Seventeen balls

Andy Lloyd faced seventeen balls in Test cricket.

He was picked to open against West Indies on his home ground at Edgbaston, the first man born in Shropshire ever selected by England, and he was twenty-seven.

Half an hour

Graeme Fowler was caught behind off Joel Garner for nought. Derek Randall was bowled by Garner for nought. England were five for two before anybody had settled.

Lloyd had made 10, with one four, in thirty minutes.

Malcolm Marshall bowled a short one. It struck Lloyd on the helmet, around the temple. He went off at 20 for two and was in hospital within the hour.

He stayed there for several days with blurred vision. He did not play again that season, and he did not play first-class cricket again until 1985.

Full scorecard: England v West Indies, 1st Test, Edgbaston, 14–18 June 1984 →

What the card had to record

In England’s first innings his line reads retired hurt 10.

In the second, where he could not bat at all, it reads absent hurt, with dashes in every column.

The fall of wickets carries an unusual entry: 2-20*, Andy Lloyd, retired not out. A starred wicket that was not a wicket, in the middle of a list of ten that were.

The record nobody wants

Andy Lloyd is the only man to open the batting in Test cricket and never be dismissed.

Not the only man never dismissed, which is a club of tail-enders with two not outs and four runs. The only opener. The position whose entire job is to be got out, first, by the fastest bowlers the other side has.

His Test batting record is ten runs, no dismissals, and an average the record books cannot compute. Where every other player has a number, Lloyd has a dash.

The rest of the match

West Indies made 606. Larry Gomes scored 143 and Viv Richards 117 and Michael Holding came in at ten and made 69 from 80 balls with four sixes. England, with ten men in the second innings, lost by an innings and 180 runs.

They lost the series 5–0. It is the summer English cricket has never fully stopped talking about, and Lloyd’s half hour is the first thing in it.

What was never established

Whether he would have been any good.

He had made 17,000 first-class runs for Warwickshire by the end and captained them. He was a solid county opener of his generation and not obviously more than that, which is what most England openers of the mid-1980s were.

The seventeen balls are all the evidence there is. Ten runs off them is a rate nobody would draw a conclusion from, and there is no second innings, no second Test and no later recall to set beside it.

What ended the career was not form and not selection. It was a cricket ball travelling at ninety miles an hour into the side of a helmet, a piece of equipment that had been in Test cricket for barely six years.

Twenty-one years later

The same ground staged the Test England won by two runs, and Edgbaston has been remembered ever since for that one.

Barrie Meyer stood in Lloyd’s match. He had also stood at Tunbridge Wells the previous summer while Kapil Dev made 175 not out in front of no cameras at all.

The card for Lloyd’s Test is complete to the ball. It just has nothing to say about the only question anybody has ever asked of it.

••••••

No. 4 in One Cap, a series of 6.

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