Random Cricket Photos Post 81



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The Curious Case of Gooch's two 100th First Class Tons

The 1992-1993 English tour of India is a treasure trove of stories. Well, if you ask the members of that English squad, they might have a different word for 'stories'. If they still remember, it's quite possible that they call them 'nightmares'.

From travelling in trains resulting from an Indian Airlines pilots’ strike to failing miserably at the hands of Indian spinners to repeated selection quandaries, England suffered. So much so that at one point during the tour, Dermot Reeve's mom, who had come to tour India with her son, had to handle the team's official scorer's duty after the man for the job, the 71 year old Clem Hill, collapsed and returned home.

But probably no one suffered as bad as Captain Gooch did. Already cornered over David Gower's exclusion from the touring party, Gooch tried to take the focus off the off-field talk with some shiny scores. A couple of personal milestones also lay around the corner - a 100th Test appearance and a 100th First Class ton.

Playing against the India U-25 XI, Gooch brought up the ton, which seemed like a much needed one ahead of the Test series. However, everything that could go wrong went wrong for Gooch and his men in the Tests. Gooch even had to miss what could have been his 101st Test due to apparently dodgy prawns.

But the worse was yet to come. In March, the ICC decided to strip the matches played on rebel tours to South Africa off their First Class status. What that meant for Gooch, who had scored a ton there back in 1982, that he was brought back to 99 FC tons.

Gooch's winter of discontent ended in a few months when he finally got to his landmark ton (once again) in a fixture against Cambridge in May the same year.

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