NICK FRIEND: Eleven years on from his red-ball debut for his home county, Rushworth is Durham's all-time leading wicket-taker in first-class cricket. Paul Collingwood, Steve Harmison, Scott Borthwick, Jon Lewis and others pay tribute to a fine bowler
Steve Harmison is under no illusions as to the scale of Chris Rushworth’s achievement.
“I don’t see anyone getting close to 500 ever again for Durham,” he says. “I think he will go down as Durham’s leading wicket-taker, which is great for Chris because he deserves it.
“I hope that this is a record for a long time that might not get broken. It’s a fitting tribute to someone who’s done so well for himself.”
With longevity, milestones like this come around more frequently. Last August, Rushworth celebrated his 500th first-class wicket against Yorkshire, who paid their own tribute in a match played out behind closed doors, rising on their balcony to offer an appreciative round of applause to a stalwart of the domestic game in this country, roundly respected by all.
Speaking then, he told The Cricketer: “It will always feel surreal, no matter how many wickets I get, to be honest. Ten years ago, I never thought I’d be where I am now.”
This is where he is now: out on his own as the leading wicket-taker in Durham’s first-class history, the county where he was born and, at 34 years of age, where he has spent his entire professional career – a love affair only interrupted when he was released as a youngster in 2006, before forcing himself back in. He has been a constant ever since.
In April, he passed the mark set by Simon Brown, who claimed 518 victims for the club in the early years for English cricket’s youngest first-class county, leaving just Graham Onions ahead of him.
On Sunday, he unseated his old new-ball partner with a record-breaking dismissal for the only team he has ever known. From Mark Wagh, his first, to Jack Haynes, his 528th first-class victim. A journey spanning 4,022 days and two trophies but, most importantly for a guardian of the north-east, just a single county.
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In the immediate aftermath of having Haynes caught off his outside edge, the enormity of the moment hit home. Rushworth threw his arms in the air, then brought his hands to his face and wiped away any tears with a towel as his teammates applauded a piece of history more than a decade in the making. He shared lengthy embraces with Mark Wood and Scott Borthwick, before strolling slowly back to his mark – a journey he has taken after each of his 24,318 deliveries in first-class cricket – and attempting to digest the magnitude of his accomplishment.
“The significance of this record is that I don’t think it will be broken,” adds Harmison, who himself picked up 458 red-ball wickets for Durham around his exploits on the international stage. So, he knows from his own experience how best to qualify Rushworth’s feat. “I look back at my career; to take more than 450 wickets for Durham and play international cricket, I feel as though I did brilliantly. Simon Brown, the same.”
Quite simply, Rushworth might just be the last man to break a county record like this. The brevity of Durham’s first-class history renders theirs perhaps the only attainable figure worth chasing: at Lancashire, the record belongs to Brian Statham, a taker of 1,816 first-class wickets; for Kent, Tich Freeman’s tally of 3,340 will never be overhauled.
With the volume of first-class cricket played annually likely now set on a terminal decrease, bowlers’ workloads protected more than ever before and Rushworth not yet in his twilight years, he has the chance to build an unassailable lead of his own. And there are none who would begrudge him that distinction.
“He’s unbelievable,” says Ben Raine, a teammate now but also a cricketer who followed a similar path early on in his career: let go by Durham, only to find his way home once he had established himself in the professional game at Leicestershire.
“I remember last year when he got his 500th wicket. That is a lot. It’s a hell of an achievement. He is part of the furniture now, and he has been for the last decade.
“It is about those kinds of players, but it is also about how young players react to seeing how he goes about his business. That’s the thing that will empower the next batch of bowlers coming through to be exactly the same. It’s not just him being him, it’s the lads growing up wanting to be him. That’s how it has an effect.”
Scott Borthwick congratulates Chris Rushworth on becoming Durham's all-time leading wicket-taker
Jon Lewis first spotted him a year or two after falling out of the setup, while observing him bowl indoors during winter. “I remember him hitting the bat hard and being consistent with the areas he was hitting, getting good shape on the ball,” he recalls. “And he bowled for a long time – I watched him for a solid hour and his pace didn’t drop.”
