Bedside Cricket Read online

  3

  1934 to 1935

  L. R. Tuckett (South Africa)

  1

  1913–14

  L. Tuckett (South Africa)

  9

  1947 to 1948–49

  H. G. Vivian (New Zealand)

  7

  1931 to 1937

  G. E. Vivian (New Zealand)

  5

  1965 to 1972

  S. Wazir Ali (India)

  7

  1932 to 1936

  Khalid Wazir (Pakistan)

  2

  1954

  Note: I had completed this chapter shortly before the publication of the 1981 Wisden in which Michael Fordham lists not only fathers and sons but also grandparents, great-grandparents and brothers. I bow to Michael’s infinite statistical wisdom!

  CHILD’S PLAY

  There is a small but definite advantage in becoming a left-hander. Since most players are right-handed, a left-arm bowler operates from an unusual and therefore more awkward angle. Conversely, bowlers used to aiming at right-handed batsmen tend to stray down the leg-side when bowling against a left-hander. Very occasionally one finds a truly ambidextrous player. Fred Trueman, for example, could throw in almost equally well with his left or his right hand.

  SIX AND OUT OF SIGHT

  Playing at Guildford, Surrey’s captain Errol Holmes once hit a six on to the open top of a double-decker bus. The ball was never seen again.

  Some years ago, there was an outstanding young cricketer in Middlesex club cricket who appeared unexpectedly one season, having recently married and moved south with his firm from the Midlands. Such was his early form that this unknown quantity was soon being picked for the first team in one of the stronger leagues. He scored a brilliant hundred in his first game as a right-handed opener with all the shots, and although for what he called domestic reasons he was available to play only irregularly after that, the committee always selected him when he said he could play. Later in the year his side had been set a stiff target against the clock and he scored a superb match-winning century batting left-handed. When his delighted captain had bought him a beer afterwards he asked him how he decided which way round he was going to bat.

  ‘Oh, it’s quite easy,’ said our hero, who shall be nameless. ‘If I wake up on Saturday morning and my wife is lying on her right side, I bat right-handed. If she is lying on her left side I bat left-handed.’

  ‘What happens if she’s lying on her back?’ asked the captain.

  ‘Oh, in that case I’m afraid I have to ring you up and say I’m not available.’

  This may explain why he never played regular cricket, but by now I am sure he will have produced some budding future players.

  From time to time one feels gloomy about the future of the game, yet although County Championship cricket attracts small crowds these days it is always encouraging to see how many schoolboys turn up, at least during the holidays or at weekends. For them the best moments of the day are often the intervals or before and after play when all but the most unenlightened county clubs allow them to play with tennis balls on the beautiful, even outfields of our county grounds. Very often they just play ‘catch’ or in the absence of a bat a sort of football/cricket with the ‘batsman’ kicking the ball away on the half-volley. The majority, though, carry their own bats and wield them with some skill and style. The bowlers, like most small boys down the ages, generally run in and hurl the ball down as fast as they can.

  Variations of these childhood games are played every summer in gardens, streets and, of course, at the seaside. Go to any British resort and you might imagine that Winston Churchill’s wartime exhortation to fight on the beaches referred not to the German enemy but to the Australian one. What joy there is in a game of cricket with a tennis ball – or any hard rubber ball – played on firm sand with any piece of driftwood serving if necessary as the bat or the stumps. The sea usually marks one boundary, and a line level with a fat lady, basking inshore, often provides the other. Frequently a stray dog, or the family’s own pet, serves as an extra fielder – shades of the Grace family playing in their orchard in Gloucestershire with one of their dogs, Ponto, acting as a brave and agile close fielder.

