Wounded Tiger by Peter Oborne

Peter Oborne is a political journalist with a pleasing sideline in cricket books; meaty, important cricket books that fill gaps in cricket scholarship. His biography of Basil D’Oliveira was masterful. He has followed it with Wounded Tiger, a history of cricket in Pakistan.

Has a cricket book ever been based on so much hard journalism? In an era when Pakistan is regarded as a no-go zone for westerners, his pursuit of the facts took him not only to the main centres of Lahore and Karachi, but also to places such as Peshawar, an hour away from the border with Afghanistan, where western visitors are usually war reporters not cricket historians. He records his inability to go to Baluchistan and Kashmir (the most militarised place in the world, we learn) as if it amounted to professional negligence. All in the cause of cricket scholarship.

The collection of primary evidence through interviews was essential because source documentary material on the early days of Pakistan cricket does not exist. I have been reading reviews of the latest work by the pre-eminent Tudor historian John Guy, (my tutor at Bristol University a long time ago). Addressing himself to the last two decades of Elizabeth’s reign, Guy has done what he always does: he has gone back to the primary sources and rebuilt the story. He had more to work on from England four centuries ago than Oborne has on Pakistan cricket a few decades past. Of course, many of the oral accounts are incomplete and contradictory, but Oborne guides us through them skilfully.

His biography of D’Oliveira and its account of cricket under Apartheid dealt with the old canard that cricket and politics should not mix. Like non-white South Africans, Pakistani players might have wished that they had the luxury of choice. Pakistan’s cricket emerged from politics in its rawest form: the turmoil of the partition of India in 1947. Some of the most famous names of the early decades of Pakistan cricket were among the the millions of Muslims forced to flee to the new country, including the five Mohammad brothers, four of whom were to play test cricket. I saw Mushtaq and Sadiq play often enough in county cricket, but had not appreciated how perilous their early lives had been.

Politics sets the game’s parameters today more than ever. The UAE appears to be an indefinite home from home, while relations with India mean that Pakistani cricketers—only Pakistani cricketers—are forbidden to milk the golden goat that is the IPL.

As millions struggled their way north and west in 1947, one Muslim was making the journey in the opposite direction. Fazal Mahmood travelled from Punjab in the north of the emerging country to Poona, “an insanely dangerous journey for a twenty-year-old Muslim male”. He had been selected in the Indian team for the tour of Australia and he was determined to make the training camp, oblivious to the chaos and danger, but eventually had to give in to political inevitability.

Fazal Mahmood is the first of heroes of Pakistan cricket whose stories Oborne tells; Wounded Tiger begins ingeniously with Fazal in the crowd at the Oval, watching as England wins the Ashes in 1953. A year later he was back, bowling Pakistan to series-squaring victory with twelve wickets.

That the young country was playing test cricket at all was remarkable, given that its domestic cricket was sparse and somewhat chaotic. How come it was granted almost immediate test status? Oborne puts it down to a victory against an MCC touring team (missing a few big names) in 1951. India proposed Pakistan and England seconded. Perhaps the inclusion of a seventh test team to fill an empty summer in 1954 appealed to Lord’s.

The safe passage of the Mohammad brothers was as well for Pakistan’s first decades of test cricket. Hanif Mohammad usually batted as if surviving a nuclear winter, the essence of a young nation making its way against the odds. Oborne presents Mushtaq Mohammad as one of Pakistan’s most under-rated and best captains, genially presiding over one of its most successful periods in the 1970s.

By then, most of the Pakistan team were familiar to us on the county circuit. Sarfraz Nawaz bustling in with short, angry steps at Northampton; Imran Khan, filmstar pace at Worcester and Hove; Zaheer Abbas, a double and single hundred in one game at Canterbury in the golden summer of ‘76. Above all, Asif Iqbal, dancing down the pitch to lash it through the covers. (How uncomfortable that the source of Pakistani matchfixing can be traced to Sharjah while Asif was in charge there). That county experience, and Kerry Packer, turned Pakistan’s players into professionals, no longer happy to be amateurs with jobs tied to the game.