In 2009, on his Durham return in a second team game against a combined Kent and Essex side, he picked up 10 wickets in the match. “It was pleasing for me because I had taken a bit of a punt, but it was pleasing for him too,” adds Lewis. “It hasn’t always been the smoothest path because nobody’s career is.”
Borthwick was also playing in that match, along with Ben Stokes and Mark Wood. Rushworth and Borthwick – now his captain at Emirates Riverside and a fellow Sunderland football fan – first came across one another as teenagers when Rushworth was part of the club’s academy and Borthwick was a highly regarded 15-year-old.
“He came back one winter after being released and I remember him bowling at Dale Benkenstein, who was captain at the time,” Borthwick says. “Benky was just like: ‘Wow, this guy has got so much skill. Why was he ever released? Get him back in.’ Then, he played in a second team game down at Essex and he just swung the ball miles.
“We were wondering why he’d ever been released. Benky just knew we had to get him in. The bloke was swinging the ball more than Matthew Hoggard. And then, he got into the team and he hasn’t really left.”
The nature of that pathway is why Lewis, initially Rushworth’s second team coach, so respects his former opening bowler.
I’m not crying, you are.......
— Chris Rushworth (@ChrisRush22) May 16, 2021
Thank you to every single one of you who have played a part in my career so far. I’m truly grateful and couldn’t be any prouder.
More in the tank yet!! https://t.co/YlgC6qZBhg
“I don’t like to live vicariously through the players,” he insists. “The success they have is their success. I thoroughly enjoy seeing them do well, but I see it more as a reflection on them. I love to see it. We talk about how many wickets Rushy has taken and how successful he has been, but every player has darker days and difficult days.
“It is their strength and their will that gets them through as much as anyone; you don’t remember those days when you talk about records being broken and new levels being achieved but that’s what sets them apart from players who don’t achieve such things: they manage to fight through the darker times.”
The pair were actually teammates on Rushworth’s List A debut in 2004, coming against a touring Sri Lanka A side, with Lewis captain at the time but approaching the twilight of his playing career. For further context into the length of this journey, Gary Pratt top-scored for Durham that day, a year prior to his Ashes fame. For Rushworth, released two years later without adding to that solitary appearance, it would be six summers before he played for the first team again. In between, there were jobs selling satellite dishes and answering phones in a call centre: an unfashionable route with a fairytale ending.
Almost a decade on, however, Lewis would lead Durham to County Championship glory in 2013, with Rushworth and Onions at the forefront of a locally reared core, claiming 54 and 70 wickets respectively. Counties find their players in different ways – several further south utilise the public school setup, while Durham are proud of the region’s club cricket culture, through which Rushworth – playing for Sunderland alongside Brown – earned his second chance.
“I don’t like the idea that people fall out of the system,” Lewis explains, “but do I like the idea that just because you fall out of the system it doesn’t mean it’s over. Nobody’s career should end at 18 just because they’ve fallen out of the academy. People develop in different ways and at different rates.
“It’s great when people come through your pathway and the junior setup and onto the staff, but you can’t limit yourself just to going down that path. You have to be open to the idea that people develop at 19, 20, 21, 22 – and that’s when you pick them up. Durham are pretty good at scouting outside of the conventional pathways to find players.”
The record-breaking moment: Jack Haynes edges Rushworth to David Bedingham at first slip, with Borthwick celebrating at second slip
Even so, Rushworth had to wait his turn once his return was finalised. Durham’s battery of seamers is no secret: in 2009, the summer before Rushworth’s first-class debut, Onions, Harmison, Liam Plunkett, Callum Thorp, Mark Davies and Mitch Claydon were all part of the county’s title win. Thorp, especially, was similar in style, and so Rushworth was forced to bide his time: “I was looking for the guy to follow Callum, I suppose,” says Lewis, reminiscing of what it was that drew him to Rushworth’s skillset.
Since then, however, he has been a rare figure of stability at a club where plenty around him has changed. For some time, he has been a totem of leadership, with Onions, Borthwick, Mark Stoneman and Keaton Jennings all moving on in the aftermath of the county’s relegation for financial reasons at the end of the 2016 season. Their transfers were linked to international ambitions and a feeling that they were better off playing at Test grounds to force their respective cases.
