IT IS TYPICAL of this epic, prolonged, and particular odyssey that in the middle of the year in which 33-year-old Angus Fraser heaved himself onto the topmost plinth of the pantheon – rated alongside the contemporary legends, Ambrose, McGrath and Donald– he should not only have been fretting in July but, as he admitted, `near certain' that he was going to be told, probably once and for all, `thanks Gus but no thanks'.

Mercifully, the selectors did not ditch Fraser for the Trent Bridge Test. But his pre-selection antennae had been whirring and buzzing; no-one's are more sharply tuned than Gus's and he could read the runes and sense the signals. `Even great friends, when they think you are in for the chop, shuffle around apologetically,' he says, `never wanting to catch your eye, not bringing you into relevant conversations.' When it comes to selection, Angus Fraser can sniff the zephyrs all right. They have swirled breezily hot and cold in his direction before, ever since his first appearance for England. They have buffeted him, bent him, and sometimes, seemingly and assuredly snapped him.

The wider world had first caught sight of Fraser in the third Ashes Test of 1989 at Edgbaston. He came on first change after Graham Dilley and Paul Jarvis and at once the appealingly solemn young man – a parsimonious grouchiness already about him – took a notable first wicket when he clean-bowled Steve Waugh; the Australian's first Test dismissal in England after 584 deliveries and 393 runs. Fraser's celebrations were muted: he was shy, sure, and on his best behaviour, but why go ape, unCorked if you like? Hadn't he been picked (he might have said born) to bowl batsmen out for England?

It was, nevertheless, an illustrious scalp for a start, and the youngster's diligent figures of 33–8–63–4 (those if Dilley, the injury-wracked strike bowler, were 31–3–123–2) gave notice at once that he had set his compass unerringly straight and on course, steady-as-she-goes, and that he could more than likely be a fixture for England all through the next decade.

Serene? Through the decade? Don't mock the poor fellow so. Can you think of a better word than `vicissitudes'?

New bug: a fresh-faced Fraser made his Test debut against Australia in 1989

No, nor can I, so it will serve well here, for they are things that poor Gus has suffered in the cause of England and his cricket in the ten summers since, up to and even past that heady Sabbath half-hour this August 1998 at his beloved Lord's itself when, on `twelfthers' duty in England's one-dayer against Sri Lanka, he loped around the boundary-rope, a good Samaritan with a water-bottle to refresh Alan Mullally far across the ground at long leg. And as Fraser was recognised so the acclaim, warm and noisy, was picked up and passed on – a mini-Stanmore Wave – first by the group in front of the Tavern, and then by the tiered throng along the whole length of the Mound Stand – until, in no time, the ringed ampitheatre itself took up the clamour of fondness and gratitude till it seemed to hang, happy and content in a proscenium of approbation, over the expanse of the huge arena itself. Meanwhile, in the middle – and in a vacuum – a serious game of cricket was continuing, unregarded, almost unnoticed. I cannot remember a similar showstopper by a non-participant since John Arlott took his bow at the end of his final commentary stint during the afternoon's play in the 1980 Centenary Test. Then, again, reality and supposedly crucial matters were momentarily suspended and all Lord's, and time itself, stood back to savour more compelling and valuable things.

This Sunday in August it went on and on … If giraffes can be sheepish, well here was that very similehybrid. With 30,000 pairs of eyes and a few television cameras trained on him, the object of the adulation did not know where to look. A small boy seized the moment and hopped over the fence with an autograph book. `Sorry, not now, sonny,' motioned the hero, quite unlike him, but then the whole passage was quite unlike anything before. Matey, loving, cheerily-chastising boos greeted the refusal of his signature. Fraser watered Leicestershire's leftie at long leg; then he returned to seek out the schoolboy and his book – and as he then continued back along the boundary edge to the pavilion sanctuary there were two or three more pit-stop signing sessions, all the while the acclaim following, encircling him as if he was an emperor, promenading through his people, on return from some great and far distant crusade. And in a way, he was … for in a matter of months, winter and summer, Fraser's uplifting cricket had, well, mightily uplifted England's cricket. And, by golly, it had needed someone to do just that.