  Beach cricket ought, indeed, to include the whole family, with mothers and sisters (if less experienced) given more than an equal chance. A generous spirit pervades these games, for there need be none of the disciplines, the firm laws or the harsh penalties for a mistake which can make the real game a stern and nerve-racking business. You are unlucky, for example, to be born into a family which allows anyone to be out first ball. On the other hand, there are rules peculiar to these unofficial games. Few gardens are big enough not to make the ‘six and out’ rule a necessity. This helps to teach a young cricketer to keep the ball down – but might it also be one small reason for the native caution of so many English players? In the street you may be caught off lamp-posts and in public parks it may be fatal to get a boundary in the rose-bed behind the ‘Please Keep Off’ sign.

  On the beaches you can often be caught out ‘one hand, one bounce.’ I once saw Ray Illingworth dismissed like that with a dive into the Barbados sand: how it must have hurt his professional dignity! Indeed ‘beach cricket’ is almost a term of abuse these days amongst professional cricketers who sometimes use the title derisively to describe the tactics necessary for the 40-over John Player League on Sundays. They recognize, at the same time, how many new devotees the Sunday league has attracted, including a huge armchair audience. In any case, it would be surprising if those same professionals had not played beach cricket in their boyhood.

  In the West Indies they actually have Beach Cricket leagues with properly organized games played on the very edge of the breaking surf. Here there are no shivers and goosepimples in a bitter wind as there often are on British beaches: just a lovely, tropical warmth. Imagine the glorious freedom of it! Even to a child, all those fierce fast bowlers must seem quite ordinary without a lethal hard leather ball in their hands. This absence of childhood fear is certainly one reason why Caribbean cricketers are so uninhibited. More West Indians than not seem to play the game absolutely naturally, with the basic rules of technique handed down from one generation to another.

  Colin Cowdrey, England’s most capped player, that gorgeously effortless stroker of a cricket ball, has acknowledged the help so enthusiastically given by the father who had consciously christened his son with the initials M.C.C.

  ‘The most valuable thing he ever did for my cricket was to use his ingenuity in overcoming the natural tendency of infant batsmen to slog every ball on the leg-side. He used to plant me with my back to the side netting of a tennis court and then bowl at me. Sometimes the challenge would be ten-to-win, at others twenty-to-win. But always those runs had to be gathered on the off-side. He never cared how exhaustingly he had to chase about the court in pursuit of the ball, so long as his four-year-old son was hitting into the covers or past mid-off, or even trying to cut. He also called on the assistance of a little mongrel dog called Patch.’

  Many another successful cricketer has told more or less the same story of parental devotion: the difficulty for the father often lies in suffocating his son with too much enthusiasm.

  There are also remarkable stories of men who have mastered this complex technical game without any coaching either at home or at school. The peerless Don Bradman – though he was born into a cricket atmosphere and was helped by both his parents (his mother was a left-arm bowler) and his uncles – was nevertheless largely self-taught. He spent hours by himself, totally absorbed, throwing an old golf ball against a wall and striking the rebound with a stump. That lonely practice in the country town of Bowral helped him to capitalize on a natural genius which was further developed by a quite extraordinary discipline, ambition, confidence and sangfroid.

  Despite the passion for cricket in India, the top players come almost exclusively from relatively well-to-do families. There have been strenuous efforts, though, in recent y
ears to try to widen the sphere of opportunity. For child cricketers of any nation the first opportunity to play organized cricket comes at school, and here again it is often a matter of luck whether a boy with a feel for the game will get the encouragement he needs. In areas where the roots of the game grow deep the chances are that he will, but there is no guarantee. I know a primary school in Sussex where the headmistress bans cricket bats on the grounds that they are dangerous. At the secondary stage many schools do not have either trained staff or proper equipment and facilities. There ought to be at least two non-turf pitches, one for practice and one for match play, at every school: they are relatively inexpensive and head teachers should consider them a basic, essential expenditure.

  Good facilities and good teaching are, of course, the main reasons why some British parents still deny themselves many things in order to pay for private education. Even in the private sector, however, one comes across strange ideas. I know a prep school in the Surrey hills where the school captain was flogged by his headmaster (now deceased) because, having made a duck in a school match, he committed the unpardonable sin of practising his faulty off-drive as he walked back to the pavilion. A former headmaster of Eton, Dr Heath, went further, taking his cane to the entire school eleven when they returned from a defeat by Westminster School.