Rushworth never wavered, even after “one of the toughest weeks I’ve ever had” when he learned of the sanctions imposed on Durham. “My future wasn’t something that I thought of,” he told The Cricketer, speaking in February about rebuilding a club that was taken to the brink. “Once we realised that we were going to be safe enough to have our contracts continue, I wanted to be there with the club when we got back up. We’re still trying, and it would be nice if I’m still around to get promoted. It would mean so much to me to reach that top division again.”
On a personal level, Onions’ departure for Lancashire left him most disappointed, but it also rendered him the undoubted spearhead of a youthful bowling attack, with Paul Collingwood tasked with overseeing a difficult revival as captain.
Collingwood says: “I think you need these characters to continue the culture of the area. We lost a lot of homegrown players in the heartbeat of the team to what would be deemed as bigger counties and it sucked the life out of us. It’s something that wasn’t just a two-year penalty; losing Stoneman, Jennings, Borthwick and Onions was more like a five to ten-year penalty.
The pride of Chris Rushworth and an unlikely journey to 500 first-class wickets
“I think we’ve been very lucky in terms of some of the amazing bowlers that we’ve had at Durham. We’ve had a fantastic production line of bowlers at the county, but we shouldn’t underestimate what Chris Rushworth has done.
“I think come the end of his career, he’ll look back and he’ll know that he’s seen the county through the hard times, not just through the easy times and the successful times, but also a period when the county was on its last legs.
“That was a really difficult period, but for a player like that not to get tempted by the money elsewhere, and what could have been, is fantastic and something that he will be proud of, but the county will be proud of as well.
“For him to fail the first time around and have a long, hard think about how he was going to come back and how he was going to take that opportunity the second time around, I think that deserves a lot of credit in itself.
“To almost repay that with his loyalty towards the club and the success that he’s had is brilliant. Let’s be honest, loyalty at county level is going out of the game and there’s a lot more opportunities elsewhere. A lot of carrots get dangled in front of your face. No doubt, he could have gone to pretty much 18 counties around the UK; he would have been sought after but he loves the north-east and he’s a proper Sunderland fan. These lads up north give it their all for the county and that’s a great attitude to have.”
And as his captain?
“You’d give him the new ball and you knew what you were going to get. I don’t think you could get anyone better. Andre Adams had a spell in county cricket, where he was an absolute nightmare to face. Someone like Mohammad Abbas would be similar – that kind of length, hitting the top of off-stump all the time, the lateral movement. It’s just his unerring accuracy ball after ball, testing your defence and your decision-making.
Rushworth and Graham Onions in action together back in a previous era
“I think there have been some more naturally gifted bowlers in terms of their physique, but I think the one thing that I was looking for as captain when I took over in 2013 was trying to bring an Andrew Strauss mentality into our bowling: not giving the opposition anything, going at two runs per over and stifling the opposition. Chris Rushworth was the perfect bowler for that.
“I’ve seen some very odd decisions made by batsmen charging him first ball, who have obviously got mental demons in the back of their minds before they’ve even faced a ball from him – or they remember him from their last meeting. That’s the type of bowler that he is; he just continuously tests your defence and you have to take some risks to get him away.
“He was extremely reliable, but not just reliable – he was hugely skilful. He was a dream. I guess you knew what you were going to get in terms of overs out of him. A lot of people said he does it at the Riverside but he also – as his record shows – he has been very successful away from home as well.”
Indeed, while 289 of his first-class wickets have come at Chester-le-Street at just 19.96 apiece, the remaining scalps have been spread across 27 grounds.
Fifteen of those arrived against Northamptonshire in the space of two days on his home patch in September 2014 – a remarkable game of cricket that, perhaps unsurprisingly, remains vividly in the minds of those involved. It exists as one of four ten-wicket match hauls to date.
