71 Facts About Graeme Hick

Graeme Ashley Hick was born on 23 May 1966 and is a Zimbabwean-born former England cricketer who played 65 Test matches and 120 One Day Internationals for England.

Graeme Hick was born in Rhodesia, and as a young man played international cricket for Zimbabwe.

Graeme Hick played English county cricket for Worcestershire for his entire English domestic career, a period of well over twenty years, and in 2008 surpassed Graham Gooch's record for the most matches in all forms of the game combined.

Graeme Hick was a part of the English squad which finished as runners-up at the 1992 Cricket World Cup.

Graeme Hick scored more than 40,000 first-class runs, mostly from number three in the order, and he is one of only three players to have passed 20,000 runs in List A cricket and is one of only twenty-five players to have scored 100 centuries in first-class cricket.

Graeme Hick is the only cricketer who scored first-class triple hundreds in three different decades.

Graeme Hick is the second highest run scorer of all time after Graham Gooch, and the second highest century scorer after Jack Hobbs.

At one time Graeme Hick's bowling was a significant force, and his off-spin claimed more than 200 first-class wickets.

Graeme Hick retired from county cricket at the end of the 2008 season, to take up a coaching post at Malvern College.

Graeme Hick was more of a bowler than a batsman, but in 1979 he began to make big scores regularly, averaging 185 for the school side.

Graeme Hick suffered from a mild form of meningitis in 1980, but he nevertheless progressed to become captain of the national Junior Schools team, and before long to play for the Senior Schools side.

Graeme Hick had no success with the bat, being dismissed for 0,2 and 1, although he did bowl Dean Jones in the second match at Mutare.

Graeme Hick was included in the Zimbabwean squad for the 1983 World Cup, the youngest player ever to achieve such a status, but was not selected to play in the tournament.

Eight days later Graeme Hick made his List A debut against the same opponents, batting one place lower still and making 16* in a game decided on run rate.

On 7 December 1983, Graeme Hick took his maiden first-class wicket, bowling Sri Lanka Test batsman Susil Fernando while playing for Zimbabwe against a Sri Lanka Board President's XI.

In 1984, Graeme Hick came to England on a scholarship from the Zimbabwe Cricket Union.

Graeme Hick played club cricket for Kidderminster in the Birmingham League.

Graeme Hick hit 1,234 runs for the club that year, a Kidderminster record.

Graeme Hick spent the winter playing for Zimbabwe, his highest scores being 95 and 88 in separate matches against Young New Zealand.

Graeme Hick enjoyed a successful season, ending with a batting average of 52.70, and scoring his first century: 230 for the Zimbabweans against Oxford University.

The 1986 English season was the first year in which Graeme Hick was notably successful in the one-day game: he hit 889 List A runs that year at an average slightly over forty.

Graeme Hick had a highly successful season in one-day cricket as Worcestershire won the Refuge Assurance League, passing 1,000 List A runs for the only time, averaging over seventy in such games and making a one-day career-best 172* against Devon in the NatWest Trophy.

Graeme Hick became the first man since Glenn Turner, and only the eighth in history, to hit 1,000 first-class runs before the end of May, with 410 of those runs coming in April alone, a record for that month until Ian Bell scored 480 in April 2005.

Graeme Hick did it on the first day, ending 172 not out and scoring a total of 1,019 runs before the end of May In all that season he scored a career-best aggregate of 2,713 runs including ten first-class hundreds, matching the Worcestershire record set by Glenn Turner in 1970.

Graeme Hick was a great success, hitting ten centuries in all and averaging 63.61 in the former season and a startling 94.46 in the latter; in one game against Auckland he scored a first-class record 173 runs between tea and close of play.

Back in England, the 1989 season when Worcestershire retained the Championship and, especially, the "batsmen's paradise" 1990 season saw Graeme Hick continue to pile up the big scores.

Graeme Hick scored well over 4,000 first-class runs in the two years combined and averaged 90.46 in 1990, his highest average in any English summer and overall second only to his aforementioned New Zealand season.

Graeme Hick followed that up with a reasonably successful winter playing for Queensland, and in March 1991 scored 91 for Worcestershire against Zimbabwe at Harare, but already the public's mind was firmly on the summer, when he would qualify to play for England.

Graeme Hick enjoyed the responsibility of captaincy, and was "surprised and disappointed" to be relieved of the position in favour of Ben Smith for the 2003 season.

Graeme Hick had missed the very end of the 2002 season with a broken thumb, and newly returned to the ranks for 2003 he endured a summer to forget.

At this point Graeme Hick was averaging 53 in first-class cricket, but the 13 innings he played after his return in late July produced only 246 runs, leaving him with a season's average of just 33.50, his worst showing since the dark days of 1991.

Graeme Hick retired at the end of the 2008 season to take up a coaching post at Malvern College.

Graeme Hick made his first appearances as an England batsman in a three-match One Day International series against West Indies, the first being played at Edgbaston on 23 May 1991.

Graeme Hick made only 14 in a low-scoring game, but a few days later, in the third and final match of the series, he hit 86* and shared in a match-winning stand of 213 with Neil Fairbrother.

Graeme Hick was given a hero's reception by the crowd as he came out to bat, but a tortured 51 minutes later he was back in the pavilion having made only six, and he could do no better in the second innings.

