Graham Alan Gooch, OBE, DL (born 23 July 1953) is a former English first-class cricketer who captained Essex and England.

Internationally, despite being banned for three years following a rebel tour to ostracized South Africa, Gooch is the third highest Test run scorer for England.

His playing years spanned much of the period of domination by the West Indies, against whom his mid-forties batting average is regarded as extremely creditable.

[8] He was not selected for the Test team again until 1978 (although making his one-day international debut in 1976), when his scoring rate for Essex meant that he could not be ignored and he became a mainstay in the England line-up.

Gooch had a further hiatus in his career when he went on the controversial 1982 South African rebel tour, which resulted in all of the players concerned, including Geoff Boycott, Alan Knott and Bob Woolmer, being banned from Test cricket for three years.

Geoffrey Boycott was generally perceived as the key player organising the tour party but it was Graham Gooch as captain of the team who gained the most media attention and in some cases vilification.

It could be argued that more attention was on Gooch however as he was reaching his peak as a Test player, others were in the twilight years of their cricket careers and so the ban was arguably felt more acutely by the captain.

Opting to miss the 1986–87 tour of Australia for personal reasons, a severe loss of form resulted in failing to win back his England place for the 1987 summer and Test series against Pakistan – indeed at one stage he was even dropped to the Second XI at Essex, but his form returned at the end of the summer, with a superb century in the MCC Bicentennial match.

His second match, the one-off Test against Sri Lanka, was won, and all seemed set fair for Gooch to remain as captain for the tour of India that winter.

But that tour was cancelled over the Indian government's refusal to grant visas to the eight players who had sporting links with South Africa, including Gooch himself.

He would probably be best remembered in the competition for the stupendous century in the 1987 semi-final against India at the Wankhede Stadium when he repeatedly swept the spinners to carry England into the final.

They lost openers Mike Brearley and Geoff Boycott in quick succession but Gooch and Derek Randall held it together.

They added 48 runs for the third wicket and once Gooch was castled by Joel Garner on 32, the English side collapsed like a pack of cards.

The fateful reverse sweep by English skipper Mike Gatting at a crucial moment of the match saw his team losing the way after a good start and England fell short of Australia's score by just 7 runs.

[15] In the 1992 Cricket World Cupfinal, Pakistani skipper Imran Khan won the toss and scored a 72 to propel his team to a formidable 249 for 6 wickets in 50 overs.

However, Gooch suffered a broken hand and missed the rest of the tour – England lost the two remaining matches and the series.

Gooch contributed to the decision to omit Gower from England's tour of India in 1993, which proved so controversial that an extraordinary vote of no confidence in the selectors was passed at the MCC.

[18] Gower never played another Test, lending an ironic edge to Gooch's surpassing him as England's leading run scorer in the 1993 Ashes series.

It is this relationship between the two men that perhaps highlights best the differences between their approaches to the game, as Gower himself identified in 1995 in an interview in The Independent "I was never destined to be on the ball 100 per cent of the time.

'[19] In 1991 at Headingley against the West Indies he scored a match-winning 154 not out, carrying his bat throughout England's second innings against a highly rated pace attack, in overcast conditions on an unpredictable pitch, while only two of his colleagues reached double figures in a total of 252.

Gooch remains at the club, continuing as the squad's specialist batting coach whilst also assuming commercial duties for the county.

Double-centurion Alastair Cook (at the first test at the Gabba in Brisbane) hailed Gooch's influence on England's and his own batting prowess.

"[25] He was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1990, when he was surprised by Michael Aspel at a gathering of the England Cricket Team in the Excelsior Hotel at Heathrow Airport.