Quote: The Angry Pirate "
Yes, Fairbrother was a favourite of mine.....His brief Test career was disappointing, though I do recall him hitting a gritty 70 or 80 odd on a tour of India in 1992/93 when we got battered 3-0.'"
That 92/93 tour summed up the inconsistent selection policies of the day.
When we'd got thrashed in the 1989 Ashes, and a lot of the players got Test bans for signing up for Gatting's rebel tour of SA, all the talk had been of using this opportunity to rebuild the England team with the obviously good young talent coming through, Graham Gooch's "young lions" had shaped up pretty well against a top W Indies team that winter. They also set up the England A side as a touring team to groom some players for the full Test team. But over the next few years, gradually they started turning back the clock again, Gower got recalled, we had ageing guys like Wayne Larkins and Eddie Hemmings having short term spells in the team.
By 1992 there was a good group of young players emerging in the county game, Graham Thorpe, Dominic Cork, Mark Ilott, and David Millns. These guys looked well worth a shot in the Test team. But then ICC announced that all the players who had gone on Gattings rebel tour had their bans revoked so instead of the younger players it was straight back to Gatting, John Emburey and Paul Jarvis for the India tour. They recalled Neil Foster against the Aussies the next summer as well.
The other really strange thing at this time was that whilst the young lads who looked like they had real talent, sat in the 'A' team for years (and in the case of Millns, never got a call up), there were a lot of one off selections of county pros in their late 20s, who had 'earned themselves a shot', and were given a token game or two. Richard Blakey was taken as the keeper for that India tour, and was miles out of his depth. Paul Taylor from Northants was another very random selection. There was an odd situation with Taylor a couple of years later, when Atherton was captain, when Atherton and Illingworth had a big fall out because Illingworth insisted on recalling Taylor (a steady county bowler but never a Test bowler) instead of Fraser who Atherton wanted....so Atherton just refused to bowl him more than a handful of overs and effectively played with 3 front line bowlers, so Illingworth had to drop him for the next Test because he knew Atherton wouldn't use him! But he wouldn't pick Fraser because that would have been backing down to Atherton, so instead he picked Gough (which was one of Illingworth's good picks).
The odd thing about picking the older county pros who'd 'earned a shot', was that whilst most of them did nothing, the ones who were successful were also dropped straight away. Neil Mallender bowled us to victory against Pakistan on debut, and was dropped to bring Jarvis back, and never seen again. Peter Such got wickets against the Aussies in his early Tests, and disappeared quickly, although he strangely reappeared again about five years later. Richard Illingworth and Peter Martin came into the team out of the blue, performed pretty solidly, and then disappeared. I think a lot of players were selected as token gestures, without the selectors ever having the intention of keeping them for more than a few Tests no matter how they did.
