5 most entertaining cricketers who also excelled at other sports
There aren’t many players around the world who have excelled in more than one sport. Every Cricket fan by now would have known that AB de Villiers was good enough to play Golf, Rugby, Badminton, Tennis and Hockey. He wasn’t the only one though. He had a set of predecessors who could have equally done well in other sports (on a global level) if they had not taken up Cricket. Here are they:
Denis Compton
Very rarely does a batsman come who not only throws the rule book out of the window but also establishes himself as an antithesis of many-a-dour stereotypes that continue to fortify the sport to date. Denis Charles Compton from England was one such player. His un-English like flamboyance and an uncanny habit of manufacturing strokes outside the textbook earned him many accolades during his playing days. Not a technical purist, Denis based his game primarily on innovative stroke making bypassing the convention whenever an opportunity presented itself and yet, when the need arose, his defence was as orthodox as any other player playing the game at that time.
However, he fancied playing the sweep shot against the ball that straightened on the middle stump and those who have watched him bat say that he deployed different varieties of it even. An obvious proclivity for risk became his modus operandi and he seemed to revel in that kind of style. One of his captains, John Warr, summed up his unique batting technique when he suggested that Denis had clearly “read the textbook upside down”.
He was duly rewarded for his consistently good show in the international circuit when he was selected to play against Bradman’s Australia in 1938. Compton’s uninhibited talent was on display as he scored a fluent hundred in the high-scoring draw at Trent Bridge. He ended the series with modest figures of 214 runs at 42.80 and was later adjudged the “Wisden Cricketer of the Year” in 1939 for his stellar outings with bat and the ball.
However, much like other cricketers of his time, Compton lost many years of his career to the World War. But once the war ended; his form reached its pinnacle. He ended his illustrious Test career with 78 matches under his belt, scoring 5807 runs at a healthy average of 50.06 with 17 centuries.
Apart from cricket, Compton was also a keen player of Football and played for Arsenal (also a FA cup winner in 1950) and also represented England during wartime international matches. For a man of his talent, Compton’s true genius lay in the manner he played the sport and the entertainment he provided to his fans and peers.
Charles Fry
Late John Arlott, an English journalist and a cricket commentator for BBC called C.B. Fry the ‘most variously gifted Englishman of any age’ and if one were to look into Fry’s past, you would know just why. A man of many talents, he equalled the world record in long jump, played rugby for the barbarians and even appeared in the 1902 F.A. Cup Final, but for now we shall only focus on his exploits on the cricket field. He scored 30886 first-class runs from 394 matches at an average of 50.22 and to top it all, the 94 first-class hundreds- six of these hundreds were made in successive innings, a feat matched only by the great Sir Donald Bradman and Mike Proctor. That Fry scored those hundreds on uncovered, Victorian-age pitches is a testimony to his batting prowess.
He played a total of 26 Test matches for England averaging a tad over 32 and captained the team in his last six games (Triangular series against South Africa and Australia in 1912). England did not lose a single match under Fry’s captaincy although; his exploits in first-class cricket were much more discussed where his average was bettered only by his close friend and another great cricketer- Ranjitsinhji. Fry and Ranjitsinhji were not only friends off-the field but on it as well. Both these batsmen were involved in one of the most memorable of partnerships both for Sussex and England and it is said that they played an instrumental role in changing the game of cricket in that day and age.
Cricket may have been just a side-bar to Fry’s prominent career but it gives us an insight into the life of a player who could do absolutely anything absolutely brilliantly.