Graeme Hick: England's prototype for Lara settles for life in the slow lane

Only one man in the history of cricket knows what it feels like to score 400 runs in a Test innings, but he is not the only one to reach that remarkable milestone in other forms of the game.

Graeme Hick's 405 not out for Worcestershire 15 summers ago does not stand too much comparison with Brian Lara's record-breaking innings this week; after all, Somerset were not England and Taunton is definitely not Antigua. All the same, only eight men have scored 400 runs or more at any level of first-class cricket.

Lara's own 501 not out, for Warwickshire against Durham in 1994, remains the highest score, closely followed by Hanif Mohammad's 499 for Karachi v Bahawalpur in 1958-59. A C MacLaren's 424 for Lancashire in 1895, also at Taunton, was the first. And the second and third were both by Bill Ponsford, both in Melbourne, for Victoria in the 1920s. Then Bradman did it, for New South Wales in 1929-30. B B Nimbalkar (1948-49) and Aftab Baloch (1973-74) complete the exclusive club.

Perhaps Hick, like Ponsford and Lara, might yet pull it off a second time. At any rate, as he embarks on his 21st season with Worcestershire, there is little, not even his indifferent form last summer, to suggest that he does not still have some more huge knocks in his enormous grasp.

And it truly is an enormous grasp. If there is a bigger pair of hands in the game, then it can only be because the organisers of Twenty20 cricket have decided to pep it up even more this year by allowing silverback gorillas to play.

At 37, and indeed with more than a little silver in his hair, Hick is still in supreme physical shape. We meet at New Road, the picturesque county ground that has been his second home in England since he arrived here as a painfully shy teenager from Zimbabwe.

His painful shyness has grown into a diffident charm. He is an immensely likeable fellow, which makes it all the harder to quiz him on why his own Test career was, in the end, a disappointment. Not a failure exactly, as Mike Atherton once put it, but a failure to meet expectation.

First, though, let's talk Lara. Hick and his Worcestershire team-mates went on a run on Monday afternoon, but made sure they were back in the New Road dressing-room in time to see Lara re-establish himself as the highest-scoring batsman in a single Test innings.

"We watched those last 15 or 20 runs and no one really moved. He had obviously set his stall out quite early in the innings, maybe by the end of the first day. It will be interesting to ask him when he felt in the back of his mind that it [the record] was on. Of course, it's one thing to decide, 'Alright, I can get to 375 or 380 again', but actually to carry it out in the heat - unbelievable.

"I was always a huge Viv Richards fan. People can have a huge influence on you just by being the way they are, and I thought Richards was awesome, even the way he walked. For some younger players now, I'm sure Lara has a similar effect. If I had to pay £30 or whatever it is to see a Test match, then out of the top three batters he's the one I would pay to see.

"Tendulkar is more classical, but a great Lara innings is full of such excitement. And it would be in the Caribbean as well because of the way the crowd reacts. He blocks and blocks and then they see that backlift and they know what's coming."

I ask Hick how well he remembers his own inauguration into the 400-club. "I remember it well," he says, "but to me at the time it was just a good innings that helped us win. If I did it again this season I would maybe appreciate it more."

He smiles. "In fact there were two things I enjoyed more that day. One was getting two wickets. The other was helping Tim Curtis do the Daily Telegraph crossword. Normally I can't even do The Sun crossword. But he was stuck on this one that went from the top to the bottom. I looked over his shoulder and jokingly said, 'It's schoolteacher'. He had a couple of letters already and it fit the space. So he wrote it in very, very lightly. I don't think he wanted to accept that I'd got it right. Anyway, we went on with the game. Afterwards, that was the joke among the chaps. The highlight of the game wasn't that I got 405, but that I got six down."

Another irony of six down was that schoolteachers did not loom at all large in Hick's upbringing, except those who took sport. From the age of six until the end of his schooldays he played sport four afternoons a week.

"I don't know whether it's a southern hemisphere thing, but I've talked about it to Robin Smith and he had a very similar life in South Africa. I look at my son now. He'll be eight in September and I know that if he were in that environment, he'd love it. Whereas here it's so different.

"If you want your child to be not just a good sportsman but even just to have the opportunity to play, it's so much harder. There's so much more pressure on the parent to pick them up from football, take them to tennis, or whatever. For my parents it was easy. At school I had all the sport I wanted, with great facilities. And at home we had a 7,500-acre tobacco farm so it was easy for them to put in a tennis court."

Hick's father was a fine tennis player, his mother played hockey for Zimbabwe and his sister played international hockey and basketball. "So we're quite a sporting family," he explains. I love the "quite".

His folks still live in Zimbabwe, which brings me to the prickly issue of whether England should go there on tour. These are not prickles that Hick is willing to grasp, however. I have been forewarned that it is a matter he will decline to discuss, and I ask him why.

"Because I don't know enough about it. Because once you've passed comment, more people ask you questions and you find yourself in an area where you're not sure of your facts. I know my parents would love the tour to go ahead because they love watching cricket. But if you said that if England don't come then things will sort themselves out in Zimbabwe within six months, they'd say fine, stay at home. Unfortunately, everyone knows that's not going to happen."