After a first-day washout, Durham made 392 – with centuries for Borthwick and Collingwood – before Rushworth took charge. Northants were bowled out twice: for 83 in 23 overs and for 90 in 17.2. He contributed nine wickets in the first innings and six in the second. For a long while, he was on course for all ten until Stokes had Maurice Chambers caught after the visitors’ top eight had all succumbed to the subtlety of Rushworth’s genius.
“Honestly, I think that was the best bit of fast bowling I’ve ever seen,” Borthwick laughs. “He just ran in and hit the top of off-stump every ball. Every other ball was a wicket.”
“It was incredible,” says Collingwood, “and it was one of those days where they just seemed to nick everything. The skill was just extraordinary.”
Chris Rushworth, @DurhamCricket's all-time leading wicket-taker in first-class cricket.
— The Cricketer (@TheCricketerMag) May 16, 2021
A phenomenal achievement 👏👏👏 pic.twitter.com/4ybPg1I8cD
Ultimately, that undoubted talent has never been met with higher honours. As social media celebrated his landmark on Sunday, several posts lamented that anomaly. There was a time perhaps when he might have been on the verge – or, at the very least, under consideration. In 2015, there were 83 wickets in Division One of the County Championship – a figure that made a mockery of those who looked at Rushworth as little more than a burly, senior pro, apparently too slow for the highest level. Between 2012 and 2020, only nine bowlers worldwide took more wickets in first-class cricket.
“Forget about Chris Rushworth, but look at his stats alone,” says Collingwood, one of England’s finest international cricketers of the 21st century. “You would certainly say that, if not in and around the squads, he would be very close. Now, sometimes it’s annoying that people get pigeon-holed as not quick enough. But if they are performing, then they are quick enough. Because they get the movement and they have that accuracy. There are other ways to take wickets than just pure pace.
“Let’s be honest and get the elephant out of the room: if Rushy had a six-pack and was ripped, then I personally think he would have had an opportunity before now. But there is always going to be that question: is he quick enough for international cricket? You will never know until you get that opportunity.”
The general consensus is that Rushworth has never been fitter than he is now. He ran regularly through last year’s national lockdown, sharing his Strava times on Twitter, while he and fellow Durham seamer Matty Potts took on a two-day, 133-mile virtual bike ride in February to raise money for the Solan Connor Fawcett Family Cancer Trust, a charity launched to support individuals and families in County Durham and Darlington affected by the disease.
When the squad returned to training last winter, Rushworth smashed his fitness tests. “In a two-kilometre time trial, where you have to get under eight minutes, I think he was one of the quickest, with about 7.10,” says Borthwick.
Rushworth was a key member of the 2013 County Championship-winning side
“Credit to him; I haven’t been around over the last four years and this winter was the first time I’d seen him for a while – I couldn’t believe how hard he was working. Even now that the season has started, he still works hard in the gym and looks after his body.”
That shift has proven fundamental. He abstained from alcohol in 2014 to raise money for Save the Children and was rewarded with 86 wickets in all competitions, while he has adjusted his diet in recent years and is now a vegetarian. As a result, injury problems have been few and far between.
“Once that penny dropped – and it was possibly at the point that a lot of the older players had gone – there was a sense of responsibility to carry the bowling attack and the team,” explains Harmison.
“He’s stood up and he’s carried Durham’s bowling stocks very well. I think that was a pivotal moment in his career because I think his lifestyle did change. He stopped drinking for more or less a year, did a lot of charity stuff, understood his body a bit better, he lost a lot of weight compared to when I was still around in 2012 and 2013.”
Lewis adds: “He had a reputation for being stocky. But he got on the park. For all the fitness work that occurs in county cricket now – quite rightly – you still have to admire the guy whose major asset is that he gets on the park, he bowls overs and he takes wickets. Even if he didn’t always have the best numbers in the gym, he had the best numbers on the scorecard – and that’s more important.
Meet David Bedingham, Durham's South African run machine
“But then I think he recognised that he could get to another level or that he could be at his level for longer by getting into a better physical condition. He has worked hard and has upped his work rate away from the game. He’s probably in as good a shape now as he’s ever been.”
