The Cricketer, November 1973

 

The cover has action shots of two young cricketers who had done well in 1973 and were both off to the Caribbean with MCC and England. For Bob Willis, his home debut in the last test of the summer was an early step on the path to 325 test wickets, the England captaincy and Headingley ‘81. For Frank Hayes, the best was already past. His century on debut at the Oval accounted for almost half his test-career runs, made in nine tests, all against the West Indies. 

The November edition of The Cricketer was the Winter Annual, the centrepiece of which was always the Journal of the Season. Over the years, this was the work of, among others, John Arlott, Alan Gibson and Tony Lewis. In 1973 it was in the hands of Mike Brearley, in his second year as captain of Middlesex after returning from academia, and not yet the deity that he was to become. The rules for the Journal were its author wrote a weekly reflection on the cricketing events that were then posted to The Cricketer so as to prevent the application of hindsight.

Brearley isn’t quite in the class of those other writers as a stylist, but we go to him for insight, of which there is plenty, for example this analysis of Ray Illingworth upon his loss of the England captaincy.

He is very open, a lover of argument; he will have a dispute out with anyone, face-to-face. He supports his players, but expects 100% at all times. He is a devoted captain, never losing concentration, confident in his own ways; he has done marvellously at critical moments. He respects hard work in others, having worked hard himself. He has been a symbol for many cricketers and cricket followers in a still class-infected game.

Brearley, along with Peter Walker and Jack Bannister, had negotiated the first disbursement of TV rights money to the Professional Cricketers Association, all of £3,500 per annum for four years. More significantly, they persuaded the TCCB (the predecessor of the ECB) to initiate a non-contributory pension scheme for county cricketers. 

They were not afraid to deploy the confrontational approach to industrial relations typical of the seventies. 

,,,it was also decided, after a ballot of all members, that if we did not reach agreement we should take action to prevent televised cricket from being as attractive to the public as it normally is.

In this light, we must reassess the career of Geoffrey Boycott. We have clearly been wrong to see him as self-serving accumulator, grimly placing  his own average above the interests of team or paying public. In truth, this son of the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire was waging class war with the willow, making the bourgeoisie regret their colour TVs. 

Boycott is the recurring theme of the Winter Annual. Alan Gibson writes, in his Cricketers of the Year piece:

I cannot help wondering whether Boycott will ever make a good captain. He does not seem able to capture and control the inner man.

BI Gunatunga, on the letters page, disagrees, and thinks that Boycott, not Denness, should lead MCC to the Caribbean. Like many another fan of the Fitzwilliam’s finest, he does not go in for shades of grey in his assessment.

I consider Boycott to be a much-misunderstood cricketer mainly because he appears to be so different from other players. He is an immensely gifted cricketer, whose constant striving after perfection bespeaks a character well-suited to leadership. 

Geoffrey Boycott is the brightest star in the cricket firmament. Is it not, to say the least, a short-sighted act to deny the honour of leading England to a man whose present role in the England team has a classical parallel in that of Aenas in the destiny of Rome?

Mr Gunatunga wrote from Sri Lanka so may not have had his opinion tempered by the experience of watching Boycott bat too often. 

Boycott also turns up in Irving Rosenwater’s survey of 1973’s statistical oddities. During the second test against West Indies, he retired hurt from separate injuries from two successive balls, which Rosenwater thought to be unique. 

Back to Gibson, who was summoned for a nightcap with EW Swanton during the Headingley test.

This turned out to be a delightful occasion, though abstemious and informal. I am pleased to report that his theological position is still sound.

Gibson’s selections as Cricketers of the Year include a British Rail employee. 

…on a crowded train between Bristol and London, I was pleased, but surprised to find myself adopted by one of the buffet car attendants, who plied me with food and drink throughout the journey, when I never stirred a step from my seat. When I thanked him afterwards, he said, ‘Always a pleasure for you, Mr Arlott’.

There is an interview with Bishan Bedi, poignant given his recent passing. The tributes presented him as a man of firm views and strong principles, characteristics on full display here. 

Cricket should be an exciting game with batsmen playing their shots and bowlers trying to get them out. In England, however, too many captains want to keep the game tight. They keep the fielders back to save singles when they should have them up for catches. 

Bedi would have approved of Bazball.

On Sundays we see bowlers like John Snow bowling without a slip. This is ridiculous. Even I must have a slip. Sunday cricket is rubbish in my view. It is not real cricket. People come to watch it because it is Sunday and they have nothing else to do. It is not attacking cricket at all, but defensive cricket. 

No fines then for criticising the product (as he would never have called it). 

David Foot writes about Gloucestershire, focusing not on their Gillette Cup final win against Sussex, but on their Championship game against Glamorgan, a week later. I often finished the season at the County Ground in Bristol, and recognise it from Foot’s description.

