Bedside Cricket Read online

  ‘Who the bloody hell are you lot?’ he inquired.

  ‘Glamorgan.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Glamorgan County Cricket Club,’ continued the spokesman with unjustified confidence. ‘We’ve booked here for the night.’

  ‘I’ve got no bloody booking for Glamorgan County Cricket Club, and I’ll tell you another thing Taff, I’m off to me flaming bed.’

  Glamorgan had had a long day in the field and a long and back-aching drive afterwards. This was not good news at all. But captain Majid kept calm and ordered an immediate team meeting outside the nearby Buxton Bus Station. There he found inspiration in the form of some hard wooden benches. ‘No problem,’ he said, with a peculiarly oriental calm and a few waggles of the head, ‘we will sleep on benches.’

  It was only because Tony Lewis had a friend at a country house nearby that the whole team did not, in fact, spend the night at the bus station. The following day Derbyshire beat Glamorgan – by one run.

  A Yorkshire team had a similar experience when they turned up to fulfil a booking at a hotel which had been closed for three months. But on the whole today’s county cricketer is comfortably housed in good hotels and the bore of having to drive so many thousands of miles during the summer is offset by the fact that most of the travelling is done in cars donated or loaned free of charge by local garages.

  More and more county cricketers are finding ways of spending their winters playing cricket overseas by taking coaching engagements with clubs in Australia, New Zealand or, more controversially, South Africa. It is a good way of spending the winter although it seldom works out that the player gets as much match practice as he is seeking. In Australia they play only one match a week, at the weekend; if it rains it is just bad luck. No wonder Australian batsmen seldom throw their wickets away.

  Many overseas players now make return visits in the British season although one Australian State player, engaged a few years ago to play a season for a Scottish League club, soon decided he had made a mistake. He was met at Glasgow Airport and told that there would be a reception for him at the club later that evening. It was suggested that he should have a shower and a rest before getting to the club at half-past seven. By half-past eight the officials and members were wondering what had happened to their new star player. Inquiries revealed that he had gone straight back to the airport, having booked an immediate return flight from London to Perth in Western Australia!

  The travelling life certainly does not suit everyone. In the Australian’s case a sweetheart had been left behind and there is no doubt that the wives of county cricketers need to be long-suffering. Generally speaking, women do not like the irregular life-style and marriages are put under strain, frequently with fatal results for the relationship. It is not always so, of course, and to say that county cricketers have girls in every port would be to overstate the case, but cricket has its share of ‘groupies’ and the temptations are there. Such are the problems of the unsettled life, the irritations as well as the pleasures of travelling the country with the same small group of people, and the strains of having to succeed in order to hold down the job that, in the opinion of the former Oxford seam bowler, now clergyman, Andrew Wingfield-Digby, each side should have spiritual assistance in the form of a team chaplain!

  For all the disadvantages, however, there are a greater number of plus factors, not the least being – for those who last the course, stay some ten years in the county team and put in the essential hard work in the relevant year – a tax-free benefit usually large enough to keep the cricketer and his family comfortably off for life. In the case of Jack Simmons, whose benefit with Lancashire in 1980 yielded £128,000, that is something of an understatement.

  Moreover, there is the challenge of daily combat at a high standard, the satisfaction of success when things go right and a great mutual respect among players. Denis Compton was once beaten hopelessly in the air by the Gloucestershire off-spinner Tom Goddard but, as he fell over, stranded yards from his crease, he managed to late-cut the ball for four. ‘One of these days,’ said Tom, ‘there’ll be no return ticket.’ Years later he again beat Compton through the air and dismissed him. This time, with a bark of delight, he produced a single-fare bus ticket from his hip pocket!

  It is a tough game, but generally also a chivalrous one. A young Nottinghamshire batsman, having been out for nought in the first innings of his first game in first-class cricket, faced Alex Skelding of Leicestershire in his second innings. His first ball, a lifter, brushed his glove and was caught by the wicket-keeper. Skelding began his triumphant instinctive appeal. He had got as far as ‘Howz...’ when he remembered it was the boy’s first game and merely added to the umpire in a softer voice, ‘...yer father?’

