Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

dedication to fitness ahead of his time; and, in later years, Mike Hussey. Out-ranking them all as the best ever was Tony Mann. Balancing this praise and his admiration for Ric’s determination as batsman, Edwards did think that he ‘over-did the slow stuff on occasions’. For his part, Ric reflected on a batting record he considered ‘quite interesting, actually’. It was ‘terrible’ he’d been out twice in the 90s and his failure to convert half-centuries into centuries showed ‘something was happening to me. … If you look at most first-class cricketers’ records for fifties and hundreds there’s normally about two fifties for every hundred’, whereas he’d made sixteen fifties and only one century. After his poor start in 1972/73, ‘the next season I made a score every time I batted, averaged over 50, but I only played three matches. If I’d finished that season I’m sure I’d have made a hundred.’ It isn’t hard to see that what was happening to him was constant distraction, but not of the kind he attributed to Kim Hughes. He’d never pursued the fame, nor claimed for himself the brilliance, that made Hughes Western Australia’s most charismatic batsman. And he had come very late to captaincy, a role that had destroyed Hughes but, in any case, one Ric would come to dismiss as greatly overrated in all the sports he analysed. The distractions had been most acute in his first unsuccessful season, returning from the Munich Olympics and wondering how he could cope with deferred medical exams preceded by a cricket tour in which he never had a settled place in the batting order. But throughout the 1970s cricket was ‘just what I did in summer; I never practised or trained or prepared in winter, when lots of other guys 1976-1981 45 Kim Hughes. Charisma, but ...