Stuart Meaker has enjoyed a meteoric rise of late ? from a peripheral figure in a Second Division County Championship side to a first international call-up
If international cricket is about taking your chances when they arrive, Stuart Meaker has already shown an aptitude for explosive first impressions. In the days following his surprise call-up for England's one-day tour of India the talk among Meaker's new team-mates has been of the 22-year-old's feats at an England and Wales Cricket Board net session immediately prior to the squad selection, at which Meaker is said to have bowled with extreme pace and "tickled up a few" of England's batsmen, among them the captain, Alastair Cook.
For Meaker the last six months have been a period of rapid ascent all round, from a peripheral figure in a Division Two County Championship side to a first international call-up in a squad of 15 for the five-match series, which starts on 14 October, and a reputation as the coming man in England's ever-engorging entourage of athletic young pace bowlers.
It is typical that even this break-though call-up should arrive in a mist of hyperbolic Chinese whispers. Meaker has long worn the laurels of the next big fast-bowling thing, first registering as a phenomenon-in-waiting two years ago when he was clocked bowling at 94mph at Loughborough (rounded up, rather excitably, to 96mph by the coach Kevin Shine). It is a reading that makes Meaker the quickest bowler ever timed by the speed guns at the ECB's indoor school, lending a degree of alluring mystique to a young fast bowler with a rugby centre's physique and a level of gymnastic fitness indicative of a very modern kind of cricketer.
For the past two years Meaker has worked closely with the Surrey coach, Ian Salisbury. "He's very quick and he's very dynamic," Salisbury says of a player who also has four first-class fifties and pretensions towards bowling all-rounder-dom.
"Stuart is a true modern-day pro. He works really hard at his game, he looks after his body and he is an immensely strong lad. He hasn't got Chris Tremlett's attributes. Meaks will say he's six foot plus, but he's six foot, and like Brett Lee he has to work hard at moving the ball in the air. He's always been able to bowl quick and he is a 90mph bowler, but he can also swing the ball, conventionally or reverse later on. When he hits his straps and he starts swinging it, he becomes so much harder to play. People like Dale Steyn and Brett Lee, they always seem a bit quicker than people who bowl it gun barrel straight."
Lee is a frequent point of comparison: Meaker has a similar brand of chest-on athleticism, a skiddy angle of attack and a penetrative yorker. He has also been compared, rather hopefully at this stage, to Allan Donald ? albeit this is a comparison with a political tang.
Much has been made by some of the fact Meaker is likely to become the eighth player with South African connections to represent England this summer (the others are Jade Dernbach, Craig Kieswetter, Jonathan Trott, Kevin Pietersen, Andrew Strauss, Matt Prior and Michael Lumb). It is a complex and also a divisive issue, but it is impossible to listen to the Surrey staff talk about their pride in the call-ups of Meaker and Dernbach - both of whom moved to England aged 12 - and maintain with any conviction that these are not English domestic cricketers.
"They've learnt all their cricket over here," Salisbury says. "They've been through the system, all the Surrey age-groups, they've been to school here. It's totally different to someone coming over when they've finished their schooling. Meaks regards himself, like Jade, as very English."
It is perhaps also best seen as a London thing: ever since the first great wave of immigration in the middle of the last century Londoners have been quickest to call those who come from abroad their own. Surrey are not importing these cricketers (Jason Roy is another first-team youngster with south African roots). London, beacon of the colonies, is bringing them. To object to their presence is to stand against half a century of similar global drift.
Moulded by the Surrey academy, refined by stints on the England fast-bowling performance unit and finished by three years in county cricket, Meaker is now the consummate modern English fast bowler and a player who appears to be on a fast-twitch learning curve. As Salisbury says: "He's by no means the finished article. But if you're talking about potential and improvement, we're going to see so much more from him over the next five years."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/oct/01/stuart-meaker-international-england
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