The Picador Book of Cricket

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The Picador Book of Cricket Page 9

by Ramachandra Guha


  Mailey really was an incorrigible romantic. Throughout his life (and he passed his eightieth year), he remained, for all his show of worldliness, the poor boy of the Sydney slums, never stale at whatever life brought to him, always experiencing events with the boy’s wonder – ‘how has all this happened to me?’ On board ship, on his many voyages to England and back to Sydney, his crowning moments occurred whenever he gave a champagne cocktail party. Champagne was, for him, the symbol of the miracle which had changed him from a ragged urchin to one of the best-beloved and most magical of cricketers. He would often, in his cabin on the ship, listen to a gramophone record; Tauber singing about Vienna. He rented a flat in Park Lane during one of his summer visits to London. He gravitated naturally, on holiday, to Montmartre. He died happy. In his last moments of delirium, he imagined he was on board the Orient liner Orion, entertaining the ship’s captain and officers to a champagne party. He squandered his imagination to the end, even as he tossed up his spin, with the millionaire’s generosity. In heaven he has probably already clean bowled the Holy Ghost – with a ‘googly’.

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  I have a theory that the best cricket writers have been competent but not outstanding cricketers. They must have played good enough cricket to understand its technical complexities. But they must also have known what it is to fail, and to fail disastrously.

  R. C. Robertson-Glasgow played for Oxford and Somerset without ever remotely approaching Test standard. He then became one of the foremost cricket writers of his time. His playing experience, as well as his previous classical education, are both manifest in these marvellously concise appreciations of three great batsmen. Observe the subtle way in which the author brings in his own experience of bowling at them.

  R. C. ROBERTSON-GLASGOW

  Three English Batsmen (1945)

  J. B. Hobbs – Surrey

  Hobbs was the greatest English batsman that I’ve seen and tried to remove. He was the most perfectly equipped by art and temperament for any style of innings on any sort of wicket against any quality of opposition. He was thirty-seven years of age when I first had the pleasure of bowling to him. Misleading suggestions are sometimes heard that a cricketer, after the age of thirty, is tottering on the brink of decline. This is humbug; not only in a Pickwickian sense. Tom Hayward was in his thirty-sixth year when, in 1906, he scored 3,518 runs in first-class cricket, which still stands as a record.

  The early Hobbs, before the last war, may have had all the brilliance and daring, but he would be a rash man who denied that his meridian of skill was shown about the years 1919–26. In the 1924–5 tour to Australia, under A. E. R. Gilligan, he and Herbert Sutcliffe formed an opening pair which many regard as the greatest the game has seen. Back in England for summer 1925, Hobbs scored sixteen centuries. Of these, two were made in one match, against Somerset at Taunton. By them he equalled, then passed, Dr Grace’s record of 126 centuries. In the next summer he and Sutcliffe made the memorable stand on a difficult wicket against Australia at the Oval in the fifth Test, the first match of six running in which A. P. F. Chapman led England to victory. Sutcliffe made 161, Hobbs exactly 100; then had his bails flicked off by a beauty from J. M. Gregory. But, apart from the runs, Hobbs showed himself the master tactician. He foxed A. J. Richardson, who was bowling off-spinners, and the Australian captain into thinking he was in difficulties. He was not. So, while the pitch remained difficult, he contrived to keep on and, for the most part, to keep the strike against the spin bowler whom he least feared.

  At Taunton, the year before, on a hot August Saturday, I saw him nervous for the only time that I can remember. There was a large crowd, as crowds go in the West; a newsreel cinematograph was perched on the reluctant roof of the little pavilion. The match was ‘news’. For Hobbs had made his 125th century some time before, and had been followed round by ill-luck and most of the cricket correspondents. We batted first – more waiting! – and fared poorly. Then the struggle began. He was anxious; the strokes were calculating, even stuffy; he was twice nearly lbw, once at each end. At about 30 he gave a chance to wide mid-on, which went wrong. But throughout these embarrassments his instinctive excellence of method saved him from those faults of execution which another man in the same circumstances would, fatally, have committed. At the close of play he was in the early nineties. Then – a Sunday, for more waiting. But nice for the Somerset gate.