To stop in its tracks in high summer a packed, panama-hatted Lord's in all its swankpot Gloria in Excelsis was quite something for a one-time apprentice of the place, a rude mechanical, a bootboy and 2nd XI gofer. `It was both wonderful and highly embarrassing at the same time,' said Fraser. But just as that one-man tattoo-and-marchpast at Lord's on August 16 might have seemed all very uncharacteristic, unbuttoned, and un-English, what it actually did was plug into that definable and definite new spirit which is (to coin a phrase) abroad in England as the century runs to its end. Culturally, self-regardingly, there is a hunger for heroes who are patently not of `them' but `one of us'– and if by his own sweat, toil and skill, Fraser has banged and battered himself to become the very best performer of his kind that there is, with results to prove it, well, England don't need Messrs Gilbert and Sullivan to write it for them any more, they'll belt it out, full tarrara-boomptyay themselves, thank you very much …

For he might have been a Roos-ian,

A French or a Turk or Pross-ian,

Or perhaps It-al-ian …

But it's greatly to his credit –

He remains an Eeeeng-lish-maan …

In this year, Gus Fraser has become England's biggest taker of wickets since Ian Botham began to overtake the previous immortals. Although Angus might be a different type of Merrie Englander to The Legend, he and Botham come from precisely similar and solid yeoman's stock. Oddly, as the crow flies, Botham and Fraser were born less than 20 miles from each other: Ian in Heswall in 1955, Angus just north-east across the Mersey ten years later, at Billinge. It is a long story …

Don't ever write him off: Fraser was man of the match in the Oval Test of 1993, where left he finished the game with the wicket of Warne Top left Fraser bowls for Middlesex in 1992, the year he returned from a devastating hip injury

 WISDEN-BROWSING for one-liners is fun. Look up those resonant with potential, perhaps, but soon to be wayside fallers. Or log the totally unconsidered. In recent years, I've been particularly fond of page 801 in the 1970 Almanack: last line in the Essex 2nd XI batting averages: `G Gooch played in one match but did not bat.' Another favourite had its 21st birthday this year – from the 1977 Almanack, page 621: ` Oxford University v Gloucestershire. At Oxford, May 11 … A Border not out … 15'; or how about Wisden 1974, page 716, `John Player Sunday League. Sussex v Somerset. At Hove … I Botham lbw b Buss … 2'?

Eleven Almanacks later, in 1975, Lancashire's tiny settlement of Billinge gets its chance for immortality. But Wisden, wouldn't you know, mis-spells it – in this very first mention, on page 475, at the bottom of the Middlesex 1st XI batting averages: `Also batted … ARC Fraser (Billings) played in one match but did not bat.'

The Gus Trundle: Fraser in his debut Test at Edgbaston top Dean Jones is caught behind at Melbourne, 1990–91

Further down the page –`Also bowled … ARC Fraser 34–7–124–1'. The whopping great size-13 Cornish pasties that Angus calls his boots were up and, er, plodding.

Billinge, the mis-spelt birthplace, is deep in rugby-league country, between Wigan and St Helens, and near enough to Liverpool to give Fraser a good sound reason for his keen and lifelong support of Anfield's soccer Reds. Angus Robert Charles was born on August 8, 1965, but even before his brother Alastair (also to play for Middlesex and Essex) arrived, Don and Irene had moved south to the bigger Smoke, to the northerly fringes. It was a happy family, a rewarding boyhood. By the time the six-foot-and-climbing gawk had done with formal education (seven O-levels) at Harrow's Gayton High and Edgware's Orange, he had each of those spindly long legs contentedly under the tea-table in the pavilion at Stanmore CC, a comradely club for `serious' cricket where the president was Fleet Street legend Reg Hayter. Kind and encouraging Reg told Angus to bowl straight –`They miss, you hit'– and to keep a detailed diary: Gus always has. Stanmore has been, longtime, a nursery for the Middlesex team. Mark Ramprakash was to follow the same route from Gayton High to Stanmore for whom, at 17, he scored 186 not out on his club debut in 1987.

Young Gus did not fire the Great North Canal with such one-off incandescence, but his cussed miserliness with the ball was filed by Lord's. Fraser proceeded serenely through the Middlesex Schools XI and the county's Young Cricketers – to be sure, later on in the same 1985 Almanack which logs his 1st XI `Also bowled …', Gus appears in the county 2nd XI bowling averages – one PCR Tufnell is top, with 18 wickets at 17.50, and Fraser third with 40, the most by far, at 24.

