Former England captain Illingworth dies at 89

Ray Illingworth, who led England to a test series victory in Australia in 1970-71, breathed his last at the age of 89.

He had been undergoing radiotherapy for esophageal cancer. Yorkshire, the English county Illingworth played for, announced his death.

“We are deeply saddened to learn that Ray Illingworth has passed away. Our thoughts are with Ray's family and the wider Yorkshire family who held Ray so dear to their hearts,” Yorkshire tweeted.

Illingworth played 61 test matches for England between 1958 and 1973, scoring 1,836 runs at an average of 23.24 and he claimed 122 wickets.
He captained England 31 times, winning 12 of those matches.

As of 2015, he was one of only nine players to have taken 2,000 wickets and made 20,000 runs in first-class cricket.

Illingworth was successful at the county level, winning seven county championships with Yorkshire between 1959 and 1967, before picking up the same trophy with Leicestershire in 1975.

His early time in charge of England also oversaw one of the team's most successful spells. He captained England for 19 of their 26 match unbeaten run between 1968-1971.

While revealing his own battle with cancer, Illingworth opened up on the ‘terrible time’ his late wife Shirley experienced while receiving treatment for cancer.

“I don’t want to have the last 12 months that my wife had,” he revealed. 

“She had a terrible time going from hospital to hospital and in pain. I believe in assisted dying. The way my wife was, there was no pleasure in life in the last 12 months, and I don’t see the point of living like that, to be honest".

However, his tenure was a debacle, as he clashed on every conceivable level with captain Michael Atherton, declining to award the young Lancastrian the same powers he had claimed when holding the role.

In his three years in post he accrued enough responsibilities to warrant the ‘supremo’ moniker, but as results and relationships teetered off a cliff – most notably an ill-tempered and ill-advised public rebuke of paceman Devon Malcolm in South Africa – there was nobody with whom he could share the blame.

But despite that, he remained much respected throughout the game in his latter years.