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David Capel, who passed away at age 57, spent 32 uninterrupted years as a player and coach in Northamptonshire and to understand what the county meant to him he just had to look at his hand.
One of his fingers was permanently crooked, the result of an accident playing cricket, and he decided that instead of losing games to recover from surgery, he would keep playing and live with his finger permanently bent.
Capel was a tough and sincere all-rounder who played 15 rounds and 23 ODIs for England, but like many others from that era, he could never live up to his billing as the next Ian Botham.
At the county level, it was different. He was a match winner for his beloved Northants and was a key player in one of their strongest eras in the late 1980s and 1990s, when the club regularly hit above their weight, reaching the Lord final and struggling. for the championship.
In the modern era, he probably would have moved county to increase his chances for England, but Capel stayed with his local club and became the first Northampton-born player to play test cricket for 77 years when he was chosen to play. against Pakistan at Headingley in 1987.
