Barry Knight (cricketer)

Barry Knight

Personal information
Full name	Barry Rolfe Knight
Born	(1938-02-18) 18 February 1938 Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England
Batting	Right-handed
Bowling	Right-arm fast-medium
International information
National side	England
Test debut	1 December 1961 v India
Last Test	7 August 1969 v New Zealand
Career statistics
Competition Test First-class Matches 29 379 Runs scored 812 13,336 Batting average 26.19 25.69 100s/50s 2/0 12/66 Top score 127 165 Balls bowled 5,377 57,813 Wickets 70 1089 Bowling average 31.75 24.06 5 wickets in innings 0 45 10 wickets in match 0 8 Best bowling 4/38 8/69 Catches/stumpings 14/– 263/–
Source: CricInfo, 7 November 2022

Barry Rolfe Knight (born 18 February 1938) is a former English cricketer, who played in twenty nine Tests for England from 1961 to 1969.

Cricket correspondent Colin Bateman remarked, "a flamboyant cricketer... [Knight] was an elegant middle-order batsman and a bowler with a sharp turn of speed who never appeared to run out of energy".

Life and career

Born 18 February 1938, Chesterfield, Derbyshire, Knight was a fast bowling all-rounder, doing the cricketer's double (1,000 runs and 100 wickets in a season) four times, including the fastest in modern times, (two and a half months). He won the World Single Wicket Title at Lord's in 1964.

Knight made his county cricket debut with Essex in May 1955, leaving them at the end of the 1966 season for financial reasons to join Leicestershire. He emigrated to Australia at the end of the 1969 season, ending his career whilst still an England cricketer. He took 100 wickets in four seasons, and scored a thousand runs five times. He accomplished the double in each season from 1962 to 1965. In 1959, he missed the honour by a mere five runs. He made his highest first-class score, 165, against Middlesex at Brentwood in 1962.

His longest run at Test match level was the first six Tests he played in India and Pakistan in 1961–62. He was recalled nine times in a stop-start type of international career, but toured Australia twice in the 1962–63 and 1965-66 Ashes series, where he was a support bowler and lower order batsman. His 240 run, sixth wicket partnership, with Peter Parfitt against New Zealand in 1963, stood for almost forty years, until Graham Thorpe and Andrew Flintoff put the same opposition to the sword, with their partnership of 281 in Christchurch in March 2002.

He was the first professional coach in Australia, starting in 1970 at an indoor facility in Sydney called Knights Inn and also was a very early user of video to record students batting and bowling. He was also the first coach to use video analysis, which led to his coaching over the past forty years of over twenty Test players, including Allan Border, Steve and Mark Waugh, Brett and Shane Lee, Adam Gilchrist, John Dyson, Andrew Hilditch and many New South Wales players and is coaching some upcoming players. He has coached over 20,000 young cricketers since 1970, and is still involved in school holiday programmes, and with Mosman Cricket Club in Sydney. He holds an ACB level 3 coaching certificate, and also a Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) coaching certificate.