Next in our series celebrating legends of club cricket, Scott Oliver profiles a Birmingham League run-machine who loved nothing better than taking on the quicks, however lofty their reputation.
If the record of its clubs in the National Knockout is any yardstick, the Birmingham League was far and away the strongest in the country between 1983 and ’96, when it provided seven winners and four runners-up. And the Birmingham League’s strongest batsman over those years – at least in the opinion of Dave Houghton, the ex-Zimbabwe skipper who spent three years at West Bromwich Dartmouth – was Steve Dean, a schoolmaster at Denstone College in the Staffordshire Moorlands.
His 1993 aggregate of 1,163 (another club record) was the second-highest by an amateur player, and one of only 12 times the four-figure mark has ever been achieved in the top division (he made 997 in 1995, too). Graeme Hick managed it, while Andy and Grant Flower scored 1,024 and 1,018 respectively in 1995. Decent company, then.
Read the first profile of this series here:
https://www.wisden.com/stories/your-game/club-cricket/wisden-club-cricket-hall-fame
