Sam Cook

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Sam Cook England (ENG)

Batting style	Right-hand bat
Bowling type	Slow left-arm orthodox
	Tests	First-class
Matches	1	506
Runs scored	4	1965
Batting average	2.00	5.41
100s/50s	-/-	-/-
Top score	4	35*
Balls bowled	180	106366
Wickets	-	1782
Bowling average	-	20.52
5 wickets in innings	-	99
10 wickets in match	-	15
Best bowling	-	9/42
Catches/stumpings	-/-	153/-
Test debut: 7 June 1947 Last Test: 7 June 1947 Source: [1]

This article is about Sam Cook the cricketer. For the R&B singer see Sam Cooke.

Cecil "Sam" Cook, born August 23, 1921 at Tetbury and died there on September 4, 1996, was a cricketer who played for Gloucestershire and England.

Sam Cook was a small and stocky slow left-arm spinner who took a wicket with his first ball in first-class cricket and 133 wickets in his first season (1946). No great spinner of the ball, Cook relied on accuracy and flight: if he lacked penetration as a bowler, he was also very rarely mastered.^[1] Before Gloucestershire acquired spinning riches in the form of John Mortimore and David Allen, Cook regularly took 100 wickets a season, and later on the county side often played three spinners, right up to the time when Cook retired in 1964.

Cook's one Test match was unfortunate. He was called into the England team to play the South Africans on the batsman's pitch at Trent Bridge in 1947 after taking six South African wickets in the second innings of the MCC match in May. But in the Test match, he took no wickets for 127 runs, scored 0 and 4, and was never picked again. The Kent fast bowler Jack Martin, who had done equally well in the MCC match, was also picked for the Trent Bridge Test, also fared badly, and was likewise discarded, never to appear in Test cricket again.

In all first-class cricket, Cook took 1,782 wickets, making him 50th on the all-time list. No batsman at all, he scored fewer than 2,000 first-class runs and never reached 50. After retirement, he stood as a first-class umpire until 1986.