Talk:Hedley Verity

Dates and links
NB: I believe that the new DNB gives Verity's date of death erroneously, as 31st August! Loganberry 16:44, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Why the "See also: Brian Close" link at the end of the article? The reason isn't immediately apparent. JH 20:12, 22 August 2006 (UTC)


 * I removed it. It was added in Feb 2005. It has no relevance now. Tintin (talk) 05:04, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

NPOV
The article is exceptionally pro Verity with 0 citations to explain these statements. I have removed some of the most rediculous, like the uncited statement that leaving him out was "the selecting mistake of the century" and so on. There are numerous others which need to be removed if they can't be cited. SGGH speak! 14:17, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Removed section about "bowling action"
I have removed this section because it does not comply with WP:MOS and it presents a personal point of view (i.e., WP:NPOV), rather than documenting a verifiable stated opinion within a secondary source. You cannot just say that you have watched British Pathe, or a match on TV for that matter, and then express views like "Verity bowled off a trotted ten yard run, essentially straight to the wicket, and pivoted in his bowling stride" or "he is shown as closer to Derek Underwood in pace than Bishen Bedi" or "slip often stood quite deep". Does the source actually say these things? If comments like these about the player's style are to be included, they must be verified to written statements in a secondary source.

Furthermore, the person who introduced the section has been told several times about following site guidelines and especially about the need for verifiable sources. Jack | talk page 04:53, 31 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I should add that it breaches WP:PRIMARY as it is one person's interpretation of a movie clip he has seen. The statements used cannot be verified in any secondary source and, as such, they constitute original research: see WP:OR.  Jack | talk page 20:52, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Hedley Verity
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Hedley Verity's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "tbat": From Len Hutton:  From George Hirst:  From Douglas Jardine:  From Norman Yardley:  

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 00:30, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

BBC article
The BBC have published a good article Hedley Verity: Ashes legend who died for his country --Racklever (talk) 18:29, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Main Page
Fascinating bio. Really well written and interesting. I have learnt something. Congratulations to the writers, particularly Sarastro1.  Giano  11:14, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Article is badly written and fails NPOV
A few examples from the first sections:

"Never someone who spun the ball sharply, he achieved success through the accuracy of his bowling."

1. What that hell is this sentence?

"On pitches which made batting difficult, particularly ones affected by rain, he could be almost impossible to bat against."

2. "he could be almost impossible to bat against". Needs more puffery, e.g. "he was Jesus" 3. "affected by rain" wikilinked. How incredibly useful. The pitch was wet?

"His first season was not a success but, after moving clubs, he began to make a name for himself."

4. "he began to make a name for himself." That just sounds stupid.

"Rain had damaged the pitch, making it difficult to bat against spinners."

5. Wet pitch wikilinked again? Th4n3r (talk) 17:52, 31 July 2013 (UTC)


 * It's a cataphor, and has the same structure as lacking any form of support, it fell over and tall, red, and smelly, he was easy to identify. Is that what you object to? The first clause never someone who spun the ball sharply is awkward, it's true. I can't imagine a bowler with the opposite technique being described as someone who spun the ball sharply, or belonging to the category ones who spin the ball sharply. There must be a readier term. I'd suggest changing the clause to never a spin bowler, except that later on the article says "he switched to bowling spin". I don't know if never a sharp spin bowler is acceptable.
 * It's true that for neutrality it should say he was difficult to bat against. On the other hand, working hard to attain greater neutrality makes articles dry and boring. Maybe the phase "almost impossible to bat against" is in the references, and the article can be changed to say "according to Alan Hill in his biography of Verity, he was almost impossible to bat against, and might in fact have been Jesus." That would be preferable.
 * (and 5.) Yes, it's bad to link to this because the information is quite simple and it could be inserted into this article instead of sending the reader to the other article, and also because it's not clear from the link text ("affected by rain") what article to expect to arrive at. It's also supposed to be bad to repeat links, though I tend to disagree - I think it's good to repeat links if the first occurrence is far away and difficult to find. These shouldn't be links, anyway; instead the article should say "because the wet pitch makes the ball's bounces unpredictable", which seems to be the only useful information in the sticky wicket article. I suppose the point here is that Hedley Verity's accuracy would combine with a wet pitch to create balls which were either deadly accurate or, if they bounced, wildly unpredictable. I don't know anything about cricket, but some explanation like that seems to be needed.
 * Stupid? It sounds completely idiomatic. I mean to say, he began to make a name for himself must be in the biographies of hundreds of different people. It might perhaps be improved with more detail, e.g. he began to make a name for himself as a silent assassin in the night or he began to make a name for himself as a serial bigamist or whatever it was that he did exactly, accurate bowling I think it was. Card Zero  (talk) 01:54, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Revert of 7 October
Having been away for a while, I just looked at the recent changes to this article. The edit history mentions "links consolidated". In actual fact, this has taken very specific references, where facts are cited to a page where they can be verified, and replaced them with the form "pp. 13–31", which is not much help if verifying a single fact found for example on p. 18. Perhaps the links could be merged in places, but doing it this way is not good practice for any article. Certainly not for a FA. While I'm not particularly one who thinks "Keep your hands of the FAs!!!", this seems to have gone much too far. Therefore, I've reverted to the previous form (Sorry if anything got lost in the process), but feel free to discuss here further. Sarastro1 (talk) 20:49, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
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