  On the Monday morning J. J. Bridges and I were the bowlers. I bowled a no-ball in the first over, which Hobbs hit to the square-leg boundary. Someone afterwards suggested that the no-ball was bowled on purpose! It wasn’t. Hobbs never needed any presents at the wicket. In Bridges’s second over Hobbs scored a single to leg that gave him what he has told me was the toughest century of the lot! His second hundred was a beauty, care-free and brilliant of stroke, and he began with a four past cover that I can still see.

  I have seen Hobbs described as a frail man. Actually he had strength of thigh and forearm far above the average, a strength which was concealed in the art of method and grace of movement. His footwork was, as nearly as is humanly possible, perfect. In every stroke he moved into the line of the ball with so little effort that he could bat for hours without overtaxing energy of mind or body. I never saw him unbalanced in a forward stretch, or ‘hopping’ on a back stroke. The interplay between judgement and execution was wonderful to see and baffling to attack. He covered his wicket much in defence. So did ‘W. G.’, according to one of his greatest admirers and opponents, S. M. J. Woods.

  There was no one stroke of which you could say that it was less strong than another. You will hear someone remark – ‘What a glorious square cut Headley has!’ or, ‘Do you remember Hendren hooking?’ You will not hear that of Hobbs. All his strokes, that is, all the strokes in the game, were equally strong and easy; they were of an even perfection. He would hook bumpers off his nose; and, as to leg-breakers, which can find out the faults of the best, he mastered them all in turn, from the South Africans on their matting, when he was young, to Mailey, Grimmett, and Freeman, when he was in early middle-age.

  To crown all, he had the gift of smiling quietly at failure and triumph alike.

  H. Sutcliffe – Yorkshire

  Herbert Sutcliffe is the serenest batsman I have known. Whatever may have passed under that calm brow – anger, joy, disagreement, surprise, relief, triumph – no outward sign was betrayed on the field of play. He was understood, over two thousand years in advance, by the Greek philosophers. They called this character megalo-psychic. It is the sort of man who would rather miss a train than run for it, and so be seen in disorder and heard breathing heavily.

  He sets himself the highest available standard of batting and deportment. His physical discipline equals his mental; shown in the cool, clear eye and the muscularity of frame. If he is bowled, he appears to regard the event less as a human miscalculation than some temporary, and reprehensible, lapse of natural laws. There has been a blunder, to which he is unwillingly privy and liable. The effects of this blunder will be entered, with other blunders, in a scorebook, and the world may read of it in due time. He does not regret that it has occurred, for he is never sorry for himself; but he is sorry that Nature should have forgotten herself. To the later comers to the ground he would, so to speak, announce: ‘Mr Sutcliffe regrets he’s unable to bat today, being, ludicrously enough, already out.’ Yet he is not proud. He leaves pride to little cricketers. There is nothing little in Sutcliffe. He is great. Great in idea and great in effect.

  In the matter of round numbers he has scored over 50,000 runs in twenty-one years at an average of 52. In Test matches against Australia his average stands at nearly 67 for 2,741 runs – easily the highest average among English batsmen. On his first appearance against Australia, at Sydney, he played an innings of 115. He took part with Holmes (P.) in the world’s record first-wicket stand of 555 for Yorkshire at Leyton in 1932. These are but a few of the feats in a career of resounding triumph.

  When I first s
aw him, in 1919, he was a debonair and powerful stylist. He didn’t look Yorkshire; even less a Yorkshire No. 1. He looked, rather, as if he had remembered and caught something of an earlier and not indigenous grace of manner. Pudsey was his home, but his style was not Pudsey. He had easy off-side strokes and a disdainful hook. I would not say that with the years he lost this manner, but it was increasingly seldom seen in its fullness. Two visits within five years to help Hobbs for England against Australia must mark any batsman of Sutcliffe’s will and intelligence. It became hard to discern which predominated, the pleasure of batting or the trick of staying in.

  As you bowled opening overs to the later Sutcliffe you noticed the entire development of every defensive art: the depressingly straight bat, the astute use of pads (as with Hobbs), the sharp detection of which outswinger could be left; above all, the consistently safe playing down of a rising or turning ball on leg stump, or thighs. This last art you will, I think, find only in the best players; Makepeace, Holmes (P.), Hutton, D. R. Jardine, Sandham and Hobbs as a matter of course, spring to the mind’s eye. Professionals generally acquire it more readily than amateurs, whose early coaching often tends to a neglect of the on-side strokes.

