Letter: Game without Gower is just not cricket

Sir: The chairman of selectors, in his broadcast comments on David Gower's omission from England's cricket squad to tour India, offers explanations of such little substance that they amount to gratuitous insult.

He says, 'age had something to do with it' - yet others in the squad are older. He says, 'two hundred other players will be disappointed' - but none with such cause.

Is the larger disappointment, of tens of thousands at home and

in India, judged of no account? Thus are cricket lovers, on whom the game depends, ignored in

favour of timid and visionless

calculations.

Gower has given to post-war cricket a unique beauty (quite aside from his prolific productivity). Those who cherish that beauty, and who forgive the attendant fallibility, will beg him once more (as before at a time of crisis) not to give up, not to deny us the joy of watching him, and not to add to the impoverishment currently inflicted on the game by its dreary masters.

Yours faithfully,

COLIN J. TULLY

Tunbridge Wells,

Kent

7 September