Graeme Hick then played all three Tests in New Zealand, but apart from a marathon bowling performance in the first innings at Wellington where he and Phil Tufnell shared 140 overs almost equally, he again had little to smile about.

In 1992 Graeme Hick finally made a Test half-century, 51 against Pakistan, but as with the West Indian series he was dropped before the end of the summer.

The personal highlight for Graeme Hick was his long-awaited maiden Test hundred: 178 in the third Test at Bombay; he added another 47 in the second innings.

Graeme Hick then scored 68 and 26 in the one-off Test against Sri Lanka which immediately followed.

Graeme Hick was recalled for the sixth Test at The Oval and hit 80 and 36 in a 161-run England victory, giving him a series average of 42.66, behind only Gooch, Atherton and Thorpe among England's specialist batsmen in a series in which England used 24 players.

Graeme Hick played in three of the four ODIs and failed in two of them, but made another 81 against South Africa.

Graeme Hick helped Worcestershire to win the 1994 NatWest Trophy, sharing an unbroken partnership of 198 with Tom Moody in the final against a Warwickshire side which had swept the board with all the other domestic honours that year.

Graeme Hick was nearing what would have been his first Ashes century, but Atherton felt he was scoring too slowly and that as a result the team were "dawdling".

Graeme Hick took the decision to call the players in with Hick 98 not out.

Graeme Hick was surprised and hurt not to be allowed to reach his hundred: Alec Stewart wrote later that his teammates "couldn't believe" the decision, and he felt that it "cost [England] dearly".

In that game, Graeme Hick made 109 and took two wickets, but Lancashire won a close contest with four balls to spare.

That winter's tour was to South Africa, and Graeme Hick made a superb hundred on the first day of the first Test at Centurion Park; Allan Donald later conceded that "he hammered us".

Graeme Hick, having reached his highest ever Test ranking of seventh, played in all five Tests and seven ODIs on that tour, but passed fifty only twice.

Graeme Hick seemed set fair for another productive season in 1996, especially after making 215 for Worcestershire against the Indians in May, but it was not to be.

The 1997 English season was the first for seven years in which Graeme Hick had no international duties to perform, and he averaged 69 in scoring over 1,500 first-class runs, the highlight being an unbeaten 303 in the final match of the season against Hampshire, sharing in an unbroken third-wicket partnership of 438 with Tom Moody, an English record for that wicket and a Worcestershire record for any wicket.

Graeme Hick was recalled to England duties for the Singer-Akai Champions Trophy ODI series at Sharjah in December 1997, and in April 1998 for just the ODI portion of the West Indies series.

Graeme Hick played in nine games altogether, but though he got starts on several occasions he never reached fifty.

Graeme Hick began the 1998 season slowly and was left out of the England team at the start of the year, but he responded with four hundreds in successive first-class innings in late May and early June.

Graeme Hick ended up playing in four Tests, but he had a rather poor series overall, averaging 25, although his defiant 68 in a losing cause at Perth stuck in the memory and his 39 and 60 contributed significantly to England's 12-run win at Melbourne.

David Lloyd "strongly fancied [Graeme Hick] to have a serious influence" on the competition, but he was frustrated by Graeme Hick's reluctance to accept a flexible batting order, only with considerable difficulty at a "frosty team meeting" getting him to agree to drop down from three when required.

Graeme Hick failed badly in South Africa and by the time the Zimbabwe leg of the tour began he had not reached 30 in nine successive innings, by far the worst run of his ODI career, but 87*, 13 and 80 against the Zimbabweans rescued his winter.

The 2000 Test series against West Indies began with humiliation both for England, who lost by an innings inside three days at Edgbaston, and for Graeme Hick, who made his only Test pair.

On what was to prove his last winter tours for England, of Kenya, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, Graeme Hick played five Tests and six ODIs, but only twice were his contributions of real value.

Graeme Hick took the field in Colombo only as a substitute, but still managed to incur a one-match suspended ban for sledging.

England, though, were crushed by ten wickets, and Graeme Hick's international playing days were at an end.

Graeme Hick was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2009 Birthday Honours.

In January 2014, Graeme Hick was appointed high performance coach at Cricket Australia's centre of excellence.

In September 2016, Graeme Hick was promoted to the role of Batting Coach of the Australian side.

In June 2020, Graeme Hick was made redundant as batting coach, a result of cost-cutting measures made by Cricket Australia due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jonathan Agnew felt his body language against Curtly Ambrose back in 1991 had been poor, and had almost invited his dismissal, and Atherton wrote that if Graeme Hick had indeed failed to do justice to his talent, it was surely "down to a vital missing ingredient in his mental make-up".

Some felt that Graeme Hick was the victim of poor man-management, and Graeme Hick himself let his feelings slip in 2002, when asked who had been his best coach.

Ray Illingworth's treatment of Graeme Hick has come under considerable scrutiny.

Indeed, for a period of more than two years from February 1994 Graeme Hick was never ranked lower than tenth in the world ODI rankings, and at the time of his omission from the one-day team halfway through 1996 he was rated number six.

Atherton "liked and respected" him, while Andrew Flintoff, as a newcomer to the England side, remembered Graeme Hick as "being good to [him] during those early stages [of Flintoff's Test career]".

Stewart himself wrote that Graeme Hick was "someone whose talents [he] admire[d] greatly".

All I can do is wonder how much more English cricket might have got out of Graeme Hick had he been handled differently.