Derek Randall
Randall signing autographs in 1978
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| Full name | Derek William Randall | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Born |
24 February 1951 Retford, Nottinghamshire, England |
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| Batting style | Right-hand bat | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bowling style | Right-arm medium | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Source: CricInfo, 1 January 2006 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Derek William Randall (born 24 February 1951, Retford, Nottinghamshire, England) is an English former cricketer, who played first-class cricket for Nottinghamshire, and Tests and ODIs for England in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Known to cricketing colleagues and cricket fans as "Arkle" after the racehorse, but always "Rags" to himself, he was one of the Wisden Cricketers of the Year in 1980. The cricket writer Colin Bateman said, "The Retford imp was, and still is, one of the most fondly admired figures in the game... the rolling gait and big sad eyes make him Chaplinesque – and like all clowns, there is pathos behind the public image... At times, genius sat on Randall's shoulders – the only trouble was it would not stop fidgeting". Randall played 47 Tests and 49 One Day International matches for England as a right-handed batsman before retiring to become a coach and cricket writer.
Randall first came to note as a cover fielder, as one-day cricket forced fielding standards to improve. His run out of Gordon Greenidge in the 1979 Cricket World Cup final highlighted this, and his partnership with David Gower was a feature of the successful England team of the immediate post-Packer era. Known for his eccentric movement at the crease, Randall was a determined batsman, specialising in hooks, pulls, cuts and cover drives, the former being used most memorably against Dennis Lillee in the Centenary Test in Melbourne in 1977 when he made 174, the highest Test score by any Nottinghamshire batsman in the history of Test cricket.
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