Frederick Esmond Allen (born 28 July 1935) is a former English

cricket Cricket is a Bat-and-ball games, bat-and-ball game played between two Sports team, teams of eleven players on a cricket field, field, at the centre of which is a cricket pitch, pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two Bail (cr ...

er who played for

Durham County Cricket Club Durham County Cricket Club (rebranded as Durham Cricket in February 2019) is one of eighteen first-class cricket, first-class county cricket, county clubs within the domestic cricket structure of England and Wales. It represents the Historic c ...

. Having made his recorded

Minor Counties Championship The NCCA 3 Day Championship or National County Championship is a season-long competition in England and Wales that is contested by the members of the National Counties Cricket Association (NCCA), the so-called national counties (previously ca ...

debut in 1960, he played one further match before taking a break from 1962, in which he played no Minor Counties matches, to 1965. A top order batsman, he made his name as a number 3 batsman and occasional

off spin Off spin is a type of spin bowling in cricket. A bowler who uses this technique is called an off spinner. Off spinners bowl with their right-arm and a finger spin action. Their normal delivery is called an off break, which spins from left to r ...

bowler.Fred Allen at CricketArchive
/ref> Durham were only awarded first-class status in 1991. Prior to this they played as a "Minor County" against several of the first-class counties' Second XI. Allen's greatest bowling performance was in his third Minor County match, against Warwickshire Second XI taking seven wickets for 53 runs. This was not enough to win the match, as Durham were unable to match Warwickshire's 223, losing the match by an

innings An innings is one of the divisions of a cricket match during which one team takes its turn to bat. Innings also means the period in which an individual player bats (acts as either striker or nonstriker). In cricket and rounders, "innings" is ...

and 23 runs. Allen was a regular in the side from 1965 to 1968 and made his sole

List A List A cricket is a classification of the Limited overs cricket, limited-overs (one-day) form of the sport of cricket, with games lasting up to eight hours. List A cricket includes One Day International (ODI) matches and various domestic competit ...

appearance in 1968, playing in the first round of the Gillette Cup, scoring two runs before being bowled out by seven-time Test cricketer

Len Coldwell Leonard John Coldwell (10 January 1933 – 6 August 1996) was an English cricketer, who played in seven Tests for England from 1962 to 1964. Coldwell was a right-arm fast-medium bowler who was, for a few years in the early to mid-1960s, half of ...

, in his penultimate year before retiring from first-class cricket. Allen took part in a single-innings match between Durham and the US, at

Ashbrooke Ashbrooke is a residential area of Sunderland, North East England directly south and south-west of the city centre. Ashbrooke developed through the Victorian era as Sunderland's first suburb. Originally occupied by large middle-class familie ...

, in which he scored 48 runs. The following week, Allen hit his only century, 123 runs, nearly double his second-best score, against Cumberland in August 1968. Between 1968 and 1970, Allen continued to play Minor Counties cricket, before retiring at the end of the 1970 season.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Allen, Fred 1935 births Living people English cricketers Durham cricketers Cricketers from the London Borough of Sutton People from Carshalton 20th-century English sportsmen