Graham Gooch
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Template:Infobox Cricketer Graham Alan Gooch (born July 23 1953) is a former cricket captain for Essex and England.
Gooch was born in Whipps Cross Hospital, Leytonstone, in East London on 23 July 1953.
Gooch played first-class cricket between 1973 and 2000. His debut in Test cricket came in 1975 against Australia, and was marked with a 'pair'. He scored 6 and 31 in the next game of the series, and was dropped from the side. He was not selected again until 1978. Thereafter, Gooch played for the England cricket team for many years, but blossomed late in his career after being appointed captain. He scored a record 456 runs in the Lord's Test against India in 1990, 333 in the first innings and 123 in the second. This is the only instance in any first-class cricket of a batsman scoring 300 and 100 in two innings of the same match. In the following year against West Indies he scored a match-winning 154 not out, carrying his bat throughout England's second innings against the might of a highly rated pace attack, while only two of his colleagues reached double figures.
Rated among the best batsmen in the world for most of the early 1990s, his skills started to fade as his Test match career went on past the age of 40. After the fourth Test match of the 1993 Ashes series fellow opening batsman, Michael Atherton, was appointed his successor as captain. In 1995, at the age of 42, Gooch retired from Test match cricket as England's all-time highest run scorer. He scored 44,846 runs in all first-class cricket at an average of 49.01, including 128 centuries. Gooch also bowled occasional medium pace, and took over 200 first-class wickets, he could be a prodigious swinger of the ball if conditions suited. In dead matches he could sometimes be seen doing impressions of fellow professionals bowling styles.
Gooch was the backbone of an Essex team that won 6 national championships.
The somewhat charismatic Gooch naturally slipped into a role as a cricket coach, and in the mid-1990s faced with a receding hairline, began promoting hair transplants for a London-based clinic. Two licensed computer games were made by Audiogenic, Graham Gooch Test Cricket in 1985 and Graham Gooch World Class Cricket in 1993.
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