  The old pros can be hard on young players, too. Roger Knight, the present Surrey captain, remembers that as he was settling for his first ball in one of his earliest games for Cambridge, the Yorkshire captain Brian Close strolled across from short-leg and said: ‘By the way, Sunshine, what’s the Test score?’ The young undergraduate’s carefully built-up concentration was broken.

  Close, of course, was tough enough himself. He deliberately let delivery after delivery from the ferocious Wes Hall hit him on the body at Lord’s in 1963. On another occasion, when he was fielding at short-leg for Yorkshire, Martin Young of Gloucestershire was caught at slip from a rebound off the back of Close’s famous bald head from a full-blooded pull off Fred Trueman. ‘What would have happened if it had hit you straight in the temple?’ Close was asked. The reply was typical, accompanied by a characteristic little laugh: ‘He’d have been caught at cover instead.’

  Another hardy perennial of the county circuit in an earlier age, Patsy Hendren, was also a man who used his experience to good effect. Alf Gover, the Surrey and England fast bowler, tells how he arrived, bursting with keenness, for his first match against Middlesex at Lord’s. Hendren was the only other man in the dressing-room when he arrived. ‘What do you do, Son?’ he asked, just to check the identity of the tearaway fast bowler he had heard about.

  ‘I bowl,’ said Alf.

  ‘Fast?’

  ‘Very fast.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Hendren confidentially. ‘I’m getting on a bit, you know. Me peepers ain’t what they was and the crowd ’ere like me to get a few. I don’t mind how fast you bowl at me but don’t give me any short stuff – I just can’t see ’em any more.’

  Cricket being what it is, it was inevitable that Gover should find himself bowling when Patsy Hendren waddled out to bat, warmly greeted as usual by the crowd whose great favourite he was. Should he respect the old boy’s wishes, or give him a bumper or two? County cricket is a tough game and Gover had a living to make: his competitive instincts won. His first ball was a bouncer. Hendren moved inside it with remarkably speedy reactions and hooked firmly for four. A lucky shot, thought Gover. His second bouncer went even more crisply against the fence in front of the Mound stand. The third went over that fence and amongst a cheering crowd.

  It was a crestfallen Alf Gover who learned from Jack Hobbs at the end of the over that Patsy Hendren was not only one of the best hookers in the game still, but also, with his Irish blood, an incorrigible joker.

  Humour is never far below the hard surface of county cricket. Sometimes it takes the form of the elaborate practical joke, such as the time when Peter Richardson ‘set up’ umpire Bill Copson to complain about the constant rumbling coming from the commentary box which was disturbing the batsmen’s concentration. The victim was E. W. Swanton, booming away to his listeners in those well-known resonant tones and explaining that umpire Copson must be waving at somebody walking behind the bowler’s arm. Colin Cowdrey, in on the joke, was summarizing in the box because of an injury and increased the commentator’s embarrassment by cupping his hand and shouting back to Copson: ‘Noise? What noise?’

  ‘That rumbling noise in your commentary box,’ the umpire yelled back, to general amusement.

  More often the h
umour is the apt off-the-cuff remark, such as the order given by the Middlesex captain John Warr as they came back to the dressing-room having been asked to follow-on after a collapse. ‘Right boys,’ said Warr, ‘same order, different batting.’

  The best remarks often come in adversity. The Kent players returned to the field at Canterbury after tea one day when they had been toiling in vain in the heat for many hours in ideal batting conditions. Derek Ufton noticed that, during the interval, a sleepy bee had alighted on the top of the stumps. ‘What are we going to do with this?’ he asked. ‘Put it on a good length,’ said Arthur Fagg, ‘our bowlers will never disturb it there.’

  Wicket-keepers are often as quick with the tongue as they are with their hands. It was Arthur Wood of Yorkshire who said to Hedley Verity, after that great spin bowler had been savaged for 30 runs in one over by the South African Jock Cameron: ‘You’ve got him in two minds, Hedley. He doesn’t know whether to hit you for four or six.’

