Former England skipper Ted Dexter dies

LONDON: Former England captain Ted Dexter has died at the age of 86. A powerful middle-order batter and medium-pace bowler, Dexter played 62 Tests, leading the side in 30 of those, scoring 4502 runs and taking 66 wickets although his life off the field was as just as notable as his cricket feats.

In a first-class career that spanned from 1956 to 1968, he scored more than 21000 runs and claimed 419 wickets. A broken leg suffered when he was attempting to push his broken down car in 1965 impacted the latter stages of his career, although he made a brief comeback to the Test side in the 1968 Ashes and would later play Sunday League games in 1971 and 1972.

“No English cricketer bred since the war has so captured the imagination of those inside, outside and far from, the boundary ropes of our big cricket grounds,” said the introduction to his profile as one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year in 1961.

His Test numbers as captain (average 53.93) were even higher than his outstanding career figure of 47.89 which included nine hundreds. His debut came against New Zealand in 1958 where he made a half-century with his first hundred arriving three games later against the same opposition in Christchurch.

His tally of 481 runs in the 1962-63 Ashes remains the most by an England captain in Australia while in the 1959-60 series against West Indies he had made 526 runs and 65.75. “Tall, upright and commanding, Dexter played the short-pitched bowling better than anyone else and thoroughly justified the faith of the selectors in choosing him, despite some earlier disappointments,” Wisden reported of his performance in the Caribbean.

One of Dexter’s most iconic performances was his 70 off 75 balls against a West Indies attack featuring Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith at Lord’s in 1963 during a match that came down to the final over with all four results possible and Colin Cowdrey coming out to bat with a broken arm.