Whether England do or England don't, it seems reasonable to assume that Hick's international career is history, that not even some blazing form this summer will propel him into the thoughts of his erstwhile fellow Zimbabwean Duncan Fletcher - the England coach of whom, although he doesn't say as much, I deduce that Hick is not overly fond.

I put to him Atherton's remark, that his England career was a failure insofar as it failed to meet expectations. His level gaze becomes just a little leveller.

"When my seven-year qualification came through [in 1991] I was instantly included in the Test squad to play the West Indies. It wasn't as though I'd been with an England A team getting to know people and working my way up. In fact I wasn't playing that well at the time, but it was a case of, 'He's qualified, he'll play'. And the weight of expectation definitely affected me, even though I didn't realise it.

"I do think that had one or two people worked with me slightly differently, it could have made a difference. I've recently done a level-four coaching course. The first two modules we did were on man-management skills and sports psychology. It was a huge eye-opener. I wondered how much of this certain people had done. If they'd had that knowledge, would my career have been different? Throughout, decisions were made on my behalf without people finding out much about me."

He does not say this in a spirit of recrimination, although he does intimate that he will be more candid when his playing career is over. In the meantime, I can only speculate that he feels let down by one or more of Micky Stewart, Keith Fletcher, Ray Illingworth, David Lloyd, Duncan Fletcher, Ted Dexter and David Graveney, the coaches he played under and the chairmen of selectors who picked him.

Ultimately, though, the shortcomings were his own. And because he rejects the suggestion that they may have been technical - "nobody ever said anything to me about my technique" - we are left with the only alternative, that they were in the mind. Of course, it is unfair to write off his England career as being one of perennial under-achievement. He scored a wonderful 141 against South Africa at Centurion Park eight years ago, for example. And a mighty 178 in India. But the gap between his century-per-innings ratio for Worcestershire (one every six outings) and his ratio for England (one every 19) is what Atherton was getting at.

"There was only one very small period of time when I felt totally comfortable in the England dressing-room," he continues. "The 1992 World Cup side was the most united team I've ever played in. You couldn't not have team spirit when Ian Botham was playing, because he wouldn't allow it. He was such a team man. But selection methods instilled a bit of selfishness into people over the years, me included. Quite a few players could never really buy into the team ethos because they were always looking over their shoulders.

"I think that's changed. These days, a guy's selected and if he's good enough they give him everything they can for as long as they can. I've seen it with quite a few Australian players. The guy comes in and he keeps going and going and people start to say, 'Surely they've got to drop him', but he keeps going and something starts to happen. If it doesn't, the policy is to carry on even further. Maybe England are now reaping the rewards of that policy. I think it's happened, to a certain degree, with Andrew Flintoff, who also had huge expectation over him, being the next Botham and all that."

The last Botham played with Hick at county level as well as for England, not that Hick welcomed the news that the great man was joining Worcestershire. "I thought, 'Oh, no'. I didn't think it would be good for the club because we were doing well as it was. But the moment he put his first foot in the dressing-room I realised how wrong I was. It became a different place and it has been ever since. Beefy was a huge influence."

As was Basil D'Oliveira, the coach when he arrived in 1984. "Basil was huge for me. When I pitched up here, as a 17-year-old in the second team, I used to get hundreds before lunch. But Basil kept moving the goalposts. He'd say, 'Good players can bat for two sessions'. Then he'd say, 'Really good players can bat for a day'."

It was, perhaps, the kind of psychological stimulation Hick needed from England. "I have no regrets," he tells me, but he is surely being disingenuous. On the other hand, there is manifestly nothing missing in his current life as a cricketer; the County Championship is all he needs.

"I love this time of year," he says. "I'm excited because we've got a really good squad here and by September we should have won something. And I love coming in here and seeing the benches getting varnished. It's been the same people over the last 10 or 15 years, doing the same jobs, and you can tell that they're excited too. For them, painting the wall is the start of summer."

Graeme Hick life and times

1966 Born 23 May in Salisbury, Rhodesia. Bats right-handed, bowls right-arm off-breaks.

1982 Makes first-class debut for Old Hararians.

1984 Moves to England and makes County Championship debut for Worcestershire.

1987 Named as one of Wisden's Five Cricketers Of The Year.

1988 Scores 405 not out against Somerset at Taunton.

1991 Makes his one-day international debut for England against the West Indies at Edgbaston after serving a seven-year qualification period.

1991 Makes Test debut against the West Indies at Headingley, scoring 6 in both innings.

1993 Scores maiden Test hundred against India in Mumbai. His 178 there remains his highest Test score.

1998 Becomes the 24th player - and the third fastest after Sir Donald Bradman and Denis Compton - to score his 100th first-class hundred, for Worcestershire against Sussex, aged 32 years and eight days.

2001 Plays his last Test match for England, against Sri Lanka at Kandy, scoring 0 and 16. His Test batting average stands at 34.40, having scored 2,993 runs in 93 innings. In one-day internationals he scored 3,112 runs at an average of 38.41.