Ali Brown is at best a footnote in English cricket history, playing 16 ODIs in a five-year span, between 1996 and 2001. However, his average of 22.12, unspectacular as it looks, belied some crucial contributions against top-flight bowling attacks. It is also largely forgotten that Brown made a pair of double-hundreds in one-day cricket, one of them in a 40-over game, at a time when it was far from the norm.

On the latest Wisden Cricket Weekly podcast, Phil Walker, Wisden Cricket Monthly‘s editor-in-chief, questions the treatment of Brown, and wonders what could have been had Brown been given a fair shot. “All I did was slightly adjust the parameters by removing the word international from the term one-day international, and that then left me with Ali Brown, who played, I think, three games in that decade,” Phil said.

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“He played, I think, 16 games all in. He is, I think, one of the most extravagant cock-ups in English history, certainly in my time following the game. He made a brilliant hundred against India to win the game. He made a very good 37 on debut against a very good South African side. He also made 59 in 40 balls against Pollock, Donald and Klusener in a run chase. Three games later, he didn’t play a game, that was it.

“Just remember, this is the bloke who made 203 and 268 in a one-day game, the first one in a 40-over game. This is a bloke who made thousands and thousands of runs at obscenely unusual strike-rates at the time, and showed, on the odd occasion when he was allowed to play one-day cricket, that he had the game against the quicks. So there is no rational reason why he didn’t play a lot of one-day cricket for England.

“He also averaged 43 over the best part of a 20-year first-class career. So he wasn’t just a blind hitter, who, when he got to the top was found out. He was a far better player than that, made over 50 first-class hundreds. So the fact that Brown played only 16 games is a shocker, it’s a joke, it’s ridiculous. Obviously, he’s not in this team, but OD, he’s in my team. He retired in 2011, so he played the whole decade. OD, he’s in my team; ODI, even I’m struggling to justify that one.

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“He made 268 in 2002, 268 in one day, in 50 overs. Three or four years before that, I think in ’98 or ’99, he made 203 in a 40-over game. Pick him whenever, pick him from the time they picked him, I think, ’96, might’ve been slightly later, might be ’98, can’t remember offhand, and then play him. And back him. It was so resonant of England’s muddled stupidity at the time when it came to one-day cricket. It was nothing more than an add-on, an adjunct to the Test side, which is why Brown was inexplicably ignored. But, yeah, play him from the late ‘90s onwards and then play him throughout the decade. And he’d have played a 100 games and he’d have won a fair few of them.”