Mike Selvey penned a fantastic piece in The Guardian on Wayne Daniel. Middlesex's bowling attack in 1981 was an embarrasment of riches with Daniel, Thompson, Edmonds, Emburey and Selvey.
Quote:We had heard about him in the mid-70s, when pretty much every county seemed to employ what we would call a whizz-bang. He played in the Middlesex second team in 1975 and, so the excellent Cricket Archive website tells me, marked his debut, against Leicestershire seconds at Lutterworth, with eight for 54 in the first innings (DI Gower b Daniel 12) and 12 wickets in the match. Much can be read into a scorecard and the string of “b Daniel 0†references that marked the end of the innings is eloquent enough about retreats beaten hastily towards square-leg.
He was 19 years old then, raw as an onion, but the following year he formed, with Andy Roberts and Michael Holding, the first of the most formidable wolfpacks of pacemen that the game has ever seen. It was his foray into World Series Cricket that ultimately put his Test career on the backburner but ensured his standing as one of the greatest of county cricketers for, while he was earning the dollars that set him up (invested shrewdly in Barbados, it is said), West Indies was mass-producing pacemen of the highest quality. Quite simply he was no longer needed. It was seven years until he played another Test and there were only 10 matches in all.
he fact was that Wayne did not know how to bowl slow, such was his power. Before he began his run he would take a few small steps on the spot, snorting, as a bull might paw the ground, and then came a surging approach, a good leap into the crease, a front arm thrust so high that he might have been grasping at clouds, and a follow-through in which his bowling arm all but grazed the ground. His default length was nasty, the sort that tickles ribs, and he possessed that rare quality that really does encapsulate the term “heavy ballâ€. Only for a few weeks one season did he veer from that, as a consequence driven repeatedly back past him by disbelieving batsmen in receipt of straight half-volleys. It transpired that the Sun was offering £500 as a “demon bowler†award to whoever shattered the stumps most often. In response we offered to have a whip-round to top that and happily he reverted to type.