Happy birthday Martin Crowe! Will the Crowe fly again?

It’s Martin Crowe’s birthday today and, at the hearty age of 49, one might forgive him for overindulging on marzipan and kicking back with a sherry. Instead, it’s more than likely that New Zealand’s former captain and one of cricket’s foremost batsmen of the last thirty years will be found netting on the outskirts of Auckland in preparation for his return to the first class game, his ultimate aim if he can cut it at Grade level for Cornwall in the domestic Kiwi league.

These things never tend to work out terribly well in any sport, with the onset of age and change more often than not proving to be insurmountable barriers to comeback success. Unlike Bjorn Borg, however, whose insistence on using his wooden racket in his 1991 return to tennis was an anachronistic farce, Crowe is an innovative forward-thinker who reinvigorated one day captaincy at the 1992 World Cupm who is also hitherto unknown to be preoccupied with the design of skimpy underpants. Alongside his Test average of 45 and a cut which was, and may still be, smoother than Barry White’s jimjams, below are a few more reasons why it’s not implausible he could make a go of it. Anyway, happy birthday, Martin. Many happy returns?

142 vs England at Lord’s, 2nd Test, 1994

174 vs Pakistan at the Basin Reserve Wellington, 1989 (lovely old school wagon wheel here)

81* vs West Indies at Eden Park, Auckland, 1992 World Cup

You can see his knock of 100* in the opening game of that tournament here.