The Picador Book of Cricket

by Ramachandra Guha

  ‘I cut that out.’

  ‘What do you mean, you cut it out?’

  ‘I just made up my mind never to be caught that way again.’

  ‘So you do not glance?’

  ‘Sure I glance, but I take care to find out first if any of these traps are being laid.’

  ‘Always?’

  ‘Always.’

  And I can see that he means it.

  Mark Twain was once a pilot on the Mississippi. The bed of that river is always changing and a man is sounding all the time and calling out the changes. Mark Twain says that a pilot, whether on duty or not, is always hearing these soundings. Even when playing poker his mind registers them automatically and days after uses the latest results when piloting. Great batsmen are the same, they are not like you or me. An experience is automatically registered and henceforth functions as a permanent part of the organism.

  Similarly with placing. For George, to make a stroke was to hit the ball (he had a loud scorn for ‘the pushers’) and to hit it precisely in a certain place. He couldn’t think of a stroke without thinking of exactly where it was going. Whenever he had scored a century and runs were not urgent, he practised different strokes at the same ball, so as to be sure to command the placing of the ball where there was no fieldsman. Those who know George only after the war don’t really know him. In 1939 he was, in addition to on-side play, a master of the cut, both square and late, and though he was, like Bradman, mainly a back-foot player, half-volleys did not escape him. This placing to a shifting field must also be to a substantial degree automatic. Having taken a glance round, and sized up what the bowler is trying to do, the great batsman puts the ball away more by reflex than conscious action.

  George had one quality that was paralleled by no one except Bradman. When he was run out in the Oval Test in 1939 he had scored 65 and, as one reporter wrote, if he hadn’t been run out nothing was more certain than that he would make a century. He was not on the defensive but, according to Wisden, was cutting, forcing off his legs and driving.

  Now physically. Headley has told me that the night before a Test he rarely slept more than an hour or two. (The night before the second century in the Test at Lord’s he never slept at all.) But he isn’t suffering from insomnia, not in the least. This fantastic man is busy playing his innings the next day. The fast bowler will swing from leg. He plays a stroke. Then the bowler will come in from the off. He plays the stroke to correspond. The bowler will shorten. George hooks or cuts. Verity will keep a length on or just outside the off stump. George will force him away by getting back to cut and must be on guard not to go too greedily at a loose ball – that is how in Tests he most fears he will lose his innings (a revealing commentary on his attitude to bowlers). Langridge will flight the ball. Down the pitch to drive. So he goes through every conceivable ball and makes a stroke to correspond. This cricket strategist obviously works on Napoleon’s maxim that if a general is taken by surprise at anything that occurs on a battlefield then he is a bad general.

  Morning sees him in the grip of processes he does not control. He rises early and immediately has a bowel motion. At ten o’clock he has another. And then he is ready. He is very specific that these automatic physiological releases take place only on big-match days. He is chain-smoking in the dressing room. But once he starts to walk down the pavilion steps he would not be able to recognize his father if he met him halfway. Everything is out of his mind except batting. Bumpers? Bodyline? He is not concerned. He gets out to good balls (or bad), but such is his nervous control that no bowler as such has ever bothered him. Near the end of an English tour he is physically drained except for batting. He has a few days’ leave, he sits and smokes. His companions plan expeditions, make dates to go out with girls. George sits and smokes. From where he sits he doesn’t want to budge an inch. But when they return to the tour, as soon as he has a bat in his hands, he is as fit as ever; fit, however, for nothing else except batting. When the season is over the fatigue remains and it takes him weeks to recover his habitual self. I watched the West Indians in the nets at Lord’s in 1933 before the tour began. George never to my knowledge practised seriously. He fooled around playing the ball here and there. It was his first visit to England, but he was as sure of himself as if he were in Jamaica. In 1933 he ended the season with scores of 79, 31 (run out), 167, 95, 14 and 35. He was third in the averages for the season, Hammond and Mead averaging 67 to his 66. If he had thought about it in 1933 he would have made the runs needed. With him batting was first, not second, nature. In 1939 he was 72 with Hammond next at 63. He was a fine fieldsman and of the great batsmen of his day only Bradman was faster between the wickets.

  His only unhappiness on the cricket field was that he was allowed to bowl only on the rarest occasions. George used to watch batsmen and detect their weak points. But from there he went on to think that he could get them out with his leg break. Which does not at all follow. In 1933 he took 21 wickets. Alas! in 1939 he was allowed to bowl only ten overs for the whole season. He spoke of it with feeling. In 1948, in a series of intercolonial matches in Jamaica, George made, out of 356, 203 not out; out of 151 for 5, 57 not out; out of 456, 79 retired hurt. But he also took 4 for 40 and 3 for 53. Whereby I deduce that George captained the Jamaica side.