It was the last afternoon of the season at Bristol, a ground which had been likened to a mausoleum a little too often for comfort, and more recently to the sands at Weston (by Somerset’s captain Brian Close). You don’t expect stirring sport on the final day. 

The home team were chasing a target of 267, but when the ninth wicket fell at 210 it seemed that the season’s end was only a few balls away. No 10 John Mortimore was capable enough, but he was now joined by Jack Davey, perhaps the only genuine challenger to Kent’s Norman Graham for the title of worst No 11 in county cricket. Davey’s 13 innings thus far in 1973 had produced 29 runs. Yet he had become something of a cult figure for the locals, particularly in the Jessop Tavern. Alan Gibson would leave the press box to shout “put them to the sword Jack” when Davey approached the crease. How fortunate that Foot was there to immortalise his heroics that day. 

The first one he received was right on a length, doing a bit off the seam. He stretched forward and pushed the ball back. The classic defensive forward stroke. Feet and bat positioned exquisitely, elbow up for the gods to see. The MCC coaches could have been inspired to poetry on the spot.

Davey equalled his career best of 17 in a partnership of 57 with Mortimore to take Gloucestershire to victory, and they “returned to an ovation as genuine as anything in the Gillette final”. The win moved Gloucestershire up two places to fifth in the table, but short of the prize of £500 for fourth place. It meant nothing, yet it meant everything and if any of the few that bothered to make their way to the cricket on a dank autumn day are still above ground, they will treasure the memory yet. 

The summarised scores of the Indian Schoolboys tour is replete with names that were to become familiar in the decade to come: Briers, Gatting, Hignell, Parker, Slocombe, DM Smith and the great CJ Tavarḗ,What a treat it would have been to be at Bristol to see 150 by VJ Marks. A King’s School batter name of Gower made 50 against visitors from South Africa.

Geoffrey Howard who was about to retire after a quarter of a century of first Lancashire, then Surrey, provides an informed summary of the changes that he had seen and, in some cases, instigated. More than that, he looks forward with some prescience, foreseeing—

• a sponsored, 16-match County Championship of two divisions (though he doesn’t approve of the latter; for some years he put together the fixture lists and says that this would become “a nightmare”)

• ODIs with every tour

• world cups in England

• neutral umpires.

Scyld Berry writes about lob bowling. I don’t recall seeing Berry’s name in The Cricketer before this, so it may have been the start of one of cricket journalism’s most distinguished careers. He gives us an entertaining history of the art of lobbing, which he suggests has some science to it, with greater variety than overarm can offer. After running through the options for seam, swing and spin, Berry lists more exotic alternatives. 

Then there is the second-bounce yorker, and of course the daisy cutter; the full toss straight to the shoulder…and as a first-ball speciality the harmless low full-toss to the off-stump that is tentatively driven to extra-cover.

GH Simpson-Hayward of Worcestershire took 23 wickets with lobs against South Africa in 1909-10.

With his low trajectory and ample turn off the matting he could not be “lofted” with safety or even driven along the ground with confidence; pushes and pokes were the best means of resistance. 

Did not Brearley once turn to lobs on the last afternoon of a county game? I suppose that Trevor Chappell might be regarded as the last international lob bowler if the daisy cutter is in the lobber’s armoury. 

What I miss about the seventies is how easy it was to infuriate those who deserved to be infuriated. Here is JF Priestly of Kent on the letters page.

I was appalled at the general turn-out of the two teams in the Varsity match at Lord’s. Only one Cambridge player was wearing his coveted light blue cap when fielding…one player had an unruly beard, long hair generally was the vogue, some of the players had not even bothered to clean their boots, flannels were different shades, and the only good thing to say about them was their good bowling and most excellent fielding.

No doubt when Mr Priestly went to the cinema he judged the film by the straightness of the ice cream seller’s tie. 

Iverson, Gimblett, Haigh and Foot

I have had Gideon Haigh’s Mystery Spinner on the shelves for a while now, and finally got round to reading it during the lockdown. It is one of cricket’s most remarkable stories. Jack Iverson was an unorthodox spinner who didn’t make his school’s first XI, debuted in first-class cricket at the age of 34, and for Australia a year later, in the 1950/51 Ashes series in which he became the leading wicket-taker for the winning team. Then he left as suddenly as he came.

Iverson was a mystery spinner in the technical sense. His grip is shown on the book’s cover, the middle finger tucked underneath the ball ready to propel it in a way that most batsmen could neither read or understand. But all we see of him is the hand, telling us that the mystery of Iverson is the man as much as the bowling.

That the book is a tremendous read goes without saying; it’s written by Gideon Haigh. It is also a triumph of research. There is no avenue of Iverson’s life that is unexplored, however apparently tangential to his cricket career. For example, Iverson spent a couple of years in his early twenties as a jackeroo (farmhand) 80 kilometres or so north of Melbourne. Haigh makes contact with the daughter of the owner, who remembers Iverson. The family still owns the property, so he visits. He also scours the archives. It provides Haigh with sufficient evidence to allow the reader to conclude that this was one of the happiest periods of Iverson’s life and that he was stifled by the duty of following his father into real estate.

