Lions81 said:
Why do you think this is the case anyway? Do cricketers not make as much money over there? I know they don't get anywhere near the limelight or attention that football/soccer players get but why has cricket so gotten lost in the country of its invention? It boggles the mind.
The specific question seems to be "how come there are no English batsmen who seem to be better prospects than Rikki Clarke but are at least equally ready to be selected for the one-day team?" and the fact that the question can even be posed is the indication that English cricket has gone to hell in a handbasket.
But that view rests on the assumption that Rikki Clarke is a mediocrity.
I have not spent much time following the development of Rikki Clarke: I've only really seen him in his outings for England. I can't say as I've been impressed, except by his fielding, but he hasn't exactly made an **** of himself.
I'd be vaguely interested, therefore, in what people thought of Michael Vaughan after he'd been in the England side for a few months.
There's no point in asking me what I thought of Vaughan after his first few months in the England side: I formed the view that Vaughan was the best England batsman in a generation in 1994, a view which Yorkshire had clearly come to a little earlier because they changed the club's rule about being Yorkshire-born in order to accommodate him (the documents urging the change on the members rabbited about overseas players because that was the easier sell, but there was no need to break the rule for home-based players in order to employ Tendulkar and it was in order to facilitate Vaughan's selection that the rules were really changed).
When Vaughan eventually got picked for England, those who hadn't been following his career very closely looked at his stats and thought they were nothing special, and perhaps a number of them regarded Vaughan as one of those lunatic picks which would come to nothing, especially as he failed to set the world alight with big scores for ages and ages.
The point of all this Vaughan-rambling is that those who have been involved with Clarke's career since he was a mid-teenager tend to speak about him with the kind of awe that early Vaughan fans did. To say that there is no more appealing prospect in English cricket than a potential all-time great, though, would seem to be a very minor criticism of the English game, and certainly no cause for apocalyptic statements about the game being forgotten in the country of its birth.
Most readers of this forum will guffaw at the idea that Clarke is a potential all-time great, and I have to say that I find it an, er, interesting suggestion. But when people who know what they are talking about at Surrey say that Clarke has always been a more promising player than Graham Thorpe was at the same stages, that's evidence I can't ignore.
And it's why you won't find me busily rubbishing him at every opportunity: I have no wish to end up like the ninnies who rubbished Flintoff and Harmison for months and years and now have to explain why they should ever be taken seriously about anything again.
Cheers,
Mike
