Loudon sells out

Another story I missed while Sellotaping my cousin naked to a windmill in Norfolk: Alex Loudon has given up his cricket career to become a businessman at the age of only 27. Loudon, you will recall, was touted as a spinning all-rounder for England (he even had a doosra, it was claimed) but he played just the one ODI, was run out without facing a ball, took 0 for 36 in six overs and has slipped back down the queue. A promising career in cricket has thus been cast aside for a job in the City.

King Cricket has done a brilliant rant against Loudon, which I think is worth sharing: "This is why we shouldn't allow Old Etonians to become professional cricketers. What kind of a person gives up professional cricket in favour of 'a career in business'? Well congratulations, Alex. You'll be shaking hands with people for a living before you know it. You can spend the next 30-odd years staring at spreadsheets and having meetings.

"You can buy a pointless grey car and put your frigging golf clubs in the back. You can get a Mont Blanc pen and tell people about how you've got a Mont Blanc pen, watching their eyes glaze over before you've even finished the word 'Blanc'. You can go to bars with your mates, drink terrible alcohol at inflated prices and talk about how you can drive from one miserable office full of idiots to a different miserable office full of idiots faster than they can, learning to distinguish between different pointless grey cars in the process.

"We're sure you'll cheer just as enthusiastically when you get that all-important third quarter contract as you did when you clean-bowled someone in a vital match. We're sure the guys in Human Resources will give you just as much of an ovation as when you single-handedly won a cup match in front of a sell-out crowd."

The departure of Loudon brought Cake to the front of my memory. Not cake in its usual cricketing sense (chocolate frosting or walnut and coffee ideally) but Russell Q Cake, the captain of the rather good Cambridge University side of 1996, perhaps the last rather good one there will ever be, who turned his back on a promising average of 38, with four hundreds, and the prospect of a middling career in county cricket to go and work in industry (for ICI if my memory is right).

The experience of his team-mates in that Cambridge side suggests that Cake was probably right to take the money and run: Ed Smith has been the most successful (he played three Tests for England and now captains Middlesex, having scored more than 1200 runs in the past six seasons) but has not quite lived up to the superb talent he showed as a student batsman; Andy Whittall played for Zimbabwe with rather middling results; Anurag Singh (who had a sponsored car as a student) was released by Notts in 2006 after a career in which he averaged 32; Will House, a brilliant schoolboy batsman, averaged 53 for Cambridge in 1996 but left the game after a disappointing five-year county career with Kent and Sussex; and Steffan Jones, who played for Cambridge in 1997, has had a ten-year career of wandering from county to county, finally returning to Somerset after visiting Derbyshire and Northants on the journey from Taunton.

All of these were supremely talented cricketers - and still are - but they chose a career of frustration in the county pool, while Cake gave that up for a more high-paid, high-powered career. Perhaps Loudon's career move was not so silly after all.

Comments

[Brian Carpenter]

I've also been away, Patrick, so hadn't managed to post anything about Loudon. You have to wonder whether he'll be like one or two other players I can remember from the past such as John Carr and the Sussex opener Toby Pierce who retired to go into the city and then ran kicking and screaming back to cricket when they realised that getting up at the crack of dawn and spending all day in an office wasn't as much fun as playing cricket for a living, even if you get paid a bit more. All in all I think he's being a bit silly and the King Cricket piece hits the nail squarely on the head.

[Peter McGuinness]

What a terrific rant by the King.

One detects a humiliating dismissal in front of the entire office at the hands of a limp middle manager in the King's not too distant past.

The most embarrassing thing for Loudon is that photo! Including your action shot of being caught in the gully from a pull shot Patrick, Loudon's effort (above) appears to be the worst cricket stroke ever captured on film.