Javed Miandad comes out of this account well. He has often been presented in the western press as some sort of upstart street urchin. In fact, his origins were firmly middle-class. Oborne credits him with accepting the captaincy at difficult times then gracefully stepping down for Imran Khan whenever the great man made himself available.

Oborne (who, it might be noted, has usually written for right-wing newspapers) is consistently critical of the attitudes of the English players, administrators and media towards Pakistan. He is scathing about the Idrais Baig incident on the MCC (in modern terms an England A team) tour in 1955, using MCC archives to tell a more complete version of the story than has been available before.

Baig was an umpire whose performance had displeased the MCC players. In Peshawar, Baig was taken from his hotel, bound and gagged, moved across town and then drenched with water. It was serious assault, but was laughed off by the MCC team and management as only a joke, the go-to excuse for bullies through the ages.

Oborne’s assessment of the “finger-wagging” incident at Faisalabad in 1987 is that it was incompetently handled by those in charge on both sides. But he makes a telling comment about Mike Gatting: “It is hard to come to grips with the set of values which led the England captain to take such a strong stand against allegedly poor Pakistani umpiring, yet be relaxed enough about apartheid to take a rebel squad to South Africa”.

The middle part of the book tends towards a series-by-series recitation. There is much good cricket played by many good cricketers—Abdul Qadir’s story is told with particular relish—as well as a good deal of selectorial mercuriality, players falling out, administrators with varying degrees of competence and cricketing knowledge, and a revolving door approach to the captaincy. The clues to how this came about are littered through the book and often come down to politics, cricketing, national and international.

The story of last quarter-century is related in themes and is the best part of the book. There is the glorious story of reverse swing, a new dimension to the game achieved only with immense skill; needless to say, the British press assumed it was those Pakistanis cheating again.  

The chapter on betting and match-fixing is the book’s saddest. It is clear that Pakistan cricket has been cursed (Oborne’s description) by the bookmakers for several decades. He makes an interesting comparison with prohibition in the United States in the 1920s, concluding that a legalised and regulated cricket betting market would be the best way of exercising control. He visited Mohammad Amir while the young bowler was serving his ban for the Lord’s no-balls. Oborne finds him playing tapeball cricket with the other village lads. He rightly presents the brilliant young bowler as a victim who stood little chance of being able to resist the massive pressure he came under from bookmakers and senior players. I am pleased to have seen Mohammad Amir play at the Basin Reserve earlier this year and hope that the cricket fraternity welcomes him when Pakistan’s tour of the UK begins in a couple of weeks.

I had not understood before reading the book how cricket was an urban, middle-class sport in Pakistan, and that its spread to the lower classes and the rural north and west is recent. Pakistan has achieved a broadening of interest in the game that the ECB and ICC aspire to but can’t deliver. One consequence has been the emergence of Afghanistan as a cricketing country: poppies on a battlefield.

Of course, 9/11 changed everything for Pakistan cricket. Home test matches were spasmodic thereafter, and ended indefinitely with the attack on the Sri Lankan team bus in 2009. Out of that and the spot fixing scandal emerges the final hero of the story: Misbah-ul-Haq.

Misbah took over the Test captaincy with his predecessor facing imprisonment, unusually difficult circumstances even when judged by the regicidal standards of that office. What’s more, he was a 36-year-old batsman who had never quite established himself in the test side. Oborne sums up:

The task that he faced was more difficult than any previous Test captain, including Kardar. He had to lead a cricket team in exile, deal with constant charges of corruption and match-fixing, and confront a chaotic administration.

Almost six years later, Misbah is still there having won more tests than any other captain of Pakistan with a victory percentage only fractionally below Wasim Akram’s lead mark, all without playing a single test at home.

Needless to say, some of the most famous names in Pakistan cricket are calling for him to be replaced for the tour of England. At this time, more than any, they were lucky to stumble upon him.

My most serious criticism of this fine book is the statement on page 261 that Wasim Bari was in 1976 “the world’s top wicketkeeper”. Readers would, I think, be disappointed if I did not assert the rights of the Kentish candidate to that title.