  What does he remember most? Or rather what do I remember most about his talk on cricket? George rarely raises his voice. He never raised it louder than when he spoke of the West Indian failure in Australia to deal with the bumpers of Lindwall and Miller. ‘West Indians couldn’t hook,’ he says, his eyes blazing. ‘West Indians!’ To this day he remains adamant in his view that as far as he is concerned bowlers can drop the ball where they like and put fieldsmen where they like. ‘If they catch it when I hit it they are welcome.’ There is not the slightest trace of braggadocio; I have not known a more genuinely modest cricketer. For all I know, George may be quite wrong in his views of short fast balls, though he had plenty of them in his time and dealt faithfully by them. He speaks as he does because it is part of his outlook: never to have his equanimity disturbed by anything that a bowler may do.

  That is why he speaks so soberly of the two balls which he did not see out of the bowler’s hand. He had a kind of nightmare vision of having to bat without seeing the ball out of the hand. And one more catastrophe, a real one. A celebration match in one of the leagues. Mayors and corporations, dignitaries and their ladies. George, the star attraction, opens the innings, taking the first ball. An unknown medium-paced bowler sends one right up on middle and leg. Right up. George plays comfortably forward, a thing he rarely does, only to see the ball move away in the last inches and hit his off stump. George is horrified. He has disappointed everybody. But there is more to it. He goes behind and observes the bowler carefully. Yes, it was not an accident, he is swinging the ball very late. George makes enquiries. Yes, he is a good league bowler, always moves the new ball well. It is years since it has happened. But George cannot get over it. He has been caught napping. He should never have assumed that any bowler with a new ball in whatever kind of cricket was not able to move it so late. Ordinary humans don’t play cricket that way. Few people in this world do anything that way.

  Such strange human beings as George Headley fascinate me not only for what they do but in themselves. There was a time when I read every biography of Napoleon I came across, and I still read some. He looks over a map of gun emplacements on the coast of France and points out that the investigators have left out two. I have known a few men who could do similarly. He could sleep instantaneously at any time for any length of time available. I have never met a man who could do that. And I have met very few men who can concentrate on anything as George concentrated on batting. I am sure he never had to learn it. I wonder if he had gone to America to study medicine (and had got interested in it) whether he would have become a great surgeon, seeing everything, remembering everything, hands deft and sure, without nerves before the most distressing case. These qualities were not remote fro
m those which made George the batsman he was . . .

  No, I have not forgotten the third reason why I wanted to write about George Headley. And note it well, you adventurous categorizers. I know Constantine and Headley pretty well, as cricketers and as human beings. Contrary to all belief, popular and learned, Constantine the magician is the product of tradition and training. It is George the maestro who is an absolutely natural cricketer. We West Indians are a people on our way who have not yet reached a point of rest and consolidation. Critics of a sociological turn of mind had proved that we were a nation which naturally produced fast bowlers, when in 1950 Ram and Val, both under twenty-one, produced the greatest slow-bowling sensation since the South African team of 1907. We are moving too fast for any label to stick.

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  In the epic bodyline series of 1932–3, Don Bradman was reduced to human scale by the bowling of Harold Larwood. Larwood was a superb bowler of sharp pace, with a beautiful flowing action and a late outswing. Under instructions from his captain, D. R. Jardine, he eschewed his normal methods in favour of short, bumping balls aimed at the batsman’s body. These tactics brought England the Ashes, but when they became too controversial to be repeated the bowler was made a scapegoat, and was never chosen for his country again.

  The following essay describes the visit, years later, to Harold Larwood of one of his foremost opponents. The bowler himself regarded Fingleton as the bravest batsman he had bowled to. Appositely, it was ‘Fingo’ who later arranged for the bowler and his family to be resettled, with honour, in Australia.

  J. H. FINGLETON

  My Friend, the Enemy (1949)

  It was in a side street in Blackpool that we found him. George Duckworth, one of his best friends in his playing days, knew the way. ‘It is a neat little mixed shop,’ said George, ‘but you won’t find his name on it.’ And we didn’t, which was strange, because in his day his name was possibly even as famous as Bradman’s, but he had not only finished with all that. He had not the slightest wish to be reminded of it.

  His eldest daughter saw us first. She recognized George and gave him a great welcome, smiling broadly and motioning towards the back of the house. And there in a homely room, its walls festooned with photographs of some of the most stirring times known to the game of cricket, he gave me a quiet but a warm welcome. He recognized me immediately, though I was the first Australian cricketer he had met since those stormy days of 1932–3 when his name was sprawled across the columns of newspapers in much the same manner as he sprawled his victims across the cricket field, but in 1948 he was much thinner. Walking behind him, one would never guess that here was the greatest fast bowler of the modern age; the possessor, in his time, of as lovely a bowling action as the game has ever known. But his face, though thinner, had not changed much. He was still the same Harold Larwood.

  The conversation, for a time, was circumspect. Not only was I one of the ‘enemy’ of 1932–3 but I was a newspaperman, and Larwood had memories of how he had been publicized over the years by the stunting gentry of my profession. Then, in addition, he wanted to bury the dead. You saw that, clearly, in his refusal to have his name shown in the slightest manner over his shop. Dozens of former cricketers throughout the world, whose claim to fame could not compare with his, have capitalized their glory by having their names over balls or bats, by having it in books, by having it up in big letters outside their places of business, but not in the slightest manner, and certainly not by having his name blazoned to the outside world, did Harold Larwood wish to recapture the past. He wanted only to forget it, and so his business, to all appearance, was no different to thousands of similar businesses throughout England that are run by the Joneses, the Browns, Williams and Smiths.

