Ted Dexter

Wisden overview
There was no more exhilarating sight in English cricket than Ted Dexter when he was savaging fast bowling. Though he had the patience and technique to develop a long innings or fight a rearguard action according to the position of a match - six of his nine Test hundreds were bigger than 140 - it was the naked power of his driving on the counter-attack that fired the imagination. An athletic six-footer with something of the feline grace and strength of the golfer Tiger Woods, Dexter's most famous innings was the 70 he smashed, from 73 balls, off Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith, after coming in when England were 0 for 1 in the 1963 Lord's against West Indies. In county cricket, Dexter was the only batsman who habitually dominated Derek Underwood, regularly scoring hundreds for Sussex against Kent. In 1968, on his first Championship appearance after two years of semi-retirement, he blasted them for a devastating 203 which immediately won him back his Test place. Dexter was a magnificent allround games player. His next-best game was golf - he won the Oxford & Cambridge President's Putter three times, the last time at the age of 52 - and he was arguably the leading cricketer-golfer Britain has ever produced. Early retirement gave "Lord Ted" scope to turn his restless mind to many interests, among them forming a PR company and covering cricket as a broadcaster and writer. In 1989 a new cricket post in cricket was created for him, the chairmanship of the "England Committee", for which he did much important groundwork for the future. But in his twin role as chairman of selectors, his judgment let him down. A sequence of glaring mistakes, culminating in the omission of David Gower and Jack Russell from Graham Gooch's 1992-93 touring team to India, led to Dexter's resignation in 1993 after Australia thrashed England for the third time in successive Ashes series. John Thicknesse