Foxes Flashback - Graham McKenzie

Graham McKenzie (24^th June)

It would be a useful pub quiz question. What Graham McKenzie and Stuard Broad - two fast bowlers have in common? Yes, they both played for Leicestershire, but they also share a birthday. Click Here to view Stuart Broad's article.

The contrast is that whilst Graham (Garth) spent the final days of his cricketing career at Grace Road, Stuart started his there before moving onto fame and glory with Notts and England.

It’s interesting to compare the careers of Garth and Stuart Broad. Stuart is now 34, the same age as Mckenzie was in his final season of first class cricket. How well the stats reflect the changing face of cricket over the past 60 years!

Leicester’s first experience of Garth was in 1961. In the tourist’s match at Grace Road, the ‘baby’ of Richie Benaud’s Ashes winning team, clean bowled the first three Leicestershire batsmen in his first four overs. (Hallam 0, Watson 1 and Jayasinghe 6). The following week he made his test debut in the Lord’s test. A breezy 34 in Australia’s first innings, and 5 cheap wickets in England’s second, gave him a significant role in their victory. The career of one of Australia’s greatest fast bowlers was launched.

In 1968 the registration rule on overseas players was relaxed, and counties were allowed to sign an overseas player without them spending a year of residential qualification. Some of the greatest players in the world decided that county cricket was a good option. Notts signed Garry Sobers and Warwickshire Rohan Kanhai, and Barry Richards and Mike Procter played for Hampshire and Gloucestershire, and Greg Chappell went to Somerset. Leicestershire, considering they had been signing overseas players since the 1930s, decided to wait until the following year when they could sign Garth. As I remember, they did so with the knowledge that he could play for three years before Australia toured again in 1972. No ‘nipping in’ to play half a dozen matches in those days.

His best test bowling was the 8 for 71 he took against the West Indies in the Boxing Day test of 1968, but how about his performance at Old Trafford in 1964? Sixty overs, 15 Maidens, 7 for 153. This was reckoned at the time to be comparable to Bobby Simpson’s triple hundred and Ken Barrington’s monumental 256, scored in the same match.

His test career pretty much finished in South Africa in 1970, where he had to wait until the final match of the series before taking his sole wicket. By the following winter, fellow ‘sand groper’ Denis Lillee was ready to take over. This left him with 246 test wickets, frustratingly just two short of Richie Benaud’s record at the time.

For six years he was pretty much the corner stone of the Leicestershire bowling attack, taking over 50 wickets each year. By 1975,