Dilley is perhaps best remembered for his tail-end batting with Ian Botham in England's second innings against Australia at Headingley in 1981, reaching his highest Test score of 56 in an eighth-wicket partnership of 117 runs.
In 1979, Dilley played 31 senior games for Kent, including taking four wickets for the cost of 41 runs (4/41) in a World Cup warm-up match against the New Zealanders.
Rain intervened, as it was to do in the fourth and fifth Tests as well, and all were drawn, but Dilley's eleven wickets, in the three innings he was able to bowl in, made sure of his place to face the same opponents in the Caribbean that winter.
Nothing that he had done before, from the moment he made his Test debut as the youngest Englishman for 30 years, until the day he retired from competitive cricket – not even the five for 68 he took in Brisbane in the winter of 1986–87 that catalysed a victory in match and Ashes series – would ever topple Headingley from the pinnacle of his achievements.
This game is best remembered for England's sensational victory after following on, and for the heroics of Ian Botham and Bob Willis, but Dilley played his part as well, albeit as a batsman.
Despite his part in the win at Headingley, Dilley did not play in the fourth Test, nor in the two that followed, being replaced variously by John Emburey, Paul Allott and Mike Hendrick.
[13] Despite being in and out of the side, Dilley's future as an international player seemed reasonably bright by 1983, and he played a full part in England's 1983 Cricket World Cup campaign.
A decent performance that winter for Natal in South Africa helped in his rehabilitation and in 1986 Dilley took 63 first-class wickets and earned a recall to the England side.
Generally regarded as England's foremost strike bowler, he developed significant pace and outswing from a long, wide run up, approaching the wicket at an angle of almost 45 degrees.
[15] In the drawn series against New Zealand the following winter Dilley produced his career-best Test match innings bowling figures, taking 6/38 including the first five wickets to fall at Christchurch.
Despite further injury problems, he proved a key bowler as Worcestershire won the 1988 and 1989 County Championships; it was during this period that he wrote, with team-mate Graeme Hick, an account of one of the title-winning seasons, entitled Hick'n'Dilley Circus.
[1] Dilley's move to Worcestershire denied him the financial security of a benefit season and he found employment after retirement as a coach, firstly for the England women's cricket team, and then accompanying the men's side on their tour to India in 2001/02.