Returning to his international credentials, Lewis points to the example of Vernon Philander, whose modus operandi is not dissimilar to Rushworth’s and whose record in Test cricket sits among the very best that the game has seen.
David Bedingham, Durham’s South African overseas player and a former Cape Copras teammate of Philander, has endured the challenge of facing both men in the nets.
Of Rushworth, he says: “If I could sum it up in one word, it would be ‘horrible’. I think he bowls at about 80mph but because of the way he swings and nips it both ways, it feels like the ball comes down at 95mph. He’s a nightmare to face but I’m glad he’s on my team.
“It’s a great test for us as batsmen: I feel like if you have a good net against him, it feels like you can go into the game knowing that you’ve got through him. And if you can get through him, then you know that you can get through the opposition bowlers.”
Mark Wood embraces Rushworth after surpassing Onions' record
More than a decade on from his debut, there is little mystery to Rushworth’s art – only the ability to move the ball both ways in the air and off the pitch with no discernible change in his action and a metronomic consistency that keeps batsmen unfailingly honest. “I think he learned a lot from Graham Onions,” says Borthwick. “He learned how to seam the ball in 2012 or 2013, whereas when he first came onto the scene he was more of a big swinger.”
Because of that, especially for left-handers, he has proven a brutally difficult challenge, attacking from round the wicket and either finding the outside edge or using his variation to target the stumps.
“Ask someone like Marcus Trescothick who he wouldn’t want to face – it would certainly be Graham Onions and it would be Chris Rushworth as well,” Collingwood knows. “He comes into that category. I always think it’s a good gauge – forget about selectors, forget about what coaches think. Go around the best batsmen in the country and ask them who the top bowlers are: Chris Rushworth would be at the top on flatter pitches down south or when teams come up here. They would be having sleepless nights about facing Chris Rushworth. Simple as that.”
“He’s obviously very challenging,” says Yorkshire opener Adam Lyth, a victim of his on six occasions – two fewer than Sam Robson and Ben Brown, and three fewer than Daryl Mitchell, Rushworth’s most frequent prey.
Lyth adds: “Not being in the same group as Durham, it’s always nice not to face Rushy!”
Borthwick concurs: “You can ask any county batter in the country and they will say the same thing: if the wicket has got anything in it or a bit of grass on it, who would you not want to face? And they would all say Chris Rushworth. I know from just facing him in the nets: if the nets are a bit tired or he’s at the top of his mark with a new-ish ball in his hand, he’ll shout from the top of his mark that he’s going to bowl around the wicket. You just know what’s coming but you can’t stop it.
“Because he seams the ball as well, when he comes around the wicket, you can’t protect both edges: you know he can hit you in the shin, but you also know he can nick you off. He can do both in the same over, and he’s not trying to get you out in the same way every time. As a slip fielder, it’s an absolute joy to watch – I’ve caught so many balls off him.”
"I think come the end of his career, he'll look back and he'll know that he's seen the county through the hard times, not just the easy times and the successful times, but also a period when the county was on its last legs"
Not as many, one would wager, as Phil Mustard, Rushworth’s cousin and – for much of his first-class career – his wicketkeeper. For a short while, he was even his skipper. “As a captain, he was a dream, he was great,” he remembers. “You just give him the ball and he’ll run in and bowl it – same as Onions. ‘Here’s the new ball, off you go. You’re the skilful bowler, go and get wickets, job’s a good’un.’ That’s what class bowlers do. He knew what he was doing – I was just there to set the field.”
Their relationship goes back much further, though, to a childhood dominated by cricket, at a time of innocence before thoughts of a lifetime in the game had even begun to enter their minds.
The fathers of Mustard and Rushworth were brothers, living two doors down from one another and little did they know then that their sons – Phil and Chris – would become pillars of the region’s sporting community during Durham’s golden age. It started for them like it does for so many, playing together in the back lane, using the wooden trunk of an electrical pole as their set of stumps.
“We did that for many, many years,” Mustard reflects. And at the weekends, after their dads had played their own matches, the children would resume their games in the carpark of Castletown’s local pub, The Crown and Anchor. “We used to play from 7pm until 10pm at night while our dads were having a few beers. We used to spend, hours and hours and hours down there.”
