Let me be your fantasy

Carl Hooper was hoist by his own potential. For most of his West Indies career he was judged by his inability to routinely hit the divine heights of which he was capable. The people of Kent saw Hooper through different eyes. In five years as overseas player between 1992 and 1998 he produced high art in industrial quantities.

You can’t really tell the story of Hooper’s batting through statistics; you might as well try to quantify love. But his Test batting average of 36 has been used in evidence against him so often that it would remiss to ignore a first-class average in excess of 50 with Kent. He also averaged 44 for them in one-day cricket and contributed plenty more as a cunning defensive offspinner and feline slip fielder. And he was the first overseas player to score first-class a century against all 18 counties, a feat he completed in 2003 during a spell with Lancashire.

The first came in his first Championship match for Kent, when he brushed an 82-ball century against Durham. It included five sixes – one of which, off Simon Brown, cleared the 90-foot lime tree at Canterbury’s St Lawrence Ground. Only three or four players, depending on who you believe, ever hit a ball over the tree. Everyone agrees that Hooper was the only Kent batsman to do so.

The style and volume of Hooper’s run-scoring for Kent made him both a fantasy cricketer and a Fantasy Cricketer. In a sense, he had too much ability for his own good. He was one of those batsmen, like Mark Waugh, David Gower and VVS Laxman, whose ethereal talent created unrealistic expectations. Yes, Carl, you’re the only Kent player to clear the Lime Tree, but why can’t you do it again?

“In my coaching career, there were two players I felt were so naturally gifted that the game came too easily to them,” says Daryl Foster, the brilliant Australian coach who brought Hooper to Kent. “One was Carl and the other one was Kim Hughes. I could throw a ball in the same spot in the nets three times and they could hit one ball straight, one behind point and one behind square on the leg side. Those were the options they had. They had this rare ability to see the ball very early and make the game look so easy. So when they got out, people were a bit critical, but that was the flair they had. They were never, ever going to be as consistent as some other players.”

Hooper had a polyamorous relationship with the sublime and the ridiculous. He could have patented the soft dismissal. But it probably says more about us than him that we spent as much time talking about the shot that got him out than the ones that preceded it. Type ‘Carl Hooper Effortless Big 6’ into YouTube and you will see a piece of timing that challenges physics. There were periods in county cricket, especially while facing honest-to-goodness medium-pacers or non-spinning spinners, when he made the straight six a risk-free shot.

He even looked good on Teletext. I remember checking the score one Saturday morning before heading into town to explore the aisles of John Menzies and Woolworths. Kent were 50-odd for two against Sussex at Arundel. Hooper, who came in at No4, was 49 not out.

The disparity between Hooper’s figures at Test and first-class level invited the facile conclusion that he was a flat-track bully. Yet in his international career he took apart most of the greats. One celebrated example came on the first morning of the unofficial world championship between Australia and West Indies in 1995. Hooper walked to the crease with West Indies six for three, and Shane Warne was brought on soon afterwards. Hooper dismissed his first three balls for four.

He was somebody who could score a run-a-ball 150 on a minefield against a World XI or get a pair on a road against Ilford 2nds. “Sometimes the more difficult the conditions, the better people like Hughes and Hooper played,” says Foster, citing Hughes’ epic century against the West Indies at Melbourne in 1981-82. “Their class and pure ability often came out in the more difficult situations, rather than when they went in at 200 for two. That’s probably where they let themselves down – they didn’t cash in when the going was easy.”

It feels apt that the man who dismissed Hooper more than anyone else in international cricket was his antonym, Steve Waugh. Hooper wasn’t mentally weak so much as concentrationally challenged, hence all those soft dismissals. He still played a number of immense innings for Kent. In his first year, a brilliant 131 helped them beat Surrey after following on. In 1994, when Kent trailed Essex by 350 on first innings and the pitch was turning square, Hooper almost pulled off a miracle. He smacked 160 off 149 balls with nine sixes – including a century before lunch, two lost balls and one broken window – and then took three wickets as Essex wheezed to a target of 50 for the loss of six wickets.

Kent batsmen just did not do things like this. Six weeks later Hooper hit 183 off 156 balls against Yorkshire, including a county record 10 sixes. There were many other mighty centuries. Sometimes, just a shot was enough to make it all worthwhile. On a quiet day, in front of a small crowd, Hooper would play a stroke that was never televised or written about, but which owns a little corner of one spectator’s soul. He made the mundane magical.

“There was nothing in the game that he couldn’t do,” says Foster. “He could bat on crook wickets, he could bat on good ones; he could get himself out on good ones! He was always entertaining, whatever he did.”

Hooper might even be one of the great lost fast bowlers. “I saw him in training once and he said, ‘I used to bowl fast’,” says Foster. “I said, ‘Yeah right mate’. He came off the long run and he was as quick as lightning. But doing it all the time was too much hard work!”

Hooper’s inscrutable demeanour, and aversion to certain fitness imperatives, did not endear him to everyone. Yet Foster says he was a joy to coach. “I have nothing but the highest admiration for Carl Hooper. He was a bit different but I got on extremely well with him and thought he was a fantastic bloke. Some people felt he wasn’t wholly committed to the cause but that was just his way. He was a laid-back character with high principles who wanted to do the best for the county and himself. He’s one of the players I still keep in touch with him because I value his friendship so much.”

Foster says he saw Hooper angry on a number of occasions in the dressing-room, usually after a soft dismissal, but never on the field. Generally, however, the frustration of Hooper’s time at Kent was collective rather than individual. They were regularly runners-up, and the only time they did win a trophy during the decade, the 1995 Sunday League, Hooper was on tour with the West Indies.

The memory says Hooper’s big-game record was patchy, though a scan through Wisden shows he was usually one of Kent’s top scorers in such games. It’s just that we wanted – needed – more, especially as Kent often ended up losing. He was the key man in a batting line-up full of muscular batsmen who were just a rung below England class.

“We had a lot of very good players and I loved every one of them,” says Foster. “But we didn’t have a David Gower or a Robin Smith, or Mike Atherton to open the batting. That put a lot pressure on Carl, but I guess that’s the role you take on as the overseas player. You come in as the best player in the team, and there are expectations that go with that. I think largely he fulfilled those expectations. You can’t be too greedy when a bloke averages 50, takes all those wickets and wins games for you. Cricket is entertainment and he certainly entertained. I think the Kent members enjoyed him.”

They did. A player with Hooper’s talent can never truly fulfil his potential, because it is infinite. Kent fans were lucky to see more of it than most.

An earlier version of this article appeared in the Nightwatchman