That first Championship season return – 34–7–124–1 – had been delivered in one match far away from home, on the ancient sporting paddock by the sea at Swansea. It was Wednesday June 27, 1984, and Middlesex were, of necessity, on their travels, for it was the very eve of the England- West Indies Test at Lord's, that memorable one which turned out, at blazing curtain-call the following Tuesday, to be `Greenidge's Match'.

At Swansea, the debutant made his curtsey – sharing the new ball with Neil Williams – and also an immediate impact by clean-bowling `Ponty' Hopkins for 5. Then the pitch, flat as a beach, took command and the rookie must have realised that it was a batsman's world, and that he had a long and lonely career-furrow to plough, into the wind as well. In a run-glut draw on those three unconsidered for-West days, Alan Jones fashioned one of his unbothered centuries for Glamorgan, Rodney Ontong took it on with an undefeated 204, and, lo and behold, for Middlesex Phil Edmonds piled in with 142 not out at No. 8 in the visitors only innings – probably as a Mr Toad-like poop! poop! to Glamorgan's seething mid-on, his former county and England colleague Mike Selvey, now captaining Wales, to all intents. As it happens, the draw ensured a Selvey V-sign because Middlesex ended a run of 11 consecutive wins against Glamorgan. Whatever, young Fraser was enthralled.

As it happened, an imminent further change of job was to result in Selvey becoming, Boswell-like, the week-in week-out chronicler of the rest of Fraser's cricketing life. Well, it takes one to spot one, if you're a cussed new-ball, wrong-end sweat and old soldier, wearing, alternately, the three seaxes or the three lions embroidered at your breast.

By the time. the following May, that Fraser played his second and next Championship match – also, oddly enough, away at Glamorgan, taking four wickets this time – Selvey had given up playing to write for The Guardian, and duly became cricket correspondent in the grand unbroken line of Cardus, Rowbotham, Arlott, Fitzpatrick and Engel. It was Selvey's gruffly proud, avuncular enthusiasms about his callow successor which lit up his early work. And because he knew all about the precise matters in hand, the bottle and skill and perseverance it entailed, Selvey's daily judgement on, and appreciation for, the young bowler became cut-out-and-keep stuff. For instance, here's Selvey, memorably, on The Fraser Action or, rather, The Gus Trundle:

`… [It] begins with a shuffle, and gathers momentum as he picks up his size-13s and leans forward like a trawlerman breasting a brisk nor'easter. It is all rather inelegant and unathletic: a man trampling through a nettlebed pursued by a swarm of bees. This is only the prelude, though. He hits the crease with a minimum of elevation, and his delivery stride – short by any standard, let alone a man approaching six-and-a-half feet – scarcely spans the width of the crease. There is no resistance in his action and he bowls through his run rather than setting himself. Nor does he bend his back. Not much for the purist so far. But now something happens. His front arm reaches out and inscribes an imaginary line to a point just outside the batsman's off stump, tugging his bowling arm after it in a replica arc so high that his knuckles could snag on the clouds and pull them down. Unencumbered by being yanked out of plane, the ball can only follow the line. The geometry of it all is simple, and the result predictable, but it is a gift given to few.'

But we leap ahead of ourselves.

Such a delivery action could cause awful problems to a padded opponent 22 yards away. But it, or matters related, were also soon causing problems to the body of the pony who propelled it. That one four-wicket match in 1985's May at Cardiff (where, by the way, `Ponty' again went quickly … lbw for 3) was Fraser's only Championship appearance that summer, and though he took another 40-odd wickets for the 2nd XI, his back was increasingly giving him and his physio cause for concern. He played only five first-team matches in 1986 – after which Terry Cooper, writing Middlesex's report for Wisden, noted: `Alastair and Angus Fraser, especially Alastair, hinted that the pace-bowling future is bright.' The following year, however, with Alastair now consigned permanently to the 2nd XI, Cooper was enthusing with enlightened prophecy: `Simon Hughes having an unproductive summer, 21-year-old Angus Fraserunscheduled heavy workload. He responded with accuracy and fortitude, despite having recently recovered from a stress fracture of the back, and became a dependable first change in the attack.' Ah, precisely, `accuracy', `fortitude', `dependable': the three qualities around which this hymn is hummed, this song is sung.