  On the credit side, it was a Clifton schoolboy, A. E. J. Collins, who at the age of 13 in a match played in 1899 between two junior houses, Clarke’s and North Town, made the highest-ever cricket score, 628 not out. He made his innings over four afternoons out of a total of 836, the next highest scorer for Clarke’s making 42. In the same match he took 11 wickets for 63. He went on to captain Clifton, but from Sandhurst was posted to India, and after scoring 121 and 68 not out for the Old Cliftonians on leave in 1913, probably his last match, he was killed in France in the first year of the war.

  The remarkable Collins, immortal through that one innings, must have found the feat impossible to live up to and never at any other time suggested that he was in the class of many other schoolboy players – amongst them J. N. Crawford, Reggie Spooner, A. G. Steel, Bob Barber, Colin Cowdrey and Richard Hutton – who were obviously destined to play Test cricket, so outstanding were they as teenagers. At the age of only eight John Snow, the future Sussex and England fast bowler, went so far as to strike a bet with another future first-class cricketer, Tony Windows, that he would one day play for England. He was always convinced that nothing would stop him doing so. Many of us who fell early under cricket’s magical spell had similar hopes, but deep down most of us knew that they were ‘such stuff as dreams are made on,’ now long melted into air.

  THE CLUB GAME

  More often that not it is as difficult for a boy who has recently left school to persuade the adult powers to give him a fair crack of the whip as it is for the aspiring professional at a higher level. Those who have played faithfully for the club over the years may have lost their speed in the field, their fire with the ball or their flair with the bat, but the game means much to them and they have no desire to lose their prime place in the batting order or their expectation of a regular bowl. Often, indeed, the immediate interests of the club are better served by the old-stagers, because it takes time for a young cricketer to adapt to adult cricket.

  Everything is very different from the school game. The humour is bawdy. Everyone has his leg pulled. The fast bowlers seem faster – often are faster – and are certainly larger and stronger. Pitches are seldom so reliable as a well-tended school pitch. Innocent-looking deliveries bowled by bald-headed men with large paunches turn out to possess hidden devils. Umpires are less predictable. It is not as safe as it looks to take a single to the old boy in the yellowing sweater with a limp: he turns out to have a throw like a rifle-shot. When an opportunity comes to bowl, the young fast bowler’s nasty lifting deliveries are nudged away to the square-leg boundary with the greatest of ease by a batsman who looks as though he’s never been taught any technique at all, and the young spinner’s subtly flighted off-breaks are driven to all parts by a tall chap in a striped cap who also turns out to be a brilliant hooker and puller whenever the ball is pitched shorter.

  It is after the game is finished, however, that the differences are most marked. The school game ends with a rapid change back into uniform and resumption of schoolboy life. But for adults, the day has only just begun when stumps are drawn. From the most bucolic village to the most sophisticated league, the drinks in the bar are what count. There it is that the swanky, loud-mouthed so-and-so of a fast bowler turns out to be a most charming solicitor of high repute, and the self-effacing batsman who never said a word when he was given out caught behind off the buckle of his pad emerges as a brilliant raconteur of blue stories. There it is that players who have not had much luck slowly drown the pain of failure, while those who have done well in the match discuss over and over again the three cover-driven fours in one over which turned the game – ‘You can bat in your sleep on this pitch’ – or the brilliant catch which was ‘just one of those ones which stuck’. A marvellous cameraderie spreads around friend and foe.

  Two decades ago the cheerful swapping of stories, post-mortems on the game, discussions on why England’s Test team was such a dead loss and sundry other meanderings round a cricket theme used invariably to take place in the pub. Nowadays even small village clubs raise money by fetes, whist-drives, raffles, donkey-derbies and celebrity matches, and perhaps a loan from the National Playing Fields Association in order to build themselves a bar. It isn’t really quite the same, but the takings at the bar help to keep down match-fees to a feasible level. There are more women to be seen drinking with the cricketers these days, too, although they tend to be either starry-eyed fiancées who have not yet learned to be bitter about how much cricket their beloved plays, or more elderly wives whose children have left the nest and who long ago gave up trying to persuade the old man that there are other ways to spend a warm Saturday evening in summer than sinking pint after pint of bitter from the ‘jug’.

