Rankin aims for test cricket

Ireland international cricketer Boyd Rankin working with local youngsters Ben Logue, Strabane Cricket Club, and Alana Dalzell, Bready Cricket Club, during his bowling masterclass at Bready Cricket Club on Thursday. INLS0113-125KM

By Kevin McLaughlin
Published on 31/12/2012 13:13

FORMER Ireland pace bowler Boyd Rankin has given himself two or three years to try and break into Andrew Flower’s England test team.

With the likes of James Anderson, Stuart Broad and Steven Finn all helping Alastair Cook’s men continue to produce the goods over the last number of years, the Bready man knows how tough a task he has ahead of him.

Rankin, who last year announced his retirement from international cricket for Ireland, is happy with his decision and now wants to concentrate on achieving his ambition of playing Test cricket with England.

“Playing for England I know would be a big step for me,”stated the Warwickshire man.

“There is quite a few guys in front of me, but my ultimate aim is to play test cricket.

“That was one of the reasons why I had to give up playing for Ireland to try and give myself the best chance of making that step up to test cricket, so I have given myself the next two of three years to try and do that.”

The 28-year-old, who since his debut as a 19-year-old in 2003, has played 79 times for Ireland, taking 110 wickets at an average of 24.05, with a best bowling return of 5 for 39 against Namibia in 2008 and he feels he has made the right decision.

“I’m happy with my decision and all I can do now is just concentrate playing for Warwickshire and see what happens from there.

“I think it’s a great thing for me, because I won’t be playing all year around now, I have already had three months off and I can feel the difference already.

“Being a fast bowler and playing all year round meant I was also getting a few injuries, so it was getting tough for me, so it’s great that I can now just concentrate on trying to play well for Warwickshire.”

Sport

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Rankin aims for test cricket

Top stories

Sport