Charles William Jeffrey Athey (born 27 September 1957)
is a retired English
first-class cricket
First-class cricket, along with List A cricket and Twenty20 cricket, is one of the highest-standard forms of cricket. A first-class match is one of three or more days' scheduled duration between two sides of eleven players each and is officiall ...
er, who played for
England, and first-class cricket for
Gloucestershire
Gloucestershire ( abbreviated Glos) is a county in South West England. The county comprises part of the Cotswold Hills, part of the flat fertile valley of the River Severn and the entire Forest of Dean.
The county town is the city of Glo ...
,
Yorkshire
Yorkshire ( ; abbreviated Yorks), formally known as the County of York, is a historic county in northern England and by far the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its large area in comparison with other English counties, functions have ...
and
Sussex
Sussex (), from the Old English (), is a historic county in South East England that was formerly an independent medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom. It is bounded to the west by Hampshire, north by Surrey, northeast by Kent, south by the English C ...
; he also played a solitary
one-day game for
Worcestershire
Worcestershire ( , ; written abbreviation: Worcs) is a county in the West Midlands of England. The area that is now Worcestershire was absorbed into the unified Kingdom of England in 927, at which time it was constituted as a county (see ...
. His bulldog spirit was exemplified by the
Union Jack
The Union Jack, or Union Flag, is the ''de facto'' national flag of the United Kingdom. Although no law has been passed making the Union Flag the official national flag of the United Kingdom, it has effectively become such through precedent. ...
tattooed on his arm. He played in 23
Test matches between 1980 and 1988, but scored more than 50 runs only five times in 41 innings. In 1990, Athey joined the
rebel tour to
South Africa
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the ...
.
Domestic career
He made his debut for his native Yorkshire in 1976, before moving to Gloucestershire in 1984.
He captained the side in 1989, and scored four hundreds in successive innings while there. In 1993, he moved to Sussex, and passed the increasingly rare landmark of 25,000 first-class runs when he made an unbeaten century against Somerset in 1997.
At the end of that season he joined Worcestershire as coach, having 'retired' from playing, though in spite of his status he did play several times for the Second XI and once (in 1999) in a
National League
The National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, known simply as the National League (NL), is the older of two leagues constituting Major League Baseball (MLB) in the United States and Canada, and the world's oldest extant professional team s ...
game. He left
New Road at the end of 2000. He played 467 first-class matches and batted 784 times with 71 not outs. He scored 25,453 first-class runs, with a best of 184, at an average of 35.69, with 55 centuries and 126 fifties. He took 429 catches, and 2 stumpings on his rare ventures behind the stumps. In 459 List A one-day matches, he scored 13,240 runs, with a top score of 142 not out at an average of 33.86, scoring 12 centuries, 89 fifties, and taking 171 catches and one stumping. He also played
Minor Counties
The National Counties, known as the Minor Counties before 2020, are the cricketing counties of England and Wales that do not have first-class status. The game is administered by the National Counties Cricket Association (NCCA), which comes unde ...
cricket for
Suffolk
Suffolk () is a ceremonial county of England in East Anglia. It borders Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south; the North Sea lies to the east. The county town is Ipswich; other important towns include Lowesto ...
.
International career
He was a
middle order
In cricket, the batting order is the sequence in which batters play through their team's innings, there always being two batters taking part at any one time. All eleven players in a team are required to bat if the innings is completed (i.e., if ...
batsman by inclination, but found greatest success at Test level as an
opener
Opener, Open'er or Openers may refer to:
* ''Opener'' (album), an album by 8mm
* Opener (baseball), a baseball strategy to use a relief pitcher to start a game
* Open'er Festival, a contemporary music festival held in Gdynia, Poland
* Bottle opene ...
. Selected for the
1986/87 tour of
Australia as middle order cover, he ended up opening in all five Tests with
Chris Broad. His top score was 96 in
Perth
Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia. It is the fourth most populous city in Australia and Oceania, with a population of 2.1 million (80% of the state) living in Greater Perth in 2020. Perth is ...
. In the 1987 summer, he was initially meant to revert to the middle order, but an injury to Broad meant that he opened in the first Test with
Tim Robinson. However, in the second Test he reverted to number three, and made his only Test hundred at
Lord's
Lord's Cricket Ground, commonly known as Lord's, is a cricket venue in St John's Wood, London. Named after its founder, Thomas Lord, it is owned by Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and is the home of Middlesex County Cricket Club, the England an ...
.
He missed only one of twenty Test matches from 1986 to 1988.
Nevertheless, his 23 Test appearances were spread over eight years. He made his debut in the
Centenary Test
Centenary Test refers to two matches of Test cricket played between the English cricket team and the Australian cricket team, the first in 1977 and the second in 1980. These matches were played to mark the 100th anniversaries of the first Test cr ...
at Lord's in 1980, and eight years later appeared in the
Bicentennial Test
The Bicentennial Test was a single Test cricket match played between Australia and England at the Sydney Cricket Ground in celebration of the bicentenary of permanent colonial settlement in Australia. The match took place from 29 January to 2 Fe ...
in Sydney, along with fellow survivors
John Emburey and
Mike Gatting
Michael William Gatting (born 6 June 1957) is an English former cricketer, who played first-class cricket for Middlesex (1975–1998; captain 1983–1997) and for England from 1977 to 1995, captaining the national side in twenty-three Test ma ...
.
Although never thought of as a one-day player, Athey hit two centuries in
One Day Internationals, and top-scored for England before being run out in their
Cricket World Cup
The Cricket World Cup (officially known as ICC Men's Cricket World Cup) is the international championship of One Day International (ODI) cricket. The event is organised by the sport's governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC), e ...
final
Final, Finals or The Final may refer to:
*Final (competition), the last or championship round of a sporting competition, match, game, or other contest which decides a winner for an event
** Another term for playoffs, describing a sequence of cont ...
defeat against Australia at Calcutta in
1987
File:1987 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: The MS Herald of Free Enterprise capsizes after leaving the Port of Zeebrugge in Belgium, killing 193; Northwest Airlines Flight 255 crashes after takeoff from Detroit Metropolitan Airport, ...
. He was suspended for playing in South Africa in 1990, but the suspension was remitted two years later when South Africa rejoined the world game.
After cricket
Athey now works at
Dulwich College
Dulwich College is a 2–19 independent, day and boarding school for boys in Dulwich, London, England. As a public school, it began as the College of God's Gift, founded in 1619 by Elizabethan actor Edward Alleyn, with the original purpose of ...
school in South London, as the First XI Cricket Coach. He also takes the Second XI football team, and is house master of Old Blew, one of the four Dulwich College boarding houses.
Athey also played
football
Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Unqualified, the word ''football'' normally means the form of football that is the most popular where the word is used. Sports commonly ca ...
and was on the books of
Brentford Reserves in the early 1980s.
Personal life
Politically, Athey is a Conservative, and once appeared on stage at a
Conservative Party conference in the 1980s alongside England teammate
John Emburey.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Athey, Bill
1957 births
Living people
England Test cricketers
England One Day International cricketers
Gloucestershire cricket captains
Gloucestershire cricketers
Sussex cricketers
Worcestershire cricketers
Yorkshire cricketers
Cricketers from Middlesbrough
English cricketers
Suffolk cricketers
Marylebone Cricket Club cricketers
D. H. Robins' XI cricketers
Young England cricketers
English cricketers of 1969 to 2000