A Fond Farewell

Hick - back when he was just 17.

In 1991, Graeme Hick was the young Kevin Pietersen of his era.

That is not to compare the styles of two very different, hugely-talented batting greats.

Similarities are few indeed at the crease, where Hick's straight-bat authority is a more pleasing sight to many eyes than Pietersen's crooked ingenuity.

It is in their geographical origins, early decision to switch hemispheres and manner of entrance into English cricket that Hick and Pietersen's CVs bear uncanny resemblance.

Sadly for Hick, who retired after 25 years as a first-class cricketer with a bank of statistics which mark him out as a member of the all-time elite, it is from the point that the two southern Africans made their England Test debuts that their careers almost instantly diverge.

Hick, still more so than the prolific Pietersen with Nottinghamshire a generation later, took county cricket by storm.

Aged barely 18, the farmer's boy from Harare played his first Worcestershire innings and within weeks had all the right people nodding at his potential - thanks not only to his weight of runs but the uncomplicated, imperious way he was making them.

By 1988, Hick was already piling up what was to be a mountainous career aggregate. Then in May that year, long before Brian Lara took Durham for 501 at Edgbaston, it was the 21-year-old Zimbabwean who was pushing back the boundaries at Taunton - where his career-best 405 not out against Somerset was greeted with a nationwide mixture of awe and near incredulity.

By the end of the month, Hick had the cherished 1,000 runs under his belt - a summer feat he was to repeat a score times, if slightly more slowly, in the years to come.

Hick's quickest 1,000 was completed with a big hundred against the touring West Indies - and the same fearsome opposition were in town when his qualification period to play for England was finally completed.

It was never going to be an easy first exposure at the highest level - but those who ought to know were confident Hick would have what it takes.

Time, in the short and long term, was to prove them wrong.

Pietersen announced himself at the start of England's surprise Ashes 2005 victory with two half-centuries, the second unbeaten, as part of his grand entrance at Lord's.

Hick's debut at Leeds against the Windies yielded only a pair of sixes - and by the end of the summer, he was dropped with an average of little more than 10 and only 73 runs.

His second coming went better, but not emphatically so - and when Hick retired from Test cricket at the age of 34, having been picked and dropped 10 times in the interim, his return of six hundreds and an average just above 31 appeared to do scant justice to his abilities.

Yet along with Mark Ramprakash, who curiously also made his debut in that same Leeds Test and went on to under-achieve on the international stage, Hick has batted himself clear of all contemporaries by easily racking up the 100 first-class hundreds which are the preserve of only 25 men since the invention of cricket.

The anomaly has been theorised by millions, trying to make sense of a batsman who has looked a class apart throughout his county career yet on graduating was so blatantly found out.

A flaky mind, a front-foot-reliant technique, leaden reaction against extreme pace, the overbearing weight of expectation ... take your pick on the root of his problem, depending on your favoured source of authority or information.

Whatever the truth, Hick's are frailties which clearly and conspicuously do not afflict the man who has trodden a modern path roughly in his footsteps - and then diverted to spectacular effect to become England captain and his adopted country's undisputed batsman-in-chief.

Parallels in the Hick-Pietersen stories are obvious.

In the end, though, it is a comparison as odious as all the rest.

If we do nothing else in honour of Graeme Hick and his monumental run-making, he must be accorded his own place in sporting history - without alternative reference.

David Clough