work.

Their shortcomings are especially sad because English cricket stood to gain much from their success. Tudor is from inner-city London and of Caribbean extraction, two areas that English cricket is failing to penetrate. A decade ago there were 33 English-qualified players of Caribbean descent. This year that number was down to 18. Willesden High School, the only state school in recent times to have produced two England cricketers - Chris Lewis and Phillip DeFreitas - no longer even plays the game. Whereas the England football team boasted five Anglo-Caribbean players throughout Euro 2004, the last four non-white players to represent England at cricket are all of Asian background. Tudor would have been a fine role model to halt this decline.

Schofield's failure means that the search for an English leg-spinner goes on. If you disregard the influence of overseas leg-spinners like Mushtaq Ahmed, Intikhab Alam and Bruce Dooland, the last English wrist-spinner to have a serious impact on our game, and internationally, remains Doug Wright, six decades ago. And yet, with warmer, drier summers, covered pitches filled with hard Surrey and Ongar loams the conditions are now ripe for a leg-spinning revival in English cricket. Like Ian Salisbury before him, it seems Schofield will not be the man in the vanguard of this movement.

It is to be hoped that both will get a chance with another county. Mark Butcher, Surrey's new captain, said he was sorry to see Tudor go since he was "one of the most talented players at the club". Surely too talented not to be given a chance to let those injuries clear up. If you ignore the expectations raised by Schofield's England call-up and think of him as an inexperienced young cricketer then his career figures - average 29.91 with the bat and 171 wickets at 31.26 with the ball - look worthy of some investment of faith. He should be regarded as a batsman who bowls rather than the other way around.

It would be deeply ironic, given the numbers of foreign players in the English game, if there were no room for these two home-grown players. Deeply sad, too: there is nothing worse in sport than shattered hopes and unfulfilled dreams.

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