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Full name Robert John Inverarity
Born January 31, 1944, Subiaco, Perth, Western Australia
Current age 64 years 250 days
Major teams Australia,South Australia,Western Australia
Batting style Right-hand bat
Bowling style Slow left-arm orthodox
Other Coach
Relations Father - M Inverarity
Batting and fielding averages
Mat
Inns
NO
Runs
HS
Ave
100
50
4s
6s
Ct
St
Tests
6
11
1
174
56
17.40
0
1
20
0
4
0
First-class
223
377
49
11777
187
35.90
26
60
251
0
List A
30
28
7
686
90
32.66
0
5
20
0
Bowling averages
Mat
Inns
Balls
Runs
Wkts
BBI
BBM
Ave
Econ
SR
4w
5w
10
Tests
6
5
372
93
4
3/26
3/26
23.25
1.50
93.0
0
0
0
First-class
223
6780
221
7/86
30.67
7
0
List A
30
615
387
15
3/19
3/19
25.80
3.77
41.0
0
0
0
Career statistics
Test debut
England v Australia at Leeds, Jul 25-30, 1968 scorecard
Last Test
England v Australia at The Oval, Aug 10-16, 1972 scorecard
Test statistics
First-class span
1962/63 - 1984/85
List A span
1969/70 - 1984/85
Profile
Almost throughout his long career John Inverarity was a good batsman, but a great captain and theorist, and Australian Test history might be significantly different if Inverarity had been entrusted with the national captaincy during the World Series Cricket schism. Instead the armband passed from 40-year-old Bob Simpson to the rookie Graham Yallop. Mike Brearley's England slaughtered Yallop's lambs 5-1, and many international careers were ended before they should have begun. Yallop himself, a potentially great batsman, never quite recovered. Meanwhile Inverarity, instead of locking intellectual horns with Brearley, was quietly racking up runs and trophies for Western Australia - in five years as captain he won the Sheffield Shield four times. When schoolteaching took him from Perth to Adelaide he just kept on playing, being seen as something of a freak in Australian first-class cricket as he continued, grey-haired and ghostly, into his forties. South Australia duly won the Shield in 1981-82, with Inverarity contributing 348 runs and 30 wickets. By the time he finally retired, in 1985, he had crept past Don Bradman's Shield-record run-aggregate. A brief Test career was long over by then - six matches, the first in 1968 as an opening batsman (he was the last man winkled out by Derek Underwood in that year's Oval epic), and the last in 1972, by which time his slow left-arm bowling was being increasingly used. A couple of inspirational stints as Kent's coach briefly interrupted his career as a headmaster, and he resumed his coaching with Warwickshire in 2004. Inverarity's father was a first-class cricketer too, and his daughter Alison was an Olympic high-jumper.
Steven Lynch
