Mike Coward, friend of Et Al, has published seventy copies of a fourteen-page booklet about and with Rick McCosker. It is called A Life Fulfilled, and pleasing indeed, told in crisp prose and printed on quality stock: it ventures into McCosker’s Catholicism, his membership of the Cursillo movement, his work in Newcastle as a volunteer with the Antioch youth programme and as chaplain of the Mission to Seafarers. There’s an image of him playing a rasping square cut, and a lovely photograph of McCosker and his wife Meryl today, in which the tilt of his head, the gangly arms and the coathanger shoulders are still recognisable. Apparently, McCosker is the spit of his farmer father Bede, also a dedicated community worker - ‘Here comes Dad’, say his siblings at family functions.
But what about the jaw, you ask? Of course you do. Everyone does. And, frankly, it’s been a bit of a bane of McCosker’s life. Hard enough to have one’s jaw broken so publicly, as he did during the Centenary Test; hard enough to bat with that jaw bandaged but not yet wired in the second innings of that game; hard enough to have to rebuild one’s game, so successfully that he made a fine Test hundred three and a half months later. The real challenge for McCosker, one senses, has been attention - the episodic revisitation of that stirring day when he re-emerged from the bowels of the old Grey Smith Stand to partner Rod Marsh. The pair, if you recall, added 54 in eight-five minutes, in a Test where Australia’s victory margin was only forty-five runs.
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