Just look at Graham Gooch: a quiet phlegmatic person whose Test career was like

Just look at Graham Gooch: a quiet, phlegmatic person whose Test career was like an opera - long drawn-out and preposterously plotted, from the two ducks on his debut to the 333 and 123 in the same match, from lording it over the most fearsome attack in history to being humiliated by the medium pace of a man named Alderman. Or look at Jimmy Adams, who, like Gooch, found Test captaincy thrust upon him because the team's main player, an extravagantly gifted left-hander, was having some very mixed results. In person, Adams is self-contained and easy-going: warm, calm and collected. Two years ago we asked him to be the guest star in the annual Wisden cricket match, a role which involves making plenty of small talk, posing for photographs, not getting a hundred (even the ringer is forced to retire at 50), putting up with some hideously inept team-mates (eg, me), and not getting paid, because the game takes place at Sir Paul Getty's ground in the Chilterns, where the house rules state that everyone is an amateur for the day. Jimmy made his 50, took a few wickets, fielded happily in the deep, and chatted to everyone.

The only disappointment was that some of the guests had to be told who he was. After a phenomenal start to his international career (after 24 Tests, he averaged 66), the runs had dried up: he was like Gooch in reverse. Once of Nottinghamshire, now reduced to playing for Sunbury in Surrey and captaining the West Indies A team, he was a 30-year-old has-been.The A team captaincy proved to be a turning point, just as it had, a few years earlier, for Courtney Walsh and Nasser Hussain. It restored Adams to the senior squad for the historic tour of South Africa 18 months ago.

From West Indies' point of view, that tour effectively ended before it began, when the players, led by the captain, Brian Lara, went on strike at Heathrow.For Adams, it really did end before it had begun: he cut his hand badly on the flight to Johannesburg, and never got on the field. The official explanation was that he had been trying to slice open a bread roll at the time. The rumour mill suggested that he might have been trying to prevent a fight between two members of the squad. (Those were the far-off days when not all rumours involved conversations with bookmakers.) Fisticuffs prevention would certainly be more in his nature than spectacular incompetence in the face of a bread roll, but you never know.If that tour had gone well, Jimmy might have been history: there were, as we now know, some brilliant young batsmen waiting their turn.

But West Indies lost the Tests 5-0, and for the home series against the world champions, Australia, Adams' seniority and sang-froid was preferred to the hot-headed exuberance of Ricardo Powell or Wavell Hinds.In four Tests he made only 168 runs, at the duffer's average of 24, and he often had difficulty getting the ball off the square. He had always played within his limitations (straight drive, what's that?); now he was plain limited, and ugly to boot - a crab-like figure, moving only sideways It didn't matter. All West Indies needed was a straight man, a foil to Lara at the peak of his powers Adams was that man. In the second Test, when the Caribbean was still reeling from seeing its team bowled out for 51, he joined Lara at 34 for 4 In a neat piece of maths, they added 344 Adams' share was 94, Lara's 213 West Indies won by 10 wickets. Asked by Wisden to talk through the partnership, Adams heaped praise on Lara, while describing his own contribution as "regular old staid Jimmy Adams shots".They won the next Test too, thanks to the same combination: Lara 153 not out, Adams 38, partnership 133.