In 1988, Vic Marks was part of a Somerset attack that Graeme Hick hammered around Taunton. With the help of team-mates and opponents Marks, now cricket correspondent for the Guardian, recalls that famous innings and examines why Hick, who retires this week, never achieved his expected dominance of the international game.
I was there. Twenty years on after a momentous sporting event there are usually enough first-hand witnesses around to fill the relevant stadium five times over. But I was bloody there all right - along with about 1500 others - when Graeme Hick scored 405 not out. I have the bowling figures to prove it (50-6-141-1, since you ask).
And I was grumpy. All that guff about being involved, however peripherally, in a little bit of history, was no consolation for another thrashing around Taunton. No one had scored 400 in the County Championship since 1895, when Archie MacLaren had hit 424 not out for Lancashire, also against Somerset at Taunton. All the other quadruple centurions had scored their runs on distant fields: Karachi, Sydney, Poona and Melbourne. Hick was sparking a new era of mammoth scores.
In the Sunday Times, David Gower pays tribute and offers a little sympathy.
It was not easy for Hick that the qualification period he had to serve to “become English” dealt him a tough hand in that his debut had to be against a rampant West Indies in 1991. Again a sympathetic comparison: I walked out for my first Test at Edgbaston against Pakistan in 1978 to face Sarfraz, Liaqat Ali, Mudassar, Iqbal Qasim, Sikander Bakht and Wasim Raja; Hick had Ambrose, Patterson, Walsh and Marshall. Maybe if Hick had been lucky enough to ease himself into Test cricket it would have given him a better chance of fulfilling all those expectations that the world had of him at the time.
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