Aforesaid trundler, Master Hughes, whose 24 Championship wickets that 1987 were 20 fewer than Fraser, noticed even more than most that someone seriously threatening had entered Middlesex's cosyish ball-shining fraternity. As he was to write in his memorable, awardwinning memoir:

`My insecurity was compounded by the emergence of a tall, stripling fast bowler called Angus Fraser who made the thing I was incapable of doing – landing the ball consistently in the same place – look as easy as hanging out the washing. Though essentially good-natured, he had the vital weapon in the fast bowler's armoury, grumpiness, and he was soon welcomed into the fold as The Long Streak of Piss. Fraser had no frills. He stuck to the basics and he was, I realised, just the sort of player the hierarchy had been looking for. Reliable, consistent, unadventurous and, above all, accurate. Gatting hated his own hard-earned runs being haemorrhaged in the field and Emburey seemed more satisfied to have bowled a maiden than taken a wicket …'

 IN THE spring of 1988, I went with Middlesex when they practised, pre-season, at the Spanish resort of La Manga. They golfed and netted, bickered and laughed. Noticeably, Gatting and Emburey and coach Don Bennett cooed and clucked over their inelegant colt with the doleful face. That young man in turn, in the evenings, would come down, leave the others to brag and play cards, thrust his long right leg onto the brass footrest running along the bar, sip a beer, and drink in the cricket talk from his ageing colleagues who had seen it all – Pat Pocock and Arthur Jepson and Simon Barnes were there as well – and knew about cricket's merriment, and also its contrary merry-go-round. Gus was different, detached somehow, and, I thought, if Middlesex have their celebrated `Diamond' in Wayne Daniel, well, this boy in his way had the makings of another sort of diamond all right.

Angus went home – now, it seemed, fiddle-fit; he took 80 wickets and finished off with an unfazed and niggardly 3 for 36 (Curtis 4, Hick 4, Weston 31) in Middlesex's Ramps-inspired victory over Worcestershire in the NatWest final. He was ready for Test cricket. The following summer, after being 12th man for the Lord's Test, he was blooded at Edgbaston where, duly, he drew his first blood against Steve Waugh on a roll. Next Test of that bleak 1989 Ashes series, at Old Trafford, saw first the plotting and then the shaming announcement of the latest (and mercifully last) rebel tour of South Africa. Gatting led the misadventure, and during that match, in the England dressing-room his mentor, Emburey, was in Fraser's words `at the centre of everything'. Young Gus, in his second Test, was saddened and disillusioned. `It was as if playing for England didn't mean half as much to them as it did to me.' It was a salutary baptism.

 Fraser missed the final Test at The Oval– twisting his knee in the fifth Test at Nottingham`trying to stop a boundary when Australia were about 600 for 4'– after which David Gower's 146-day second reign as captain came to an end. Graham Gooch replaced him for the West Indian tour, and, at the press conference monarch stopped at Fraser's name and announced, `Angus is any captain's dream.'

 Gooch's side was a brand-new one. After only three Tests, Fraser now found himself the second most experienced bowler after Gladstone Small (six caps). Malcolm and David Capel had just one each. That was the quartet of bowlers Gooch led out on the first morning of the opening Test at Sabina Park and into his famous huddle – an appalled John Woodcock of The Times observed the 11 men forming a human wigwam round their captain in the outfield and memorably noted, `one confidently expected to see a pair of rugger shorts tossed out from among them'.

But it worked – or seemed to have, once a searing, tracer-flat throw from Malcolm at fine leg after a misfield and run out Gordon Greenidge at 60 when the great West Indian openers had threatened to take the match by the scruff there and then. That run-out presaged a remarkable match for Gooch's fledglings – the first Test of the new decade and, for romantics anyway (and Gus remains one of those, whatever his public protestations) probably the most satisfying England victory of the 1990s.

In his 11 overs before lunch Fraser had conceded only 11 runs. In the afternoon he rested in his lair as Small and Capel nipped in to pick up Haynes, Richardson and Best.

The heavy-hocked, ungainly Middlesex bowler came back to greet mighty Richards, first ball, with a lifting fizzer which Russell held but the umpire refused to uphold. But after five boundaries in 31 balls the vengeful West Indies captain was chopped off by Malcolm.

