Forty years ago this week, Lancashire's Frank Hayes was rewarded for some fine county form with a Test debut against the West Indies at The Oval. After scraping together only 16 in his first innings, falling victim to Andy Roberts, he went on to make 106 not out in the second, running out of partners as Keith Boyce led the attack to victory. I was young at the time but remember what fuss was made at the time. Then, as now, dashing blonde strokemakers tended to win more headlines than those of darker hair or less flair with the bat (he did look uncannily like a hairier version of Joe Root!) and Hayes was seen as the future of English cricket. He was already in his mid-twenties so no spring chicken but it was the way he made his runs which grabbed the attention.
However, after that lauded start, he played only a further eight Tests. His misfortune was that all were against the emerging West Indian pace onslaught. A terrible Caribbean tour removed him to the sidelines until his recall in 1976, when Roberts, Holding, Holder and Daniel ended his international career for good. Those subsequent matches yielded exactly the same number of runs as his first, including six ducks.
A hundred on debut is rightly considered a big deal, but it's quite common. Indeed, many all-time greats as well as long-forgotten talents have achieved the feat. Lawrence Rowe's double- and single-century in 1972 was one of the greatest starts to a Test career but he never quite maintained that excellence, partly due to injuries but also strong competition for the opener slot. Mathew Sinclair, Brendon Kuruppu and Jacques Rudolph each opened their account with 200s. Young stars who started with three figures and went on to even bigger things include Gordon Greenidge, Javed Miandad, Saurav Ganguly, Peter May, Younis Khan and Michael Clarke.
Interestingly, quite a few of England's current crop made spectacular beginnings with the bat. Alastair Cook (Nagpur, 2006, alongside a first-innings 60) is probably no surprise, as is his fellow opener that day and another future skipper, Andrew Strauss. Jonathan Trott famously achieved the feat with a super-cool 119 in an Ashes clincher in 2009. Two years earlier, a certain Matt Prior clubbed 126 not out in 128 balls in the first innings against the West Indies. He wasn't alone that game as Cook, Collingwood, Bell and Pietersen all scored centuries although a draw was the result.
With such a settled side I suspect it could be a while before another England batsman hits a three-figure score on his debut but the likes of Hamish Rutherford and Shikhar Dharwan (in what remains his only Test so far) show it still can be done in 2013 forty years after Frank Hayes' brief spell in the spotlight.