  There are a good many more overseas players in county cricket now than there used to be, and men of quite different colours and creeds play cheerfully together. Associations such as those between Zaheer Abbas of Pakistan and the South African Mike Procter for Gloucestershire, or Procter’s compatriot Barry Richards and the Barbadian Gordon Greenidge for Hampshire, have made a nonsense of apartheid. Like the amateurs and professionals kept apart by convention in an earlier age, they learned that one man’s hopes and fears are much like another’s.

  One man’s temper, too, especially if he is a suffering bowler. George Macaulay once yelled in frustration at the Yorkshire slips, after yet another catch had gone to ground: ‘I’d like to stuff the lot of you and put you all in Madame Tussaud’s.’

  ‘You can’t do that until they’re dead, George,’ said mid-off in sympathetic response. ‘And believe it or not I can still see their lips moving.’

  CRICKETING WOMEN

  Yet, strangely enough, affection for a particular cricketer (which may or may not last!) often develops into affection for the game itself. The idea of a handsome athlete dressed all in white making graceful patterns with his body or his bat on the greensward is soon discovered to be as much a myth as that other ideal of cricket as a gentle and chivalrous game conducted ritually in the sunshine in beautiful surroundings. But the little mysteries of the game which gradually become apparent – cricket’s slow drama and endless statistics – often grow on the female mind long after its owner has discovered that a man bowling with two silly short-legs is not a physical freak.

  Girl-friends, wives, mothers or daughters...women so often have to put up with the obsession for cricket of their boyfriend, husband, son or father that many accept that if they cannot beat it, they might as well join in. Numerous players would be unable to flourish without the encouragement of women – although the old Yorkshire cricketer Ted Wainwright is supposed to have preferred to sleep with his bat!

  The historical role of women in cricket is well known. In Surrey in 1778 Elizabeth Ann Burrell was reported to have ‘got more notches in the first and second innings than any lady in the game,’ thus causing the Eighth Duke of Hamilton to fall in love with her. Christina Willes is credited with the development of round-arm bowling because, playing with her brother John in a barn in Kent, she found that under-arm bowling was impossible with a hooped skirt. Another famous round-arm bowler, William Lambert, also learned the art from a lady, his wife. And it was a group of women who burnt the bail which produced the Ashes in 1882–83.

  Now the monstrous regiment is everywhere. They played a women’s match between England and Australia at Lord’s in 1976 to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of the Women’s Cricket Association. There are women on county cricket club committees. B.B.C. Television employ a woman scorer. The daughter of the Indian Test batsman C. K. Nayudu commentates on cricket in India. Some women also umpire, others score and apart from the more traditional female roles of making teas, washing and ironing cricket shirts and consoling suicidal husbands when they have made a succession of ducks, a relatively small but certainly not insignificant number also play.

  I have only once had the pleasure of playing in a properly organized match with women, for a scratch side against the England team at the Saffrons in Eastbourne. I remember the fast bowlers being relatively friendly, although the slow ones were subtle enough and when it came to batting I shall never forget Christine Whatmough of Kent hitting the ball as hard as almost any man.

  The great publicist for women’s cricket in recent times has been Rachael Heyhoe-Flint, captain of England for many years, a very good batsman and a very witty girl. She made one of the best impromptu remarks I have ever heard when presenting some new Gray Nicholls short-handled cricket bats to the members of the winning side after the first final of The Cricketer National Club Knockout at Edgbaston in 1968. Ronnie Aird, then M.C.C. President, had presented the Derrick Robins Trophy and a cheque, and a director of the bat company was preparing to hand Rachael the bats one by one when he accidentally caught her in a very delicate abdominal region with one of the willows. She let out a loud squeal over the powerful loudspeakers and quickly defused any embarrassment by saying: ‘Good thing it wasn’t a long handle!’