Wounded Tiger was Wisden’s Book of the Year in 2015 and deservedly so. We must hope that Peter Oborne will soon shine his torch of journalism and scholarship into another of cricket’s dusty corners.

The Appeal of the Championship by John Barclay

The Appeal of the Championship is an account of Sussex’s attempt to win the County Championship of 1981, written by their captain, John Barclay. It is quite the most enjoyable cricket book that I have read for some time, probably since Of Didcot and the Demon, the collected writings of Alan Gibson. I picked it up at the second-hand bookstall at the Basin Reserve during the recent Test against India.

The Appeal of the Championship was first written twenty years after the event as a series for The Times, and collected between hard covers in 2002. It betrays its newspaper origins in the brevity of many of its paragraphs, which might have been consolidated for its publication in book form. And that footling observation is the only negative remark I have to offer. Everything else about it is unabated delight.

Barclay—known in the game as “Trout” from his unusual third Christian name, Troutbeck— was an off-spinning allrounder and opening batsman who scored nine first-class centuries, but who finished his career with a modest batting average of 25 and a bowling average of 30. 1981 was his first season as Sussex captain. The player most similar to Barclay was Vic Marks, and Barclay shares Marks’ droll, understated but perceptive style of writing. His favourite target is himself, particularly his account of his first six in twelve years of Championship cricket, and description of how, at the culmination of an increasingly desperate motivational speech as captain of a TCCB XI, he made to leave the dressing room and walked into an airing cupboard.

The stars of Barclay’s Sussex were opening bowlers Imran Khan and Garth le Roux, who took almost 150 wickets between them. More surprisingly, the Pakistani proto-politician and the white South African also formed a close friendship, travelling and rooming together, which would then have been illegal in le Roux’s homeland.

There were plenty of overseas quicks around, and it is significant that the Championship came down to the two sides with a pair of them, the other being Nottinghamshire with Hadlee and Rice. There was much moaning then about the number of overseas players in the county game; most counties had at least two (except, of course, Boycott’s Yorkshire, where they did not want outsiders to distract them from the business of fighting among themselves). I always thought that the complainers were wrong and that it was to the great benefit of young English players to be playing with and against the world’s best. With seventeen counties homegrown talent would always have its chance. It worked the other way too. Glenn Turner and Richard Hadlee are just two of many who say that they became much better players for their time in England.

Besides Imran and le Roux, Barclay had plenty of less renowned talent available. Of the rest, the best-known today would be the keeper, Ian Gould, now one of the world’s leading umpires. Paul Parker was the batsman of the year and became the only Sussex man to play for England that summer. I was at the Oval to see him make a duck in the first innings. Parker became a victim of the abhorrent practice—as near to bear baiting as cricket can get—of deciding selection for the winter tour purely on the basis of the artificial circumstances of a Test debut. I would say thank heavens that we live in more civilised times, except that this Inquisitional practice returned for Simon Kerrigan and Chris Woakes last year.

There was Gehan Mendis, worse players than whom were picked for England in that period. Ian Greig was to play for England the following year and there was Geoff Arnold the cantankerous but wise former England bowler. Also a clutch of worthy county players, Waller, Phillipson and Colin Wells among them.

I crossed paths with Barclay and his team only once that summer. It was at Eastbourne for the first day of fixture against Kent in early August, my only visit to the Saffrons. Apparently 25,000 people watched cricket there that week, and even then it was said that nobody watched county cricket. Sussex spent much of the day compiling 310 before declaring. Barclay describes how Paul Parker came to be run out without facing.

I played a ball to Chris Cowdrey at mid-wicket and, in my enthusiasm, became confused and said “yes” instead of “no”.

The rest can be inferred. Barclay was himself run out, for 79. Curiously, my main memory of that day is of Graham Dilley struggling terribly. He had a dreadful time that year as his action, never a thing of flowing beauty, had become a river of tears. It was the last time he played that season.