 Fraser clinically polished off the innings, with five wickets for six in only six overs, his boyish face glowing rosier with the exertion of it and the pleasure. And all enacted to the chorus of `Handbrake!'

Matchplay had been limited in the run-up to this first Test and Fraser's size-13s had not been hitting the deck with any of the rhythmic clang he savours. He needs long spells to groove his tunes and, with the one-dayers pre-eminent, he had bowled only 60 intermittent overs (6 for 192) in the tour's first three weeks.

`Gus still had not found his rhythm,' said Gooch. `He wasn't running up confidently, so the ball wasn't coming out right. So in the match before the Test, against a weak Jamaica side, we claimed the extra 14 overs in a dead game to give Gus and Devon a last fullpelt work-out. C'mon Gussie, I wound him up, take the flippin' handbrake off. It stuck, so in the Test every time he began a new over we were all exhorting him with Handbrake off, Gus!'

Those spectators banked around Sabina's deep backward-point boundary that afternoon are still, perhaps, wondering what magic lay in Allan Lamb's twangy South African cheerleading: `C'mon, Gus,'andbryke orf, min!'

`Every bowler can tell you of a dreamlike little session when it all comes together and the wickets fall,' said Fraser. `And don't forget West Indies usually have a longish tail. I particularly recall batting in England's first innings. There was only Devon to follow me and our lead was just on 200, so I'd already put on my bowling boots. Viv looked at them as I came in and as I'd already heard about a nice little developing hole in the pitch on a length, it was no surprise to have him demanding: No walking on the pitch in those bloody boots, Fraser! When Viv demands, you obey. But I thought, They're worried. Even they think we might be winning this.'

The Spectators at Sabina are still wondering what magic lay in Allan Lamb's twangy cheerleading: `C'mon Gus,'andbryke orf, min!'

Touring glory: on his first overseas trip, to the West Indies in 1989–90, Fraser took 5 for 28 in Jamaica

And so they were – Small and Malcolm finishing the match with five wickets each, with Fraser's sublime match return of 6 for 59 in 34 overs ensuring that he and Lamb (132) were first to be joyously dunked in the swimming-pool of the Pegasus Hotel that afternoon. Fraser took five more wickets in the Trinidad Test, before a rib injury not only put him out of the tour but forced him to miss half the following season and the three-Test series against New Zealand. Was he taking that handbrake off too often?

He recovered to enjoy the three Tests against India when, at Lord's, his captain's 333 and all that stole the headlines not only from Gus's eight wickets but from Mohammad Azharuddin's answering century of such dazzling charms that it probably remains, Fraser reckons, the best he has ever bowled to. One can still recall yet another sublime drive leaving Azhar's bat and Gus's unbelieving `teapot' retort, hands on hips in despair, but on that day there was no resulting `drop-kick-into-the-top-corner' with a swing of his right boot at the crease, for this was not a case of furious self-flagellation by the bowler but, more, an incredulity at the wonder of the batsmanship. Fraser's oldfashioned virtues have always included, as a man and an opponent, giving best when it is due, honouring the deserving foe.

Just as many generations of England bowlers had down the century and before, Fraser went to Australia in 1990–91 lauded as an Ashes trump card, only to return as a busted flush. In his case, however, it was a matter not of talent on those different pitches, but of physical injury that had him landing early at Heathrow wondering if he would ever play again. England's optimism had been put out of kilter at once with a spate of injuries – but Gus's crept up on him steadily. He had been having the time of his life: dinner at the Perth home of Dennis Lillee (all-time hero along with Richard Hadlee) and, at Adelaide, his first introduction to a vineyard, a visit which began what has since become one of his most enjoyable hobbies, regular sampling of vineyards' products.

But soon after the first Test (21–6–33–3 in the first innings), in the match against Western Australia, he began to feel an ache in his right hip. He played through it, and a month down the line, in the Christmas Test at the MCG, he bowled 59 overs in the match, took seven wickets, and was cheered off by the vast, generous throng. On the worst days, Gus would bowl from memory rather than give up, but the hip was now giving him serious gyp and he missed the Sydney Test. Some nights he wasn't able to sleep –`It was like I'd pulled a big muscle in my backside.' But he announced himself fit for Adelaide, bowled 49 overs and took one wicket – and then flew home early, well dosed with cortisone as well as despair. He reckoned he had two-and-a-half months to get fit for the English season. It was more like two-and-a-half years till he would play serious cricket, for England anyway.

