Aleem Dar
Striker
The batsman Adrian Shankar has been released by Worcestershire after barely two weeks with the club and there is more to the departure than a simple change of mind.
The background of Shankar, who represented Worcestershire in the CB40 and County Championship last week, and whose deal was terminated without further comment on Thursday, has started to unravel. He's actually three years older than he's been saying and has talked his way into a county contract through a mixture of bluff and bravado.
Do you remember Ali Dia? He appeared very briefly for Southampton in the 1996-97 Premier League season after convincing the team's manager, Graeme Souness, that he was the cousin of former FIFA player of the year, the Liberian George Weah .
It turned out that Dia's story wasn't true. Not only that, but he wasn't very good at football. Brought on as a 33rd minute substitute, Dia was subsequently substituted himself 20 minutes later. He never played again. Well, now cricket has its own version.
Worcestershire only signed Shankar on May 11. In the press release that announced his two-year contract, the club stated that Shankar is 26 years old and that's he's just returned from a prolific winter in Sri Lanka. It also stated that he was in demand from several other counties.
None of it is true. Shankar is actually 29 and, while he may have played some cricket in Sri Lanka, it was not at first-class or an equivalent level.
Shankar actually left Bedford School (he played in the same team as Alastair Cook) after his A Levels in 2000, made his second XI debut in 1999 (for Nottinghamshire) and his first-class debut in 2002. He's subsequently played second XI cricket for Sussex, Worcestershire, Lancashire and Middlesex.
Might he have been a youthful prodigy, who made his second team debut aged just 14? No. When Shankar registered at Cambridge and Bedford, he gave his date of birth as May 1982. Only much later did it slip to May 1985.
Shankar, however, has had a good try at re-writing history. Not only has he produced identification apparently proving that he was born in 1985, but he has explained his past by suggesting he might have been the youngest Cambridge University captain in history. At the time of writing, even the Cambridge University Cricket website (www.cucc.net) carried that myth. Meanwhile, a little research proved that several of the players who was supposed to have played against in Sri Lanka were actually playing elsewhere on the same days.
Among other eye-catching claims, Shankar said he played tennis to national standard as a junior, that he was in the Arsenal academy at the start of Arsene Wenger's tenure and that his career progression has been held-up by an 18-month bout of glandular fever.
Whatever the truth in any of those claims, Shankar isn't very good at cricket. After a decade in the game, he had a first-class average of just 19 and has passed 50 only once in 21 innings. He made 143 in the Varsity Match of 2002 (as a 17 year-old, if you believe his version of events) but, as Chris Scott, the Cambridge UCCE coach, said: "The bowling was unbelievably bad. He was a poor player and there's no way I would have recommended him. "
Oddly, however, when Shankar signed for Lancashire, the Cambridge coach was quoted in a press release referring to him as one of the finest young players the side had seen since John Crawley. "I phoned Lancashire and made it clear that I'd never said anything of the sort," Scott said. "No-one at Worcestershire or Lancashire asked my opinion before they signed him." Instead of smelling a rat, however, Lancashire simply removed the offending paragraph.
Does any of this matter? Is it just an example of a determined man refusing to give up on his dream?
Perhaps. But Shankar was also taking another man's place in the Worcestershire team. And, by claiming to be 26, Shankar slipped in under the threshold to qualify for the young player incentives handed out by the ECB to first-class counties. He therefore gave himself an unfair advantage in the fight for a place in the Worcestershire team. His swift release was no surprise.
The episode also raises questions about Worcestershire. It seems incredible that no-one at the club thought to check Shankar's story. Five minutes spent on Cricket Archive would be enough to raise suspicions; ten minutes on the phone would confirm them.
Instead, however, Worcestershire contented themselves with a photocopy of a passport and took Shankar's word for his former achievements. They even threw Shankar straight into their first team - as an opening batsman - without even taking a look at him in a Second XI game (though he did play for their second team in 2003). He was out for a third ball duck against Middlesex and, batting in the middle-order in the Championship against Durham, was unbeaten on 10 when injury ended his innings.
Shankar's motivation is also unclear. He graduated from Cambridge with a degree in Law in 2004, so, under normal circumstances, might have been considered to have had the world at his feet. Instead of pursuing a worthwhile career, however, he's become bogged down in an increasingly unwieldy series of lies.
