It occurs to One that maybe Colin Croft, the former West Indies fast bowler of the late seventies and early eighties, was a man for the times. With twenty-seven Tests and one hundred and twenty-five wickets at an average of 23.30 to his name, not only was he a speed sphering great, here was a character beholden to the fine art of the shoulder charge. In Cricket of all sports. A game whereby the only contact is, supposedly, between willow and leather, the bruising of leather upon fragile skins, and unless some fiery speedster unintentionally let’s rip with a beamer aimed at a batsman’s noggin and swells that noggin larger than said batsman’s average – not hard in some cases, admittedly – a shoulder charge is generally not an anticipated outcome within a day’s play. Even with a five-pronged attack of Roberts, Marshall, Holding, Garner and Croft engendering fear upon the mean strips of Worldly pitches the globe over, no one really expected to see shoulder on shoulder action at Christchurch’s Lancaster Park in 1980. Fred Goodall, the umpiring recipient of Croft’s unwelcome attention, certainly wasn’t expecting the unexpected. At 6ft 5”, though, Croft would surely have made a fearsome forward within the Rugby League fraternity back in an era where the shoulder charge was nothing more than the equivalent of air kissing. Having more than one string to your bow and all that. These days, air kissing – let alone the shoulder charge - would be deemed too brutal. Alas, the shoulder charge is supercharged with connotations of long-term brain damage, and has been banned – And fairly, too. So, there probably wouldn’t be much of a future for Croft in modern sport. Even Cricket, these days, take a somewhat dim view of such deity’s as sledging let alone physical harassment. But with that average of twenty-three, a fine bowler the West Indian was when he was concentrating fully on the intricacies of his craft. Best we remember Croft for the good. Because pace bowling was clearly a craft for Croft.