Wayne Larkins died on June 28, 2025, aged 71. He played 13 Test matches and 25 ODIs, and was remembered in the 2026 edition of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack.
LARKINS, WAYNE, died on June 28, aged 71. For much of the 1980s, Wayne Larkins was – when form and confidence coincided – the most destructive batsman in county cricket. While most openers were content to see the shine off the new ball, Larkins went after it, all guns blazing. “He was ahead of his time,” said Geoff Cook, his former opening partner. “He was someone who could take the bowling on from ball one – a very small minority could do that then.” Larkins was undeterred by reputation. “I always wanted to take out the best,” he said. Yet he frequently failed against less exalted names. He was, thought Simon Hughes, “strangely vulnerable to the innocuous dobber”.
For Northamptonshire, he was one of the greats. In 363 matches he scored 20,317 first-class runs – fourth on the county’s all-time list – and 9,612 in one-day games, behind only Allan Lamb and Rob Bailey. At international level, though, Larkins remained unfulfilled. He played 13 Tests and 25 ODIs in two spells, but couldn’t reproduce the form that frequently left county team-mates and opponents in awe. A three-year ban for joining a rebel tour of South Africa did not help.
Larkins had arrived at Wantage Road from the Bedfordshire village of Roxton, where his father was a farm labourer, as well as a weekend cricketer and umpire. Larkins was a good enough footballer to be offered a contract by Notts County, who said he could not play both sports. He chose cricket, signing up in 1969. His first-class debut came against Essex in May 1972 – caught and bowled by Keith Boyce for a duck – and, though he scored the first of 59 centuries at Fenner’s a year later, progress was slow. But he had influential supporters at Northamptonshire. Dennis Brookes, the former captain, had been his first coach. “He taught me the basics,” Larkins recalled. “He never curtailed me. He said: ‘If you watch the ball, it’s not going to hit you on the head.’” Jim Watts, his first county captain, said: “Wayne was a wonderful athlete, but he had insecurities, and doubted himself.”
A turning point came at Chelmsford in August 1975, when Larkins scored a match-saving century in a partnership of 273 with Mushtaq Mohammad. He quickly became more productive, though he did not pass 1,000 runs until 1978, when he first opened the batting with Cook. Larkins had been nervous of moving up the order, but it suited his temperament not to be padded up, fretting in the pavilion. “He was an amazing talent,” said Cook. “He was mainly a back-foot player. He played with a straight bat and could hit the ball 360 degrees. And he was much more thoughtful about his game than people gave him credit for.”
Larkins peaked in the mid-1980s. He had long been nicknamed “Ned”, after the Archers character Ned Larkin. Now a new word entered county cricket’s lexicon: “Nedded” meant the feeling of being reduced to impotence by one of his assaults. It was thought to have been coined by Leicestershire’s Jonathan Agnew: “He did it to me and just smiled back.” In 1983, handicapped by finger injuries, Larkins started the season poorly. Then he took flight. At Derby in mid-July, he hit 236, before smashing a career-best 252 off 220 balls at Cardiff in late August – the highest first-class score of the summer. In the John Player League, he blasted an unbeaten 172 against Warwickshire at Luton. In The Guardian, Matthew Engel wrote that one six “soared over long-off without any sign of gravitational pull”. It was briefly a competition record.
Larkins was selected in the tour party when England played a three-match series in Australia in 1979/80, making his debut in the third Test at Melbourne. The following summer, he averaged 15 in three Tests against West Indies. His ODI debut had come during the 1979 World Cup, when he was drafted in for the semi-final against New Zealand. In the final against West Indies, two overs of his occasional seamers were despatched for 21. Coming in at No.7, with England well behind the rate, he was bowled for a duck by Joel Garner.
He did, though, make a small contribution to the 1981 Ashes: in the sixth Test at The Oval, he was promoted to open with Geoffrey Boycott, and scored 34 and 24. But it was not enough to earn a trip to India, and he accepted an offer to go on the rebel tour of South Africa in 1981/82. “There were many reasons why players joined that tour,” Engel wrote. “Larkins was the only one to go out of pure pique.” He was banned for three years, and lost the opportunity to cement an England place in the absence of Boycott and Graham Gooch, who had led the trip. Engel called it “a terrible waste of a wonderful talent”.
An unexpected comeback almost occurred in 1986, when Larkins was called up for the third Test against India at Edgbaston. The timing was odd: after missing the start of the season with a football injury, he had scored 43 runs in six first-class innings. “He probably cannot believe he is back again,” wrote Michael Melford in The Daily Telegraph. But Larkins bruised a thumb against Sussex, and withdrew from the squad. Not until Gooch became England captain in 1989 did Larkins get a further chance. He played in the Nehru Cup in India in 1989 and, against Australia at Hyderabad, crashed 124 off 126 balls. He called it the best innings of his career. “He batted with poise and aggression, thumping his drives, showing a rare eye for the gaps,” reported Simon Barnes in The Times. “There was no holding the boy.”
He was back in the Test side for the 1989/90 tour of the Caribbean and, more than eight years after his previous appearance, opened the batting with Gooch in England’s unexpected first Test victory at Sabina Park. Larkins made 46 and 29 not out, hitting the winning runs, and batting with unusual restraint. His first Test fifty came in the third match at Port-of-Spain, but was followed by a pair in Barbados. Ignored for the home series against New Zealand and India, he was part of Gooch’s Ashes squad in the winter of 1990/91. In the second Test at the MCG, Larkins dropped to No.3, hitting 64 – his highest Test score – and 54. But he failed twice at Sydney, and this time there was no comeback. He had been chronically homesick. At the end of the tour, his room-mate Mike Atherton guessed he had spent his entire £20,000 fee on phone calls home: “We reckoned he was in negative equity.”
Larkins served as Northamptonshire’s vice-captain, but sometimes clashed with the county’s Establishment. When groundsman Les Bentley took the club to an industrial tribunal for unfair dismissal, Larkins and Peter Willey spoke up on his behalf. The pair also attended a meeting of the club committee wearing the blazers from their unofficial tour of South Africa. When Cook became director of cricket at Durham, Larkins was one of the senior players he recruited for the county’s first season of first-class cricket, in 1992. “I probably should have stayed,” Larkins said. “That said, Durham was fantastic.” Cook recalled: “He brought experience and ability, and the people up there loved him because he was such a character.” He was Durham’s leading scorer, and made a hundred in their first Championship win. He later played for Bedfordshire and spent a season with Huntingdonshire.
In retirement, Larkins worked as a marshal at golf courses, and as a representative for a sports company. In 2007, he received a 12-month suspended prison sentence at Taunton Crown Court for illegally obtaining a mortgage. He was not a regular at player reunions, preferring racing to cricket. In Philip Brown’s contemporary portraits of the players who appeared in the 1981 Ashes, Larkins looked, wrote Atherton, like “an ageing rocker”. His death was marked by a minute’s applause before the second Test between England and India at Edgbaston. The memory of his thrilling batting lived on. “Against top-quality bowlers, I would get the feeling they didn’t want to bowl to me,” he recalled. “You could smell the fear.”
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