Gus refutes the charge that captain Gooch (for whom his high regard has never faltered) or manager Micky Stewart, bowled him – and his hip –`into the ground'. Says Fraser, `Every decision to play through it was mine. Sure, Graham might not have come up and said OK for another spell, Gus?– but it was me who wanted to carry on all day, that's just my nature.'

Adelaide in January 1991 was his 11th Test. He had taken 47 wickets at 26.70. His 12th was not till the Oval in August 1993. After differing prognoses, surgery, recuperation, more surgery, and more recuperation – crutches, wheelchairs, the lot – a Cambridge surgeon, MR Villar, did the trick: so simple, Tommy Cooper-like, just-like-that! Explained Fraser: `He just re-opened the hip joint, cleared out the junk and debris, and that was it. I felt better at once.'

His return against Australia at The Oval in 1993– on a sudden selector's whim when poor Martin Bicknell cried off at the 11th hour – was a triumph all round (although the rubber was dead and lost). Mike Atherton, who had forged a strong and enduring friendship with Gus during their mutual injury problems, was England's new captain, the match was won handsomely, and Gus's eight wickets in the match not only ensured his place on the West Indies tour, but won him the match award, which he celebrated by (at last) officially proposing to long-suffering Denise behind the pavilion!

The surprising, but gloriously warming, comeback had been sponsored by his best Championship return that August – 7 for 40 against Leicestershire– but in Barbados in April he capped that with a thrilling 8 for 75, the best figures ever recorded by an England bowler against West Indies, and the best for England anywhere since Bob Willis at Headingley in 1981.

Later I asked, `Talk me through it.' His cheeks once again assumed a roseate flush at the memory, and the solemn eyes glazed over. `Well, early on Athers asked me if I wanted to keep in a third slip. I said, Yeah, okay, why not. Next over, Richie Richardson nicked one straight to third slip, didn't he? And then I just took it from there …'

Imperturbable. Just like his bowling. And to think, all his grand feats begin with that hangdog, browbeaten look, that weary turn at his mark, and resigned deep breath, and then that galumphing run – as Robertson–Glasgow said memorably of the `mature' Maurice Tate –`like some policeman easing his conscience by a token pursuit of the uncatchable'. He topped the bowling averages for both the Caribbean tour and the Tests, but in the latter was never in harness with Malcolm. He once said it was his favourite partnership –`when we are both firing it has to be good': one the straight-up-and-down oldfashioned conservative, the other a gloriously haywire stick-it-up-em radical. Later he was to write that Dominic Cork and Andrew Caddick were the only new-ball partners he `rated higher than myself'. This summer, however, he has been unstinting in his praise of, and fondness for, Darren Gough–`It is a pleasure to have him in the side, but I just hope Goughie spares a thought for the old codger at the other end in Australia when the wind is blowing.'

There were quite a few zephyrs left to blow out. For one, Raymond Illingworth was yet to blow in with his `one-man committee'. Fraser was almost the first to be swept away by Chairman Ray's new broom. `Fair enough,' says Fraser, `in 1994 my best return was 3 for 16, and they were tailenders.' Illingworth had said county form, for him, was to be a priority. More crucially – and surprisingly – the chairman could not fathom that almost mopish body language, the lugubrious world-on-my-shoulders demeanour – Eeyore on a particularly Heffalumpy day – which the cricket public, home and abroad, found so fondly engaging.

At nets before a Test in 1994, Raymond nodded across at Gus doing his stretches and muttered, exasperated, to me: `The bugger looks shagged out already, and we haven't even tossed up yet.' Gus took seven wickets in the New Zealand trio of Tests, and another seven in two against South Africa before Illy dropped him for the Oval and, more devastatingly, for the Ashes tour. `The latter decision,' wrote Selvey, `amounts to nothing less than a dereliction of a chairman's duty,' as the astonished chortles began in Australia.

