7 Ancient Greeks Who Were Crap at Cricket

A giant of philosophy, but a midget on the cricket field. As wicket keeper, he proved a constant distraction to the slips, gulley, short leg and silly point. His rambling dialogs frequently meant, when the bowler had the post-luncheon sun behind him, that the entire close field was facing in the wrong direction, apparently looking at their own shadows.

Fair enough, on a good day he was a reasonable medium-pace swing bowler, but his twin beliefs that the highest good is pleasure and that the gods have no interest in human endeavor repeatedly sapped the prowess of his line and length and, ultimately, reduced his usefulness to little more than a couple of overs. And even then only when tail was starting to wag.

Yes, yes. His pupil Alexander the Great was one of cricket’s legendary opening batsmen, but Aristotle himself wouldn’t have known a sweep from a drive. According to Wisden, the Hellenic empiricist’s weakness as a batsman was his tendency, especially when facing spin or swing, to lose his focus on the bowling and wander off into constructing logical arguments that apply deductive reasoning to arrive at conclusions based on two or more propositions that are asserted or assumed to be true. See his duck in both innings for Macedonia in the crucial 4th Test against Thebes.

He may have been OK at calculating the circumference of the earth and the tilt of its axis, but, when it came to delivering an even half way decent leg-break delivery on a turning wicket, he was about as much use as a two fingered tree sloth. As evidenced by his 0 for 223 in the 3rd Test for Cyrene against Athens.

Initially thought of as useful right-handed 1st wicket down batsman, Empedocles’ test career was severely impeded by his willingness, especially when facing spin, to hurl himself into the nearest volcano.

As a middle-order batsman, left-arm swing bowler, and specialist short-fielder, Diogenes Laertius’ test career was principally handicapped by the fact he insisted on playing international cricket from inside a barrel.

As a left-hand off-break spinner, Archimedes’ main failing was his tendency to spend too much time cogitating in his bath in an attempt to determine a method for calculating the volume of an object with an irregular shape. Dividing the mass of the object by the volume of water it displaces in order to obtain its density is of course, an important lesson; but not as the ability to deliver a consistent Chinaman to a right-handed bat.