Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

24 So close Bharat Shah is shown on CricketArchive as having played 23 other, non- first-class, matches for Kenyan or East African sides between January 1978 and June 1990. But his score of 97 against the Pakistan Starlets was the only half-century that he scored in any of these 24 matches; next best was a score of 49 against the same Pakistan side in the one-day game that immediately preceded the first-class fixture, and otherwise he played only one other innings greater than 28. So it is hard to think of him as a cricketer who, but for his East African base, might have been able to make a mark on a wider stage. We know nothing of how he scored his runs, or of his batting style generally (as with Salim, we don’t even know if he batted right- or left-handed); but still there is no escaping the fact that he will remain as one of the small band of cricketers who scored a 90 in their only first-class match. Bravo to him, and to all of them, for that.