Best of the Rest XI

[jaybro]

Dont understand why they couldn't have more than 1 player per team but an interesting side anyway.


http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/co ... 62995.html

[brmtaylor.com admin]

Tikolo was a gun. Imagine how much he would have thrived playing in a professional setup.
He deserved to finish his career with a First Class average of over 50. I think he played until he was 38 or 39; had he retired even just a couple of years earlier he probably would have.

A few of those mid-90s Kenyan's were pretty good, come to think of it. Even guys like Thomas Odoyo could have gone on to become very good international players had they been born in a Test playing country.

[jaybro]

Maurice Odumbe was pretty good before he decided to fix matches lol

its a real shame to see the state of Kenyan cricket Watching them make the semis in the 03 WC was so enjoyable and I really thought they were going to kick on, Im sure there were even calls for them to get test status .....

Ravi Shah was also very classy and could have made it in test cricket ..... should have defected to Zimbabwe lol

[samedwards]

That was one of the best Associate teams ever. Kennedy Otieno, Ravindu Shah, Steve Tikolo, Maurice Odumbe, Hitesh Modi, Thomas Odoyo, the Suji brothers, Asif Karim,what a team.

Though to tell the truth, the situation is a lot different now. At that time, Kenya was the only competitive Associate member. We have now 3-4 Associate teams who are good enough to upset Full Members regularly. And just when the level of Associate cricket is improving, the ICC decides to cull them from the World Cups.

[foreignfield]

Tendo shouldn't be in that list, Roland Lefebvre would have been a much more reasonable pick.

Tendo might be one of the best 'players from a Test nation who weren't good enough to make it in their own Test playing enviroment and therefore decided to disvover their emotional attachment to the associate country of their forebears in order to play professional County cricket', but personally I would put Michael di Venuto (Australia and Italy) ahead of him.

.. and Kenya, what joy and what a shame.

[foreignfield]

Btw, I remember a few decent cricketers who never got a chance to play Test cricket because they represented arguably one of the best Associate teams ever, such as Duncan Fletcher or Kevin Curran, who would merit a place in that list.

[eugene]

At the time we thought the 2003 CWC Kenyan team was the start of something big. However if we had dug a bit deeper we would have realised that it was the end of something big. It was a golden generation of Kenyan cricketers, but most of the team were aging with few replacements in the system. I guess ZImbabwe in 1999 were a similar situation.