  Sutcliffe added a defensive stroke of his own; not exactly pretty, nor easily imitable. It was often played to a rising ball on about the line of the off stump. The bat started straight, on a restricted forward stroke; then with a swivel or overturn of the wrists he caused the ball to lie ‘dead’ a few yards down the pitch, or where a silly point would have stood if such a liberty had been taken; as if Sutcliffe had thought: ‘Ball, you irk me. There. Be strangled, and lie quiet.’

  He has always been capable of scoring at a great speed, especially from fast bowling. His hook is imperious. Some remark that this stroke has often been his downfall. They forget the many hundreds of runs that it has brought him, from balls which make lesser batsmen dodge and murmur of danger. I hope we shall soon see his batting again.

  F. E. Woolley – Kent

  Frank Woolley was easy to watch, difficult to bowl to, and impossible to write about. When you bowled to him there weren’t enough fielders; when you wrote about him there weren’t enough words. In describing a great innings by Woolley, and few of them were not great in artistry, you had to go careful with your adjectives and stack them in little rows, like pats of butter or razor blades. In the first over of his innings, perhaps, there had been an exquisite off drive, followed by a perfect cut, then an effortless leg glide. In the second over the same sort of thing happened; and your superlatives had already gone. The best thing to do was to presume that your readers knew how Frank Woolley batted and use no adjectives at all.

  I have never met a bowler who ‘fancied himself’ against Woolley, nor heard one who said, with conviction, ‘Woolley doesn’t like an off break on the middle stump or a fast bumper on the leg stump.’ I never heard Woolley confess that he preferred or disliked any bowler whatsoever. But then he is a very quiet man. I have a belief that he was particularly fond of them fast and short. They went that much more quickly to the boundary.

  It has been said that he was not a good starter. Like other great batsmen, he would sometimes miss in the first minutes. But equally he could kill two bowlers in the first six overs of any match. His own innings might be only about 50 or so, but he had fathered the centuries that followed. Only a few years ago, when he was some forty-seven years old, I saw him ‘murder’ Voce and Butler, the Nottinghamshire bowlers, in the first overs of a match at Canterbury. They were pitching a little, only a little, too short, and they extracted an exhibition of cutting and hooking which was . . . but we have refused the use of adjectives.

  Merely from a personal aspect, I never knew so difficult a target as Woolley. His great reach, and the power of his pendulum, made a fool of length. Balls that you felt had a right to tax him he would hit airily over your head. He was immensely discouraging. The only policy was to keep pitching the ball up, and hope. He could never be properly described as being ‘set’, since he did not go through the habitual processes of becoming set. There was no visible growth of confidence or evident strengthening of stroke. He jumped to his meridian. He might hit the first ball of the match, a good ball too, if left to itself, crack to the boundary over mid-on; then, when he had made 60 or more, he might snick a short one past slip in a sudden freak of fallibility, a whim of humanity.

  Sometimes he is compared with other famous left-handers, such as the late F. G. J. Ford. But these comparisons seem to be concerned only with attack. It is often forgotten, I think, that Woolley’s defence was as sure and correct as that of Mead or Bardsley. Of its kind it was just as wonderful to see, on a sticky wicket, as was his attack. It had a corresponding ease and grace, without toil or trouble. For this reason I think that Woolley will rank as the greatest of all left-handers so far seen in the game. None has made so many runs while giving so much delight.

  For many years Woolley was a great part of the Canterbury Festival. Myself, I preferred to watch him or play against him on some ground not in Kent. Praise and pride in home-grown skill are natural and right; but at Canterbury, in the later years, these had degenerated into a blind adulation that applauded his strokes with a very tiresome lack of discrimination. They had made a ‘raree’ show of a great batsman.

  No one, when county cricket is resumed, will fill the place of Frank Woolley. I have tried to avoid metaphor and rhapsody; but there was all summer in a stroke by Woolley, and he batted as it is sometimes shown in dreams.

