Top 5 England cricketers who never played the Cricket World Cup

#3 Mark Butcher

Mark Butcher sadly, never got the chance to play an ODI

Mark Butcher is remembered for being one of England’s finest middle-order Test batsmen during the late 90s and early 2000s. Butcher has quite an impressive Test record, scoring 4288 Test runs across 7 years with 23 fifties and 8 centuries to his name.

Butcher also has quite an impressive List-A record with 4460 runs and 49 wickets. He has 28 fifties and two centuries to his name. Despite this, Butcher never got the chance to play for the ODI team. Butcher is the only player in the ODI era who has never played an ODI despite playing more than 30 Tests (he went on to play 71 Tests).

With the presence of the likes of Graham Thorpe, Graeme Hick and the experienced Neil Fairbrother, Butcher had no chance of finding a place in the 1999 World Cup. He played some really wonderful innings from 2000-2002 and was among the Top 30 Test run-scorers from 1st January 2000- 31 December 2002. However, this wasn’t enough for Butcher to play a single ODI let alone play a World Cup.

Butcher’s Test performances lost consistency during 2004 and he was dropped from the Test team following England’s Tour of South Africa in late 2004.