The fastest bowler of his generation and one half of cricket's most feared partnership
CricketFor a few brutal summers in the mid-1970s, Jeff Thomson was the most frightening sight in world cricket.
A Sydney boy with a slingshot action and a blacksmith's shoulders, Thommo burst into the Australian side in 1974 and proceeded, alongside Dennis Lillee, to dismantle England 4-1 in the 1974/75 Ashes. The phrase 'Lillee and Thomson' entered cricket's vocabulary alongside Laurel and Hardy. Batsmen genuinely feared for their safety, and not without reason.
Thomson took 200 Test wickets for Australia at an average of 28 across 51 Tests, with a strike rate that many modern fast bowlers would envy. His action was unorthodox, almost javelin-like, and generated speeds that were measured at well over 90 miles per hour in an era when nobody bothered with speed guns. He played through serious shoulder injuries and still managed to terrorise opposition line-ups into the 1980s.
Off the field Thomson has always been refreshingly blunt, a country-raised fast bowler with no interest in gilding the lily. His accounts of touring with that great Australian side, of bowling to Viv Richards and Sunil Gavaskar, and of the unspoken rules of 1970s Test cricket are the stuff of after-dinner legend.
At Steam he arrives with a lifetime of stories and the directness of a man who never needed a run-up to say what he meant.
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