Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

Well aware that Lehmann had enjoyed years of success as Yorkshire’s overseas professional, I had still been amazed at the level of enthusiasm he had inspired among diehard supporters I met, attitudes reflected in the cricket columns of The Yorkshire Post . ‘The word “genius” is nowadays dispensed with reckless abandon, but in Darren Lehmann’s case it is thoroughly applicable,’ wrote Chris Waters, marking the batsman’s retirement in November 2007. It was remarkable that only 1,798 of Lehmann’s 25,628 first-class runs had been made in Test cricket. But Australia’s loss had been South Australia’s and Yorkshire’s gain. The county’s ‘statistically most successful batsman of those who have played over a considerable period’, Lehmann scored 8,871 runs at 68.76, with 26 hundreds in 88 first-class matches: those figures showed why Yorkshire Post readers had voted him into the county’s all-time greatest eleven: one of his most striking achievements was to change Yorkshire folk’s perception of non-Yorkshire-born cricketers. In 1997 he arrived as an ‘outsider’; last year he left as an adopted son … Lehmann’s departure also marks the end of an entirely different era – that of the international sportsman who is the physical antithesis of how the modern international sportsman is supposed to look and behave … he has played the sport his way and in a manner that can only have made every watching dietician, nutritionist and sundry nondescript cringe with frustration; in a game cluttered with support staff and psychobabble, this has surely been one of his finest achievements. 43 If journalist Waters had included Ric Charlesworth in the ranks of superfluous ‘support staff’, the West Australian had a measured response. Lehmann was ‘personable’ and a ‘smart player’. One of the greatest run scorers in Sheffield Shield history, he ‘probably should have played for Australia much earlier’. He wasn’t surprised he went well in Yorkshire: ‘he’s hail fellow, well met! Very sociable, loved a beer. At that level you can drink a bit and still be good.’ A very good player, ‘he might have been much better’. It wasn’t a good example to others if somebody could succeed ‘while being fat and lazy. I’m not sure being fat and lazy helped him to be as good as he could have been.’ 94 Epilogue 43 Chris Waters, ‘All-time great who played the game on own terms’, 20 November 2007, www.yorkshirepost.co.uk