Barclay had persuaded the groundsman to prepare a pitch of St Patrick’s Day green, not so much to help Imran and le Roux as to negate the threat of Derek Underwood, who had been skittling Sussex out for almost two decades, and they were sick of it.

 On every page there are reminders that this was another time. For a start, the Championship comprised three-day games only. One would finish, there would be an evening drive across the country and another would start at 11 the next day. With pitches covered like Victorian debutantes at the first hint of rain, this meant that there was a lot of what Barclay calls match-fixing. This practice was not for profit, but the only way on some pitches of fitting four innings into the time available and producing a win for one side or the other on the last afternoon. Captains would agree on a fourth-innings target that would give both teams a chance and manipulate the bowling so as to bring it about. In 1981 they would at least wait to see how things were until the third day before opening negotiations. As the eighties wore on one sometimes gained the impression that everything before lunch on day three was a charade until the pursuit of a figure that both captains had in mind when they tossed could begin. It was why four-day cricket was an essential innovation and a reminder that not everything was better as it was.

Another thing is that Sussex coach Stuart Storey is mentioned only occasionally. No other support personnel are referred to for the good reason that, apart from a scorer and possibly a physio, they were non-existent.  Barclay, the captain, was in charge.

There are wonderful descriptions of the famous and not as famous. We learn that the bowler Imran feared most was Surrey’s amiable off spinner Pat Pocock. There is an account of Ian Botham giving chase to a spectator who had foolishly shouted “you’re rubbish Botham” just loud enough for the great man to hear. This was after Botham had lost the captaincy, but before the heroics of Headingley, so there was frustration to be rid of. The following year Barclay edged to Botham at second slip, an easy catch but for the fact that Botham’s concentration, always a hard dog to keep on the porch during county games, had left the ground. He made no movement to prevent the ball striking him in what EW Swanton used to describe as “the breadbasket, or perhaps a little below”.

He describes Derbyshire’s Alan Hill as having

the gnarled and weather-beaten face of a man burdened by the worries and uncertainties of batting for a living…whose style gave great comfort for, in him, I had at last found a batsman who scored slower than me.

Sussex came across Imran’s countryman, umpire Shakoor Rana on several occasions. He became famous six years later when he and Mike Gatting had a pointing and name-calling contest that interrupted  a Test in Faisalabad. Shakoor, on a placement on the first-class umpires list for the season, was particularly taken with Geoff Arnold and always complimented him in the same way: “well bowled Mr Snow”.

Of course, the backdrop to cricket in 1981 was the astonishing Ashes series, the best until 2005. At times, Barclay becomes Guildenstern, describing the more important action going on offstage. At a Sunday League game at Grace Road, the crowd was more interested in Botham’s astonishing five-for-one spell that grabbed the Test away from Australia. The players followed what was going on through the roars of the crowd as each wicket fell. The same thing was happening at Canterbury, where my radio was turned up loud with no complaint. Barclay makes clear his admiration of Mike Brearley’s captaincy.

Sussex did not win the Championship in 1981. They lost by two points by Nottinghamshire. The centrepiece of the book is the match between the two at Trent Bridge in August. The tension builds over three days in Barclay’s account until Nottinghamshire are nine down with 27 needed, Hemmings (a capable batsman) and Bore (not so) are at the crease. Bore goes back and across and Imran thunders a ball into his back pad. It looks as out as can be. Raucous appeal. Pause. All eyes on the umpire, Peter “Shaking” (a name the Sussex team had given him after an earlier encounter) Stevens. Not out. One moment never decides a season, but even at this distance you hear the hiss as the air goes out of Sussex.

Sussex did win the Championship eventually, in 2003, and again in 2006 and 2007. I hope that they did it with the same generosity of spirit and sense of fun that took Barclay and his men so close, and that comes off every page of his book, which is full of all that was and is good and fun about county cricket.

The book was published by that saint among men Stephen Chalke, who was also responsible for Of Didcot and the Demon as well as much else that has been good in cricket publishing since the turn of the century through his Bath-based Fairfield Books (http://www.fairfieldbooks.org.uk/index.html), including two later books by John Barclay that I am looking forward to getting my hands on.