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  When Walter Hammond scored 905 runs in the Ashes Tests of 1928–9 he was hailed as the most accomplished cricketer of his generation. People thought he would dominate world cricket for the next decade or more. He was the best batsman in the world, the best slip fieldsman in the world, and a first-rate swing bowler too. But within a year and a half Hammond had his crown wrested from him. In the next Ashes series, played in England in 1930, Bradman scored 974 runs. No one had scored runs faster or with less effort or with more certainty. So infallible did Bradman seem that a duck by him was deemed more newsworthy than a double hundred by someone else.

  In any other epoch Walter Hammond would have been top dog. He continued to score runs, and take wickets and catches, always with a classical elegance. Some of his own innings, such as the 240 he hit at Lord’s in 1938, were acknowledged masterpieces. But he would inevitably be compared with Bradman. Theirs was one of the great rivalries of cricket, and it was usually the Australian who came out on top. Hammond had done enough nonetheless to become an icon to a whole generation of English schoolboys, of which the literary historian Ronald Mason was one.

  RONALD MASON

  Imperial Hammond (1955)

  One day early in the Australian summer of 1928–9 a press photographer at Sydney, squinting through his sights for a suitable action snap, released the shutter at one precise and infinitesimal instant that gave him (all unknowing, it is to be supposed) the most striking action picture of a batsman that has ever been put on record. For poise, grace, symmetry, composition and power it might be a picture of a statue by Pheidias; there is a flawless balance in the distribution of every line and every mass in the field of vision, and moreover it conveys an infinite potentiality of strength. It is Hammond at the finish of an off drive; or, rather, not at the relaxed finish, like the classic Trumper snap where you can feel the delicious release of the sprung muscles after contained effort, but a split instant of time after the maximum of productive tension. The head, beautifully poised, is still tucked down over the point of impact; the bat has come up in a great arc to finish over the left shoulder; the left toe, giving direction to the stroke, is pointed as lightly and as weightlessly as a ballet dancer’s. This dancer’s lightness, expressed in the poise of the left foot, gives the whole bodily attitude a strange and lovely ease of movement. I never saw Nijinsky, but I doubt if any gesture of his could convey the power and the glory of motion as this superb snapshot of Walter Hammond does. C
ompositionally the picture has built itself up most happily in the form of a pyramid; the wicketkeeper, who is Oldfield and therefore adds an instinctive grace of his own, is bent alertly in such a way that the line of his back and the transverse one of his arms and outstretched gloves exactly lead into and answer the corresponding lines of the batsman’s figure. All these lines point to the centre; to the great shoulders and whipcord sinews at the hub of this explosive activity. All else is just as the imagination hears and sees, the rich thunderous crack and the red flash, and the straight line shot through the covers to the fence.

  More often than not, when pictures of Hammond are required, that is the one that does duty; and it is appropriate enough, for it shows him on the very threshold of his greatest period of renown. All in all his career in first-class cricket lasted from 1920, when he played, I think, three matches, to 1951, when he emerged from a sickeningly early retirement to play one more; yet it never excelled in consistency of success the greatness of his tour of Australia in 1928–9 under Percy Chapman. In the series of five Tests he made 905 runs, a record were it not for Bradman, who hardly counts; he seemed unbeatable and unbowlable and, though he curbed them of necessity, he commanded ferocious aggressive powers, of which the epitome is for all to see in the magnificent photograph I have described. On that tour he entered into possession of a kingdom for which, seasons before, he had begun to make insistent bids. I say ‘kingdom’ with considered stress on the word; about him and his cricket was a perennial air of cool domination. Where Hobbs seemed primus inter pares, chief servant of the state in an idyllic republic, Hammond lorded it unabashed like an emperor. I know nothing of his personal temperament; from hints I have gathered here and there he seems to have been gifted with a modesty and charm which make his public character even more attractive; but as a public figure he displayed the pride of a commander, a pride without frills and flounces, a direct and uncontradictable pride. ‘Hammond’, said Denzil Batchelor, ‘never walked to the wicket. He strode’; and when he came down the steps and out on to the grass, you could hear in your ears the trumpets and the drums of an imperial salutation. His very name sounded like a ceremonial discharge of cannon.

 

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