Brief profile of Chris Adams by Matthew Reed

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Player:

CJ Adams

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DateLine: 19th October 2005

 

Chris Adams is a heavy scoring, occasionally awesome county batsman. However, his international career was mostly a disappointment, as one too many leaden footed drives at balls outside off stump saw him dismissed cheaply too many times, although in scoring 16 in his debut innings (in the 1st Test of England’s Millennium tour to South Africa) after walking to the crease with the score reading 2 for 4 he hardly did worse than those who had gone before him. If technically he was imperfect, his temperament meant he took a step back from no one. As the junior player in the Derbyshire dressing room, he once castigated his far senior team mates for their moaning. In the 1993 B & H Cup Final he confronted Wasim Akram over lunch after a beamer from the left arm quick. His siding with the unpopular Dean Jones/Les Stillman regime at Derbyshire led to such ostracisation that new players to the team were warned they were gambling with their careers by even socialising with Adams. Although the international disappointment which followed his move to Sussex could have soured his career, redemption more than arrived with his captaining of Sussex to their first ever county championship in 2003, a feat made all the more remarkable by the fact that he kept the team upbeat and winning despite his own battles with his form, which he eventually overcome after intense and near obsessive net practice. Adams should have perhaps been kept for the one day international arena, where his aggressive instincts, handy medium pace and high quality fielding would surely have been well suited. Instead he played the same number of Tests as he did one dayers (5), a quirky statistic in an era where ODI's so proliferate

 

(October 2005)

(Article: Copyright © 2005 Matthew Reed)