The Picador Book of Cricket

by Ramachandra Guha

  After the 1947–8 season in Australia, India’s captain, Amarnath, summed up: ‘Miller is Australia’s best batsman as far as style is concerned, though, of course, none can compare with Bradman for making runs.’ In Miller’s 86 for an Australian XI at Sydney the Indians saw that he was a sportsman of sensitivity as well as a batsman of style and strength. He came in soon after Bradman and for a while seemed likely to steal the show from the older man. Then, seeing that Bradman was heading for his hundredth century, Miller eased himself into the background, leaving the captain a monopoly of the limelight on such a memorable day. On the same ground in the same season Miller raced to 100 against Western Australia in 88 minutes, and his full 170 included three of the longest sixes ever seen at Sydney. One crashed high up the back wall of the alley between the pavilion and the Noble Stand. But some of us were not happy about the way the ex-Victorian’s cricket was being burned at both ends. If his pleas to be spared from regular fast bowling received any consideration in the Test seasons against England and India they were outweighed by eager desire for victory. His labours as one of the chief bowlers prevented him from approaching his batting with a fresh mind and untapped energy. The flame of his batsmanship was not burning with the same purity. The power was still there – he could hit as distant a six as ever – but he was tending to become a swash-buckling on-side hitter instead of a distinguished batsman with unrivalled hitting capacity as one of his qualities. The feet, ankles, shins, knees and thighs of such uncommon batsmen as Miller are among cricket’s rarest possessions, far too precious to be tarnished and squandered in the dust and potholes of the bowling crease.

  His bowling has been chock-full of life and personality, and full of shocks for batsmen – some of them nasty shocks. He gathers momentum in a much shorter run than other fast bowlers, shorter than Wright takes for a slow-medium googly. Nine loose-jointed strides are usually enough, sometimes fewer. He is the only Test-class bowler with such a flexible approach, and the only one I have seen drop the ball as he ran, scoop it up and deliver it without a trace of the interruption. Once he bowled in odd boots, one size nine and a borrowed ten, because the stress of fast bowling had broken his own. After his short run Miller generates pace with such a convulsive body effort that it is a wonder his back and sides have not troubled him more often. His delivery is high-handed (in more senses than one), especially for his in-dipper. Not satisfied with late swerve either way, break-backs and a wide range of pace changes, he rings in a leg break or a round-armer now and again. Batsmen find it hard to understand Miller’s bowling. Some of it is well over their heads.

  We came to expect one like that whenever he was hit for four. That indignity stung the same combative streak in him as a bowler that a crisis did as a batsman (I preferred to see him hit the roof when he was batting). Tossing back his mane like a mettlesome colt with dilated nostrils, he would stride back, giving a hurrying clap to the fieldsman and thrusting out his hand to command a quick return, in eagerness to get at the batsman again. Rushing up, he would fling down a bumper that made the batsman duck penitently; or occasionally it would be an exaggerated full toss instead. For the most frequent bouncer in post-war cricket he seldom hit a batsman – the ball usually bounded too high – but such moments transformed him from hero to villain, and he has been hooted at Nottingham, Madras, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and other points east and west. How much of his apparent anger was simulated only those close at hand could tell. As he ran up Miller did not always look at the batsman, and once started to bowl without noticing that the umpire’s arm barred his path because the striker was not ready. When he almost collided with it he changed in a flash from his bowling action to shake the umpire’s outstretched hand. His personality abolishes the boundary and brings the crowd into the game with him. Thinking Miller’s bowling for a Combined XI against the Englishmen at Hobart lacked its usual devil, a Tasmanian shouted: ‘Let ’em have the lot!’ Loudly enough to be heard beyond the boundary, Miller answered: ‘Quiet!’ lifting a cautioning finger in the direction of the barracker.

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  With Lindwall, Hassett and others, Miller formed part of Don Bradman’s all-conquering side of 1946–8. Another linchpin of that team was the wicketkeeper Don Tallon. Tallon kept beautifully to all types of bowling and, although competition for the ‘best-ever wicketkeeper’ slot is fierce (Godfrey Evans, Bertie Oldfield and half a dozen other names come to mind), he was up there with the best. What is less in dispute, perhaps, is the claim that this essay by Ray Robinson is the finest portrait by a writer of a stumper.

