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from Cathy (cathyvpreece@aol.com)

Telegraph : Sport

Key's run of good luck ended by his captain

By Simon Briggs
(Filed: 26/07/2004)

If Laurel and Hardy had played cricket, they would probably have specialised in the sort of mid-pitch slapstick which yesterday left Rob Key glaring back at his captain, as if to say: "This is another fine mess…"

The contrasting figures – Michael Vaughan tall and thinning on top, Key more squarely built – made it easy to imagine the scene being played out in crackly black-and-white. As they hesitated over a tight single, Shivnarine Chanderpaul rushed in and threw down the stumps, putting an end both to Key's innings and to a week where everything – including the traffic on Kennington Road – had been going his way.

Key owed his opportunity here to outrageous fortune, expressed through Mark Butcher's car crash five minutes from the gates of the Oval. If his selection was an unexpected bonus, he could hardly have made any better use of it than by scoring 221 last week.

There was no room for complacency, though, as even a double-hundred was not guaranteed to keep him in the side. What would happen if Butcher reported fit for Edgbaston? When the selectors loaded their scales, how many runs would it take to outweigh three years of loyal service?

If Key was a little traumatised after his own accidental mix-up, relief was soon on its way. Within the hour, news was coming through from Guildford that Butcher would not, after all, be playing in Surrey's Totesport League match against Warwickshire. It was not his neck this time – he seems to have recovered from whiplash – but his earlier thigh injury, which had set the whole saga in motion when his rehab programme required a visit to the Surrey physio last Monday.

Remarkably, Butcher aggravated the thigh while moving boxes around his Croydon home. Perhaps the law of averages has caught up with him, after those 42 consecutive Tests, and he has suddenly become accident-prone. One gets the sense that if he saw an empty swimming pool at present, he would probably dive into it.

"I am thoroughly fed up," Butcher said. "I was just pottering around tidying up at home when I lifted a few boxes and felt it go. It felt like a dead leg. The irony is that the neck is a lot better." Butcher may still have a chance of making Surrey's day-night game against Northamptonshire tomorrow, but the selectors are unlikely to want to wait. They are due to announce the second Test squad today, and his latest misfortune has got them out of a terrible bind.

"What Rob Key has done is come in and play extremely well," Vaughan said last night. "If you're having headaches as a selection unit then it's a sign you've got a few good players to choose from, so I see that as a huge positive."

Vaughan was himself off the field for much of the final session after Brian Lara caught him at silly point with an off-drive that gashed his toe. But he needed no more than a few running repairs. At the end of the day, he will still have gone back to his room full of satisfaction, after scoring the first pair of matching hundreds in his first-class career.

In many ways, yesterday's unbeaten 101 was Vaughan's best one-day innings of the season. A week ago he was advised by two knowledgeable pundits, Mike Atherton and Geoff Boycott, to forget about style and score some ugly runs instead. But even they must have been shocked when he jumped outside the line and tickled a steady off-stump ball from Pedro Collins down to fine-leg for four.

This was a thrillingly irreverent stroke, unorthodox enough to appal the purists, and he followed it with three more thumping boundaries. As Vaughan reached out to pan the ball back past Collins, he briefly abandoned his natural image as the sepia-tinted classicist, stiff upper elbow pointing to the heavens.

If the assault was designed to pierce West Indian morale, it seemed to succeed. One of those crunching drives raced straight through Chris Gayle's legs, and as Andrew Flintoff joined Vaughan in a freewheeling stand of 92 from 69 balls, the fielders managed to contain them about as effectively as a damp paper bag.

At least one selectorial issue has been resolved: Vaughan has settled down at No 4. He now has three hundreds in as many innings against the West Indies, and is looking like the man the Australians ranked on a par with Sachin Tendulkar and V V S Laxman.

The captaincy jinx has clearly left his batting. But his running still has a hint of Nasser Hussain.

(posted 7185 days ago)

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