Peter Granville Lee, born at Arthingworth

Arthingworth

Arthingworth is a civil parish and village in the Daventry district of the county of Northamptonshire, England.-Location:The nearest towns are Market Harborough about north and Kettering east via the A14 road which connects the town to the M1, M6 and M11 motorways.-Buildings of note:The church of...

, Northamptonshire

Northamptonshire

Northamptonshire is a landlocked county in the English East Midlands, with a population of 629,676 as at the 2001 census. It has boundaries with the ceremonial counties of Warwickshire to the west, Leicestershire and Rutland to the north, Cambridgeshire to the east, Bedfordshire to the south-east,...

, on 27 August 1945, is a cricketer

Cricketer

A cricketer is a person who plays the sport of cricket. Official and long-established cricket publications prefer the traditional word "cricketer" over the rarely used term "cricket player"....

 who played for Northamptonshire

Northamptonshire County Cricket Club

Northamptonshire County Cricket Club is one of the 18 major county clubs which make up the English and Welsh domestic cricket structure, representing the historic county of Northamptonshire. Its limited overs team is called the Northants Steelbacks. The traditional club colour is Maroon. During the...

 and Lancashire

Lancashire County Cricket Club

Lancashire County Cricket Club represents the historic county of Lancashire in cricket's County Championship. The club was founded in 1864 as a successor to Manchester Cricket Club and has played at Old Trafford since then...

.

Lee was a right-arm fast-medium bowler who moved the ball off the seam and took a lot of wickets in English county cricket in the 1970s. In 1973 and again in 1975, he achieved the now-rare feat of taking more than 100 wickets in an English first-class

First-class cricket

First-class cricket is a class of cricket that consists of matches of three or more days' scheduled duration, that are between two sides of eleven players and are officially adjudged first-class by virtue of the standard of the competing teams...

 season, and his 112 wickets in 1975 was the highest by any bowler that season. He was named as a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in the 1976 edition of the almanack

Wisden Cricketers' Almanack

Wisden Cricketers' Almanack is a cricket reference book published annually in the United Kingdom...

.

Lee played for five seasons from 1967 for Northamptonshire without ever becoming a regular in the side. He moved to Lancashire in 1972 largely as insurance for the likelihood that regular opening bowlers Peter Lever

Peter Lever

Peter Lever is a former English cricketer, who played in seventeen Tests and ten ODIs for England from 1970 to 1975. He was a successful wicket taker, taking 41 victims from those seventeen Tests, and a handy batsman with a top score of 88 not out...

 and Ken Shuttleworth

Ken Shuttleworth (cricketer)

Kenneth Shuttleworth is an English former cricketer. He played five Test matches and one One Day International for England in the early 1970s.-Life and career:...

 would be called up for Test cricket

Test cricket

Test cricket is the longest form of the sport of cricket. Test matches are played between national representative teams with "Test status", as determined by the International Cricket Council , with four innings played between two teams of 11 players over a period of up to a maximum five days...

 by England

English cricket team

The England and Wales cricket team is a cricket team which represents England and Wales. Until 1992 it also represented Scotland. Since 1 January 1997 it has been governed by the England and Wales Cricket Board , having been previously governed by Marylebone Cricket Club from 1903 until the end...

. But at county level, Lee proved useful in his own right, taking 101 wickets in 1973. Injured and ill, he played very little in 1974, but he returned for a full season and even greater success in 1975. He remained successful, albeit taking fewer wickets, for two more seasons, but in 1978, he played only one match because of a shoulder injury, and he was an irregular player in the following seasons until his retirement in 1982. During the 20/20 Finals Day in August 2011, Paul Allott suggested Lee's decline coincided with the total loss of his run up, similar to the yips suffered mainly by left arm spinners. He took 599 first class wickets in all.

Lee appears never to have been considered seriously for Test cricket. He toured South Africa twice with teams organised by Derrick Robins

Derrick Robins

Derrick Harold Robins, often known as D. H. Robins was an English cricketer and sports promoter, at one time chairman of Coventry City Football Club. He was born in Bexleyheath, Kent....

. His batting was negligible: his highest first-class score in more than 200 matches was 26.