  It was a pinch of snuff, so to speak, that broke the ice. He took his box out and offered it to me. I declined. Not so George Duckworth. ‘Aay, laad,’ said George, taking a copious pinch. He placed it on the back of his hand, slapped it with the other, sniffed simultaneously and forthwith began to sneeze so vigorously that tears ran from his eyes. Larwood smiled and took his with the air of a man long accustomed to the art.

  ‘You know,’ he said to me, ‘I always had snuff in my pocket when I was bowling. I often used to take a pinch of it on the field in Australia. It used to freshen me up. And it’s much better for you than cigarettes.’

  An eminent medical authority in the last century, Dr Gordon Hake, would have approved of that. ‘Snuff’, wrote Dr Hake to a critic of his habit, ‘not only wakes up that torpor so prevalent between the nose and the brain, making the wings of an idea uncurl like those of a newborn butterfly, but while others sneeze and run at the eyes my schneiderian membrane is impervious to the weather or, to be explicit, I never take a cold in the head.’ Soon after the introduction of snuff into Britain in the eighteenth century, the Gentlewoman’s Companion, noble production, was advising its gentle readers whose sight was failing to use the right sort of Portugal snuff ‘whereby many eminent people had cured themselves so that they could read without spectacles after having used them for many years’.

  As Larwood was snuffing, I thought his Australian opponents might have been a little better off in 1932–3 had somebody got his box away from him. He might not have sighted his target or his victim so readily, but here at Blackpool, in 1948, it cleared also the atmosphere and when, at long last, George had got his schneiderian membrane to behave, the three of us fell to discussing the old days in a reminiscent manner. There was no bitterness. I had taken many on the ribs from Larwood and Voce in those bodyline days, but all that was forgotten as we recalled the players of those days and the many incidents – for incidents happened in the bodyline series every other minute.

  One has not to talk long with Larwood to realize that he is still embittered over those days. I don’t think it is with the Australians, but rather with those English officials who were glad to have him and use him before bodyline became ostracized, and then, conveniently, put him aside. He finds that impossible to forgive. Like the prodigal son, he would have been welcomed home by the MCC in 1935 and had all forgiven, but Larwood is a man of strong beliefs. To satisfy all and sundry, the MCC wished Larwood to apologize to them. Had he done that, like Voce, he would have been chosen again for the Australian tour of 1936–7, but Larwood could not see that he had anything to apologize over and so he remained adamant and went out of the game under a cloud.

  He did not say so, but I gathered that he considered himself badly treated, and many who know the story of those bodyline days will agree with him. With us, he recalled only the happy memories of the most distressing tour in cricket history, though when we talked of Bradman I detected again the same old glint of battle I had seen in his eye when I had faced up to him as a batsman.

  ‘When I bowled against Bradman,’ he said, ‘I always thought he was out to show me up as the worst fast bowler in the world. Well, I took the view that I should try and show him up as the worst batsman. But, laad, he was a good ’un.’

  We fell to looking through his photographic albums and the reminiscences among the three of us came thick and fast. His eldest daughter (and Larwood has five beautiful daughters, the youngest between our legs on the floor) had just begun to take an interest in cricket, and only a few days before Larwood had got out his souvenirs to show her, and they included innumerable balls with silver rings about them describing how in many places he had performed grand bowling feats.

  Larwood made some pretty shrewd observations about batsmen. He reeled off the names of famous batsmen who, he considered, couldn’t play the hook stroke and were thus at a disadvantage against him. The cricket world would be amazed if I repeated the men he named but, like Keith Miller, the Australian, he considered himself fully entitled to prove their weaknesses with bouncers. But how the wheel has now turned full circle! Here, in 1948, under Bradman, the Australians exploited the bouncers to the full (though without the packed leg field of Jardine), and members of the Nottingham County Committee, the
same committee which was forced to apologize to Woodfull and his team in 1934 because Voce had bowled bumpers, now admonished their own spectators for barracking against Australian bumpers. The cricket world, surely, is as crazy and as inconsistent as the outside one.

  It was with difficulty that we induced Larwood to come with us to a cricket game for charity which we were playing on the Blackpool ground. He compromised to the extent of promising to come down after afternoon tea. He had not seen either the 1934 or 1938 Australian teams in action. He had not seen his C.-in-C., Douglas Jardine, since Jardine had played in his benefit game in 1935. He had not seen this present Australian team in action, though he had a hankering to see Lindwall bowl. He could not remember the last time he had seen a game on his old home ground, Trent Bridge. Cricket had lost all its appeal for Larwood.

  He came to the charity game, forced into it, we thought, by his family, who liked to see him with old associates. He told me there a story I loved. It was about Sir Pelham Warner and myself and concerned the bodyline tour. It happened during the Adelaide game, where feeling was tremendously high, and where Woodfull used strong words to Warner over the tactics of the MCC team. That story ran quickly to the press, and Sir Pelham, jumping to conclusions because I was a pressman, wrongly blamed me for the breach of ethics.