In contrast, the cover of The Cricketer is in colour, and captures the bowling action of
Bishan Bedi, a thing of beauty in itself. In mid-winter, this would have been a
promise of sunshine that was irresistible (I think that umpire is David Evans,
but I’m not certain).
Spin bowling is something of an undeclared theme in
this edition. There is a conversation between Jim Swanton and the Essex
leg-spinner Robin Hobbs. It was compulsory in cricket magazines at this time
for there to be at least one article presaging the death of leg-spin. You want
to take them aside and say “it’s ok, there’s this three-year-old in Melbourne…”
Chris Martin-Jenkins interviews Derek Underwood, who is
interesting on the question of the pace of his bowling. Critics were fixated on
the need for him to slow it down and toss it up.
“If I tried to learn the
art of tossing the ball up temptingly it would take me five years…Those five
years would probably see me out of the England side for good.”
Underwood reports that there were two thoughtful
dissenters from the consensus on this matter.
“[Ray Illingworth] told me
that if I’d got a thousand wickets by the age of 26, there couldn’t be much
wrong with my basic style.”
“Knottie [sic] is always
on at me to push it through quicker, the complete opposite of my critics.”
There is also a profile of BS Chandrasekhar and
reflections of the recent Australian tour of the UK by their off-spinner Ashley
Mallett, in which he does not mention the Headingley pitch. Mallett, who was to
become one of Australia’s best writers on the game, criticises England’s
selectors for undermining the confidence of Keith Fletcher and Dennis Amiss. Of
the young bowlers, he rates Chris Old highest.
Irving Rosenwater, BBC TV scorer for many years, gives
us something different. The writer Daniel Farson had recently named Montague Druitt
as Jack the Ripper. Rosenwater does not tell us why, but Google suggests that
this was based on little more than Druitt’s frequent presence in Whitechapel
and that the murders stopped after he committed suicide in 1889.
Druitt was a regular for a number of amateur teams of
the team, such as Incogniti and Gentlemen of Dorset, as well as his local club
Blackheath, whose Rectory Field ground was a regular venue for Kent for many
years. Rosenwater traces Druitt’s movements during the cricket season of 1888 using
the scorebooks of the time. He finds some correlation between Druitt’s
whereabouts and the location of the murders, but he lived in the general area,
so that comes as no surprise. There is no undiscovered alibi of a match away
from London at the time of a murder.
The
Cricketer had Alan Ross as book reviewer and we find him in a
grumpy mood. John Arlott had compiled a book on the recent Ashes series based
upon his reports in The Guardian. For
Ross, the master of the tour book, this is not enough.
Arlott has written too
many potboilers for his own good, which is a pity, because particular gifts and
in The Ashes 1972 none of them are
realised.
As a freelancer almost throughout his writing and
broadcasting career, it was precisely for his own good that Arlott kept the
books coming. He had a family and a large cellar to support, so literary
excellence had to be compromised from time to time.
Arlott’s treatment was like a couple of gentle on
drives compared to Ross’s bazballing of RS Whitington’s Captains Outrageous.
I have the illusion Whitington
wrote quite decently at one time, but his style now is quite abominable –
cheap in its effect, falsely pepped up and without dignity or decency.
and
It may seem not worth the
space dealing with such an indifferent book, but the fact is that bad cricket
books damage good ones, for they devalue the whole genre, and a market flooded with shoddy goods is no use to anyone.
Just as bad first-class cricket makes for bad habits in the young, so do
crudely contrived and presented books blunt the sensitivities of young readers.
An altogether more enthusiastic review could be found in
Playfair, where Neville Cardus
devoted his column to JM Kilburn’s Thanks
to Cricket.
Kilburn writes admirable
English, never overwriting in the recurrently lavish way which occasionally
embarrasses me whenever I return to the early works of Cardus.
He and Kilburn had humble origins in common. Kilburn
writes “Many of the books on our household shelves were marked with a
second-hand price representing lunch foregone or tram-fares patiently saved by
walking to work”. Cardus adds “I could easily have written that sentence myself”.
The forthcoming demise of Playfair Cricket Monthly
meant that this was one of Cardus’s last published pieces.
There are plenty of reminders of how much has changed
between then and now. Dr M Ijaz writes to The Cricketer to note that all the
test-playing nations of the time, numbering six, would be playing in the 1972-3
season. He asks if this is a first. Now, it might be unusual to find a month in
which any did not play in one form or another.
The
Cricketer has summaries of the pre-test matches played by
Pakistan in Australia and MCC in India, proper first-class games against strong
opposition. Dennis Lillee was taking it seriously; he took six for 30 as
Western Australia beat Pakistan by eight wickets.
Playfair
lists all first-class and what we now call List A fixtures for the forthcoming
season. On a rough count, there are 45 grounds that will not feature in the
2023 list, the great majority in towns that no longer see county cricket.
Particularly evocative for me are the Crabble
Ground in Dover, Folkestone’s Cheriton Road, Mote
Park in Maidstone, and the Recreation
Ground, Bath.
