Chris Tavaré

Christopher James Tavaré (/ˈtævəreɪ/;), (Born 27 October 1954, in Orpington, Kent) is an English retired cricketer who played in thirty-one Tests and twenty-nine One Day Internationals between 1980 and 1989. His style of play was characterised by long periods at the crease and a relatively slow rate of run-scoring.

Life and career

Tavaré was educated at Sevenoaks School and St John's College, Oxford, where he graduated with a degree in zoology. He played cricket for Oxford University, Kent and Somerset as an attacking right-handed batsman.

He adapted his natural game to meet the requirements of the Test side, becoming a notorious blocker. In 1981 against Australia at Old Trafford he scored 69 and 78, but was at the crease for twelve hours. His 50 in five hours and fifty minutes, against Pakistan in 1982, was the second slowest in the history of the English game. Among his slowest innings was a score of 35 runs in six-and-a-half hours at Madras in the 1981/2 season. In 2012, Alex Massie wrote that, for Tavaré, scoring runs seemed "a disagreeable, even vulgar, distraction from the pure task of surviving". The Test selectors dropped Tavaré in 1984, after he had made 25 Test appearances, following another time-consuming score of 14 against the Sri Lankans.