  The jug, filled up first by the home skipper, then by the opposing captain, circulates briskly. Traditionally, anyone who has got five wickets or fifty runs also pays for a jug, so it is a bad evening, or rather a bad match, if it doesn’t get filled up at least six times.

  To a temperate youth all this takes some getting used to, but playing club cricket at any level means accepting that it is a man’s world. It is not – or not usually – a case of a cricket match being an excuse for lingering on after the match to talk about cricket. Perhaps there are indeed better things to do on summer evenings but there are worse things too, as any policeman will tell you, and drinks with the opposition after the game are a part of the ritual. They help to give cricket its unique character and friendliness. The tradition goes back to the earliest days: any student of Hambledon will know how important was the Bat and Ball Inn besides Broadhalfpenny Down to those larger-than-life characters who played in the club’s great days of the 1770s and 1780s. Indeed the club’s ‘head and right arm,’ Richard Nyren, was the innkeeper and the inn, in effect, was the clubhouse:

  ‘Then fill up your glass, he’s the best that drinks most.

  Here’s the Hambledon Club! – who refuses the toast?’

  In more recent times fear of the breathalyzer has happily prevented many excesses, and the lure of television along with the emancipation of women, and in many cases the pressures of work, have cut down the time spent at the club bar. But cricket maintains its genuine social role: in James Pycroft’s Victorian novel Elkerton Rectory, the Reverend Henry Austin records:

  ‘My cricket club was designed to encourage sympathy between man and man, however wide their ranks might be asunder, and most admirably did it conduce towards this end.’

  It still does, although village cricket these days embraces a wider range of professions than it used to. It is many years now since a batsman walked out in a village match in Somerset with the club’s only pad strapped to his right leg instead
of his left. ‘Bert,’ said the opposing village’s fast bowler when he saw one of his old adversaries thus clad, ‘you’ve got your pad on the wrong leg.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Bert, in all seriousness. ‘So I ’ave. But t’will be on the right one when I get up t’other end.’

  ENTER THE LEAGUES

  League cricket used to be the prerogative of the Midlands and North of England. Through the determination of the former England batsman Raman Subba Row and others, the majority of clubs in the South also joined or formed leagues during the 1970s.

  In Scotland, Ireland and Wales too the main clubs are engaged in league cricket on most Saturdays of the season. It is only recently that the public in England have been made aware how seriously the game is taken in certain pockets of the Celtic lands, because of the participation of Scotland and Ireland in the Benson and Hedges Cup and the National Westminster Bank Trophy (not to mention Wales in the Prudential World Cup). But Scottish cricketers have long been proud of producing England Test players of the class of Douglas Jardine, Ian Peebles and Mike Denness, and Ireland rightly look back with pride at bowling out the 1969 West Indies touring team for 25 at Londonderry (Goodwin 5 for 6, O’Riordon 4 for 18).

  The image of league cricket in the North is of a grim, tough contest. The first adjective sometimes applies perhaps, the second almost always – especially in those leagues where professional cricketers are employed each season to supplement the local amateur talent. Most of the great West Indian fast bowlers have terrorized opposing batsmen in Northern England in their time, notably in the Lancashire and Central Lancashire Leagues where overseas stars can often make as much money for less work than in county cricket. Of the many West Indians who have graced the Northern leagues over the years the most famous association was that between Learie Constantine and Nelson, whose public flocked each weekend in large numbers to see their glittering acquisition from faraway Trinidad justifying not only his large salary but also, as often as not, the traditional collection round the ground which acknowledges to this day a fifty, a hundred or a good piece of bowling.