The Wisden Club Cricket Hall of Fame: Harshad Patel

Published in issue 36 of Wisden Cricket Monthly (October 2020)

When a 37-year-old Harshad Patel took strike for Herefordshire on a hot June afternoon in 2001, trying to chase down Middlesex’s daunting total of 278 in a C&G Trophy clash, and having made 1, 3, 2 and 0 in his four previous List-A innings (after starting with 63 against Glamorgan), little did he know he was about to underpin the most dramatic Minor Counties giant-killing of them all, scoring 68 and earning himself Player of the Match.

It was the high point of his 20-year Minor Counties career, which included two Lord’s finals – the first lost, the second won as skipper – a shared championship in 2002, in which he made 84 and 26 in the drawn final against Norfolk, and a golden year in 1995, when he churned out 1,093 runs, the first batsman for 16 years to break the 1,000-run mark. “I missed the whole of the 1993 season with a prolapsed disc in my back and was told I’d never play sport again,” he says, “so everything after that was a bonus.”

Born in Kenya, Patel arrived in the West Midlands as a three-year-old, cricket already in the blood (his father played for East Africa and cousin Dipak played for New Zealand). His first club cricket was at West Bromwich Dartmouth – the professional, Vanburn Holder, who umpired the Middlesex C&G game, gave him his first bat, ‘Big Bertha’, which he had used in his last Test innings – and he remains as keen and fit as ever, over 40 years of Birmingham League (BDCL) cricket later.

He moved to Stourbridge in 1986, winning the National Knockout in his first season, contributing 54 in the final against Weston-super-Mare at Lord’s. There were two BDCL titles in the next three seasons, too, the only ones of his career, and a personal-best aggregate of 975 – pretty handy in a league, the country’s oldest, in which only 12 men have broken the four-figure mark. “I missed a couple of the bank holiday games because of playing Minor Counties,” he says ruefully.

After 10 years at Stourbridge, he spent another 10 at Old Hill, followed by spells at Himley and Smethwick, and second stints back at West Bromwich Dartmouth, Old Hill and Stourbridge, where he is today. Standouts memories from the hundreds of BDCL games he has played include making 80 against a Warwickshire Second XI side that had Allan Donald and Gladstone Small taking the new ball, and 67 against a Smethwick side whose opening attack was Kabir Ali and Wasim Akram.

Patel was a teenage triallist at Worcestershire, eventually earning a one-year deal in 1985, aged 21, and sharing a house with Graeme Hick and Steve Rhodes. Opportunities were limited, though, with a sole firstclass outing bringing him 39 against Cambridge University.

“It just fell my way,” he says of his brief professional career. “It was never something I really wanted or felt passionate about. I got told I was being released about two weeks after scoring 100 against Leicestershire twos: Phil DeFreitas and George Ferris, who bowled the quickest spell I ever faced. Mainly, I used to taxi around the coach, Basil D’Oliveira. He’d drink, and I’d drive.”

Patel represented the England Amateur XI against the Pakistanis in 1992, but the rest of his higher-level cricket was restricted to Herefordshire, for whom he eventually called time in 2011, aged 47. He had been the ECB’s cricket development officer, and later became a coach. “I was the first person to win the Minor Counties Knockout as both captain and coach,” he says proudly. “The final, in 2016, was my last match as Herefordshire coach.”

It has been a long and distinguished career, with still a few chapters remaining. “I’ve always said that as soon as I let anyone down in the field then it’s time to pack it in,” he says, although the inevitable limitations of ageing have been reckoned with: “I used to expect two decent knocks in three, but now it’s more like one in five!”