Rushworth leads Durham off the field after beating Worcestershire on Sunday
Was it impossible even then to get the ball out of Rushworth’s hands? “In those days, we did everything,” Mustard laughs. “We didn’t have a wicketkeeper. Everybody did a bit of everything: six balls each, some people threw it, some people bowled it.”
That passion led to the foundation of Hylton Cricket Club’s under-13 side, put together by the Mustard and Rushworth families, with the two sets of brothers making up the majority of the team.
Lee, Rushworth’s older sibling, was “a very, very good batsman” and “probably the best in the family”, adds Mustard. He made a solitary List A appearance in 2001.
Father Joe has remained a major influence and an avid watcher. “He loves it. He follows Chris around everywhere. When we were allowed to travel, he used to go to away matches: he used to take his dog and take him for walks around the ground. He loves watching cricket. I umpired a game a few weeks ago – Durham University against Northumberland – and Joe was there watching that. Everything about it, he just loves.”
It is why Harmison told The Cricketer that he hoped Rushworth might slow down for a fortnight or so in his history-making quest: “I just hope that he can break Durham’s record when people are allowed in because, if anyone deserves to break a record in front of their family, it’s Chris Rushworth.”
From the skipper 👊#ForTheNorth pic.twitter.com/oLhlWH6mKS
— Durham Cricket (@DurhamCricket) May 16, 2021
As it was, Joe was in the car park at Emirates Riverside when the landmark came, not as nearby as he’d have liked to have been, but close enough for his son to offer a salute of gratitude.
Lewis reflects: “From the way I have seen it, his family and kids have offered him something outside of the game, which allows him to have that downtime which means that the game doesn’t go home. He has two young kids. His home life is important to him and I think it offers him that bit away from cricket which allows him to be fresh every time he gets back to the ground.”
During lockdown, he launched a YouTube channel to keep children – not least his own, Henry and Emily – active, while also setting up a podcast. Since the season began, he has used his Twitter account primarily to champion the amateur game, heap praise on deserving fellow professionals Darren Stevens and David Payne and wish luck to former teammates James Weighell and Cameron Steel after moves away from Durham. He doubles up as the county’s PCA player representative.
All in all – and this has been a common theme in the stream of congratulatory messages that have followed – a thoroughly decent bloke, a figurehead for his club and a symbol of a region committed to growing its heroes. “A lot of that is down to one man: Geoff Cook,” says Harmison of the club’s maiden first-class captain, who first came across Rushworth as a 13-year-old and achieved legendary status in an off-field capacity both as academy director and head coach.
Durham's record-breaker attempts to come to terms with a historic moment, celebrating with his father after the final wicket was taken
Harmison explains: “It was Simon Brown’s record, who is from Sunderland, and Graham Onions’ record, who is from Gateshead Fell. It’s not an outsider who has come into the club from a different part of the country and it’s not an overseas player; it’s our very own who have broken these records. For Chris to go away and to come back and to get to where he’s got to, that for me makes it more special.
“Geoff and (academy manager) John Windows have put their heart and soul into going to the non-attractive areas and finding these young kids who are hungry and desperate to perform and have been brought up the right way: Paul Collingwood’s mum and dad, Graham Onions’ mum and dad, Liam Plunkett’s mum and dad, Chris Rushworth’s as well. They are family units, helping their children to be the best they possibly can be as people, which has helped them to be better professionals.”
And there have been few better than Chris Rushworth, who has taken an understated route to a richly merited stardom. The burst of emotion as Haynes’ outside edge carried to Bedingham at first slip told this whole story in a single image.
In amongst the celebrations, Borthwick took him to one side and provided a shoulder for Rushworth to cry on: happy tears of relief and a relentless pursuit accomplished, all in aid of Durham, the county of his life.
Borthwick pauses for a moment and chuckles, beset with pride: “It’s a lot of wickets, isn’t it?
“He’s done it in about 10 years, which is incredible. That’s the message to Rushy now though: don’t stop now because you’ve got this many. Make this record your own. Make sure that no one ever catches you. Because you are that good.”
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