David Gower hit his very first Test delivery for four
At Edgbaston in 1978, a young left-hander from Leicestershire pulled the first ball he ever faced in Test cricket, from Pakistan's Liaqat Ali, to the boundary. David Gower went on to make 58 that day and 8,231 Test runs overall, becoming one of the most elegant batsmen England has produced.
His path was far from direct. Born in Tunbridge Wells, he spent early childhood in Dar es Salaam, where his father worked for the Colonial Service, then won a scholarship to The King's School, Canterbury. He was dropped from the rugby team for 'lack of effort', missed a place at Oxford, and abandoned law at University College London after six months, choosing instead to play for Leicestershire, at first for £25 a week.
Wisden named him a Cricketer of the Year after 1978, describing a 'precocious breed of stroke-players' and noting that on the rare sunny days of that wet summer, the sun seemed to settle on Gower's blond head. Only Jack Hobbs scored more Test runs against Australia than his 3,269, and he once went 119 consecutive Test innings without a duck, a record as of February 2021.
Captaincy was bittersweet. Gower led England to victory in the 1985 Ashes, but two 5–0 defeats by the West Indies, in 1984 and 1985–86, cost him the job. Brought back for the 1989 Ashes, he was soon replaced by Graham Gooch, and friction between the two helped end his Test career in 1993. In his last first-class match that September, playing for Hampshire, he scored a farewell 134 against Gooch's Essex.
Afterwards he became a popular Sky Sports commentator, nicknamed 'Lord Gower' by colleagues for his public school polish and distant aristocratic relations. His autobiography recounts that family land in Pembrokeshire was once gambled away by an ancestor in a moment of boredom. He joined the ICC Hall of Fame in 2009 and was picked in England's greatest Test XI in 2018.
Source: David Gower