Haigh also goes to great lengths to place Iverson in the context of the game’s history, with a chapter on the evolution of bowling from underarm days and another on the subsequent development of unorthodox spin, focusing on Iverson’s most well-known successor, Johnny Gleeson.  

Mystery Spinner passes the test for the best cricket writing, that it could be enjoyed by readers with little or no interest in the game. It sent me back to the book that is a benchmark in this regard: David Foot’s Tormented Genius, his 1982 biography of the Somerset batsman Harold Gimblett.

The two books have much in common. Gimblett’s entry to first-class cricket was even more sudden and spectacular than that of Iverson. A 20-year-old called up from the farm in Bicknoller at the last moment—it was in May; in July one of Somerset’s many jazzhat amateurs would have done the job—he hitched his way to Frome where he went in at No 8 and took the Essex attack for 123 in 79 minutes. Now, that would be noted only by the county cricket websites; then it was the story of the day, and dressed Gimblett as a golden boy, an ill-fitting suit for the introverted lad from the farm, but one that some pictured him in for the rest of his career.

Not that his batting was shy; many was the county attack that he took apart. Gimblett made 23,00 runs including 50 centuries at 36, equivalent to the mid-40s today. But he played for England only three times. The Second World War took out what might have been his best years, but a reluctance to hide his contempt for sleights (mostly real, but some imagined) from authority figures and being classified as a dasher also contributed. The latter has been a constant in English selection, through the years. Look at all the batsmen who got a few tests while Ali Brown of Surrey went capless. Somerset has a tradition of undercapped batsman, one that James Hildreth is upholding to this day.

For several decades David Foot had one of journalism’s more enviable job descriptions. For the Guardian, he wrote about cricket, football and rugby, and was the paper’s theatre reviewer in the West, and he had a column in the Western Daily Press, all of which left him time to write some terrific books, including an outstanding biography of Wally Hammond.

Some cricket readers may not realise that Gideon Haigh also has a parallel career as a business journalist. Both Foot and Haigh are examples of the CLR James principle, their cricket writing enriched by that on unrelated subjects.

Whereas Haigh had to ferret for the bulk of his content, Foot had it ready-made. He had agreed to write a book with Gimblett, but the subject died before the work began. But he left Foot his memories, honest to the point of distress, on a collection of tapes.

Haigh didn’t see his man play, of course. He was well into the research when he came across some footage and could finally watch Iverson bowl. Foot watched Gimblett play often. A childhood hero is a hero for life, though Foot got to know Gimblett well enough to know the truth of his title: Tormented Genius of Cricket. He starts with a bold assertion:

Gimblett is the greatest batsman Somerset has ever produced.

It would be interesting to know if he would concede that Marcus Trescothick now has that place in the county’s pantheon.

There is a dark connection between the two books. Both subjects ended their own lives. They had been born within a few months of each other in the first year of World War One, so lived at a time short of understanding of mental health. Gimblett’s melancholy (to use Foot’s word) was always apparent in hypersensitivity to criticism and a grim mood when the blackness became too strong to fight off: “He moaned more than most; he berated and he patronized. And a great deal of the time he despaired.”

David Foot describes several incidents that reveal Gimblett’s inner turmoil. He was the adjudicator for the Gold Award (man of the match) at an early-season one-day game in Bristol. For most ex-players this was the easiest of days, with food, drink and a fee in return for only a couple of minutes’ thought about who to give the medal to at the close of play. But the black dog accompanied Gimblett to the County Ground that day. For some time, he sat in his car outside the ground, wanting to turn round and go home. Foot found him wandering around the boundary in lonely anguish, dreading the moment of decision and the public disapproval that he had convinced himself was inevitable.

Jack Iverson’s insecurity was always apparent. He was forever announcing to teammates that was going to give the game away. A poor performance (and he set the bar high) would push him into a sea of self-doubt. Unlike Gimblett, Iverson generally hid his insecurity behind an affable persona, but the last ten years of his life saw a gradual decline in his wellbeing. Haigh’s meticulous account of Iverson’s life allows us to understand the context of his illness, which appears to have had a significant connection with the decline of the real estate business, that he had entered from filial obligation. His death followed his getting a disappointing business discussion out of proportion.

Foot records Gimblett’s final despair with similar detail and compassion. Both authors know that the story of the cricketer cannot be told without an understanding of the man and the times in which he lived. Duncan Hamilton’s on Harold Larwood, which I wrote about some time ago, is of the same high standard. All of three are worth a read.

NB David Foot was the subject of a recent piece on Cricket Web.