Alan Mullally (ENG)
One of the new Lashings World XI squad members for 2008, Alan Mullally was born in Essex but raised in Western Australia, which is where he made his first class debut in 1987. From there, he played briefly for Hampshire and Victoria before taking root at Leicestershire, where he played the bulk of his cricket before returning to Hampshire in 2000 where he saw out the rest of his career, ending with over 1000 career wickets across all forms of the game. A left-arm seamer with the ability to nip the ball back into the right-hander, his main asset was accuracy and economy, maintaining a career economy rate of less than 3 in first class cricket and less than 4 in the one day game. He carried those outstanding figures into the international arena, where he played 19 tests but was better known for his 50 ODIs for England, where his economy helped him to the dizzy heights of world number 2 for a short while. He is also another in a long line of utterly useless tailenders - indeed, in an article on Cricinfo he was voted the worst English number 11 of all time! - although he did play one innings that proved significant. In the series against Australia in 1998, he walked out to bat on the Boxing Day test on the back of a spectacular run of failure: 0, 0, 0, 0, 4 and 0! However, this day turned out to different as he took a couple of swipes at Glenn McGrath and connected, scoring 16 in double quick time. It turned out to be a particularly significant innings for England - they won by just 12 runs.
Click here to see Alan's profile on Cricinfo (opens in new window)
