When you have had a 15-year career at the top level of English cricket, with almost 400 victims, scored a couple of First-Class centuries and started a post-playing career of coaching, it is probably galling, to say the least, to be best remembered for ‘the one that got away’.
But that’s the fate of Chris Scott, former Notts and Durham wicket keeper who let slip a relatively straightforward catch off the West Indian batting legend Brian Lara in a county game at Edgbaston in June 1994. Popular legend has it that Chris commented “I bet he gets a bloody hundred now”…‘he’ didn’t – Lara went on to make the highest-ever individual score in First-Class cricket, 501no!
Scott still gets asked about that famous drop – it cost the small matter of 483 runs, the most expensive miss recorded in cricket – and rarely fails to mention that Lara could and should have been out before then; he was bowled off an Anderson Cummins no-ball when he had scored just 12.
Christopher Wilmot Scott was born on 27 January 1964 at Thorpe-on-the-Hill in Lincolnshire and joined Nottinghamshire in 1981. He spent the next decade at Trent Bridge, playing regularly when Bruce French was on international duties and was almost a first team fixture in 1986 and 87, gaining his county cap in 1988. In all, he played 63 First-Class games for his first county, making 1,263 runs at 23.38, with five half-centuries and a top score of 78; behind the stumps, he took 135 catches and made 9 stumpings. In List-A cricket, Scott played 32 times, with a further 26 catches and one stumping.
He left Trent Bridge for Durham in 1992 when the county, newly-admitted to the First-Class game, were recruiting experienced cricketers to meld with their developing local players. Scott stayed with Durham until 1996 and, apart from that momentous Edgbaston match, had a steady record – taking a further 146 catches and 8 stumpings – and making both his First-Class hundreds, top score 108.
He continues his cricketing career by coaching the Cambridge UCCE side (now the Cambridge MCCU), based at Fenner's, coaching the MCCU side to the double in 2012.
May 2020
Nottinghamshire First-Class Number: 488