 Fraser kicked his kitchen chairs, and the cat for good measure, and then growled and grumped to the News of the World about not being telephoned and told he was dropped before he heard the news himself on Sky Sports. The headline screamed that Illy had been `Gutless' not to tell him to his face. The board fined him £1000. Gus cannily took a winter job, Denise and baby Alex coming too, with Western suburbs, the Sydney grade team. In no time, England telephoned him – SOS. Malcolm had chicken-pox and McCague was proving expensive. Glory be, old Eeyore took 5 for 75 in the Sydney New Year Test, booked his berth for the next two, and finished with 129.5–25–389–14 in the series.

Not that Illy had actually recanted. And with Keith Fletcher gone, it really was now a committee of one. Fraser, of course, was picked in the 12 for the first West Indies Test at Headingley– and left out on the morning of the match to allow honest Peter Martin a first cap. Without breaking sweat, West Indies sauntered to a nine-wicket victory. Gus came back at Lord's– and took 5 for 66 in West Indies' first innings ( Lara, Adams, Richardson, Arthurton for starters) to set up Cork for his debutant's party piece. Fraser finished the series with 16 wickets, twice as many as anyone bar Cork. But Illy wasn't finished with him yet. For England, the South African tour was a desperate disappointment – the Atherton-Russell partnership, a permanent glory, sure, has since been garlanded with treble resonance because of the horrors that went before and after it. Fraser played in three Tests – 66–21–187–4: pretty good figures for a Timeless Test of old but, to write home about, worth only a postcard in the circumstances of that tour. Illingworth never even considered Fraser for the World Cup.

 David Lloyd arrived to steady the ship. Which he did. But without Fraser. With his 119 Test wickets at 29, good old Gus was consigned to the county motorway egg-and-chips circuit. A fair Test return, more than good-to-middling: but now over and done with.

 Fraser did not feature in 1996. He was nowhere near the frame for the tours of Zimbabwe or New Zealand. The Ashes summer of 1997 passed him by. He was very much `a former England player'.

He should have settled back into Lord's well satisfied, enjoyed the confraternity, worked at his highly promising and amiable journalism, but most of all he should have put his deserving feet up and contemplated in serenity a Test career of some achievement. He was, you might say, the Geoff Arnold of the 1990s – and you can't say fairer than that. Faithful, striving, shirehorses both – and weren't the very two of them nicely stabled together for all time in the immortal log of those 30 or so Englishmen famed for taking more than 100 Test wickets – Fraser 7967 balls delivered for 119 wickets at 29, Arnold 7650 balls for 115 wickets at 28: lying next to each other, peas in the pod for history, for ever and ever, Amen.

If Illingworth's supremoship had, in the end, been totally undermined by his bizarre hunches, now his successors played just one. They recalled Fraser for the West Indies tour of 1998, hinting (just as bizarrely) that he would be `an influence' on the younger and, presumably, hungrier pack of bowlers. Fraser heard the news as he was on his way to Sky TV to comment on the team. At once, he announced: `If you think I'm going for a swan, think again. I'm aiming for 200 wickets, I want to be up there with the great bowlers of all time.' We all smiled benignly … Sure, Gus. Good ol' Gus. No chance, Gus.

The rest, as they say, is … well, logged immutably in gold leaf in the last seven issues of this magazine. Once he had (oh joy and unconfined) taken his 123rd Test wicket – maestro Lara caught by Atherton, for even more pointedly symbolic measure – to overtake Illingworth's Test bag, the plain facts need no further embellishment. He returned from the West Indies as successful as any other England bowler has been in history – 27 wickets at 18 and a phenomenal 20 for 190 in the back-to-back Trinidad matches – though he wept, as well, when his mate Atherton's record stint ended in another defeat. Scarcely breaking stride – although the same, of course, couldn't be said for sweat – Fraser took 24 wickets, by far the most for England, at 20 against the summer visitors from South Africa, helping to ensure the decisive and epic victory at Leeds with 25–9–42–5 in South Africa's first innings.

Triumph secured, Fraser sat in the Headingley dressing-room, his head in a towel. He was weeping once again. Satisfaction and relief. He was right up there – 170 wickets now – with his fellow legends. And proof positive came when all Lord's stood to acclaim him less than a fortnight later.

And more yet to come. Handbrake off, Gus.

`An influence': Fraser went to the West Indies last winter as a minder for the younger bowlers, and came back a matchwinner

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