  ESSEX CALAMITY

  Even scorers need lavatories, and many keep theirs in a caravan which moves with them from ground to ground. At one time the Essex club used a former London bus, part of which was converted into a Ladies.’ Once at Chelmsford a lady went in after close of play, and to her considerable alarm found herself being transported out of the ground and off to Westcliff for the following day’s fixture.

  Rachael Heyhoe-Flint is one of a line of lady cricketers who became famous names, at least in cricketing households. Myrtle Maclagen, Molly Hide, Betty Snowball, Mary Duggan and the Australian Betty Wilson were others, as was Enid Bakewell, the Nottinghamshire girl who produced brilliant feats in more recent times, interrupted only by occasional absences from the game to have children. Rachael herself offended a few but entertained many by pricking the pomposity of some of the more serious and old-fashioned jolly-hockey-sticks types with whom serious women’s cricket is still to a certain extent associated. Her favourite reply was to those who asked whether ladies, like men, find it necessary to protect their sensitive parts. ‘Oh, yes,’ she would say, ‘but we don’t call them boxes, we call them man-hole covers.’

  Despite all the publicity, men are sometimes unable to cope with the idea of women cricketers, not least the distinguished gentleman who during a speech at a mixed cricketing occasion referred to a former lady player present as being ‘in my humble opinion one of the greatest hookers of her time.’

  Some enlightened schools still offer cricket as a sport for girls as well as boys, but the number of specialist girls’ schools playing the game has dwindled. They dropped cricket from the curriculum at Wycombe Abbey, the well-known Buckinghamshire school, at a time when I was depty editor of The Cricketer. Normally the magazine, even though it was then a fortnightly, had all too little space, but on one occasion I found myself at the printer’s with a small gap to fill on the letters page and nothing to fill it with. I therefore decided to impose upon the warm heart of my Aunt May, who had been a pupil there years before and in whose name I now wrote a strong letter, deploring the fact that the great game would no longer be played at Wycombe Abbey. Anyone reading the letter who had known my aunt as a schoolgirl must have been amazed. She had always loathed cricket and avoided playing it at all costs.

  THE PRESS

  The volume of letters I receive from young people aspiring to become cricket journalists is enough to underline my own good fortune. In fact I once wrote to Brian Johnston and asked how I could become a commentator. Like so many things, it is as much a question of luck and timing as anything else.

  There can be little doubt that it is easier to write about cricket than it is to play it. On the other hand the job is open to similar pressures and short bursts of feverish activity at the end of long periods of c
oncentrated effort. Most cricket writers are conscientious people and, like the players, find that the advantages of travel, not being tied to an office and doing an enjoyable job in convivial company are offset to some extent by the disadvantages of spending a great deal of time in cars or aeroplanes and long periods away from home. It is, without question, the perfect bachelor’s life.

  As in any job there are frustrations. E. W. ‘Jim’ Swanton has always believed that he failed to get the chance to cover the ‘bodyline tour’ of Australia in 1932–33 (which in the end was very inadequately covered in the Press, to say the least) because he had angered his sports editor by missing an edition one afternoon at Leyton when the only available telephone had been taken by another journalist. (The story was a good one: the record-breaking opening stand of 555 by Holmes and Sutcliffe.) In his later, Daily Telegraph, days Jim used to have a secretary to phone in his copy – a luxury rarely enjoyed by anyone else.

  Overseas it can be a good deal harder than in England to get copy to the office on time. Some years ago, a writer on one of the popular papers eventually gave up using the inefficient telex system (nowadays it usually works well) during a match on a remote West Indian island and told his office he would instead use the telephone to phone his report through after the last day of the match, which was an important one just before a Test. However he had equal trouble getting through on the phone and only made contact, after three false alarms, at about half-past eleven at night, London time. As soon as he got through he said: ‘Copy. Urgent,’ and waited anxiously to be transferred.

  Some newspaper copytakers are notoriously uninterested in whatever it is they are obliged to take down.

  ‘Who is it?’ a weary voice eventually said.