  RAY ROBINSON

  Much in a Name (1951)

  Tallon! The very name brings to mind an eagle swooping on its prey. The lean, hardbitten Queenslander’s presence has made batsmen feel they are being attacked from two directions, that they are as much in danger of being torn down from behind as of being overcome by the visible foe at the bowling crease. No other man within my memory’s span has kept wicket with such intensity and brilliance – the efficiency of an Oldfield or a Strudwick, heightened by a verve that was not in their make-up and extended by a taller man’s reach. Don Tallon has been as ravenous for victims as Duckworth; less obviously only because he seemed actuated more by an implacable inner hatred for batsmen than the bouncing hostility of the Lancashire man. As with Bradman among batsmen, Tallon has combined the skills of more than one keeper. He alone exceeded 300 wickets before he played 100 first-class matches.

  Paganini’s wizardry on the violin caused superstitious folk to say the devil guided his fingers. Tallon is the Paganini of wicketkeepers. You see this first in the mystic passes his gloves make before the bowler begins: he gives occult signals by wriggling his fingers; with elbows close to his body he draws his hands sinuously down in front of his chest. He stands nearer the stumps than the others – stands guard over them, alert as a sentry, left foot behind the middle stump. As an outlet for nervous energy his feet smooth down the already level ground. He puts his wrists against his hips, then wipes his forehead with the strip of bare forearm between gauntlet and shirtsleeve. Taking the peak in both hands, he resettles his cap on his curly, brown head, tugging it nearer his eyes. He stretches his shoulders, hitches his trouser waistband, stoops halfway, then folds like a pocket knife until legs, thighs and body seem all one piece, balanced on level feet. Though rather tall, he squats nearer his heels than the others, with elbows outside his knees. He raps the earth with his fists, makes a final pass before his face with open gloves, and peers past his forefingers before he poises his hands in front of his shins as the bowler runs up. He crouches there, motionless, until his eyes read the ball’s secret.

  Often scenting a wicket before the batsman becomes conscious of danger, he whips into position in readiness for the victim’s mistake. His footwork is full of short, quick steps, his legs rarely straddle wide. He is a master of the sway and the lean to keep eyes and hands true to the ball’s course – so much so that he looks as if most of his close-up keeping could be done with a book under each armpit. His glovework is full of wristy curves, convex for the knee-high ball, concave for the skidder. He is as fussy about his hands as a pianist. The wicketkeeper is the nerve centre of the field; when Tallon is there it is a highly strung nerve. As the ball approaches he often jams his tongue into the right corner of his mouth. When the bat denies him the ball he goes through the taking action just the same, bringing his hands back like a chef drawing a tray from an oven. The ball that seems certain to bowl the batsman causes most keepers to stand upright to acclaim the happy sight; embarrassment and four byes usually result if it misses. If the stumps stop the ball from coming to Tallon, as like as not he will catch one of the flying bails.

  In his leathery face, tanned by the Queensland sun, his hazel eyes almost disappear amid a network of wrinkles – the result of days staring along baking wickets in shimmering glare, enough to cause mirages to appear at the other end. A sardonic-looking smile occasionally creases his lean cheeks, accompanied now an
d again by a laugh that sounds hard and dry. Strangers don’t find him easy to talk to. He walks to his position with an air of brooding concentration. Sparely built and lithe (5 ft 10½ in and 11 st 4 lb), he could be a dismounted boundary rider, accustomed to hours of solitude on some vast cattle station in Western Queensland. Behind the stumps he is a man of two words: ‘How’s that?’ (When Tallon came in to bat in Sir Donald Bradman’s testimonial match and played nowhere near an off-the-wicket ball, every fieldsman joined in a prearranged appeal.)

  Tallon fits exactly the picture of the Australian cricketer – sundried, hard and efficient – formed by many English people who don’t get to know the men personally.

  In stumping or running out batsmen from balls taken wide he has sometimes ripped a stump out of the ground, as if his gloves really did have talons. When a batsman clumps down on a yorker he darts around as if to wrench the ball from under the bat. His clamant appeals have been bad for batsmen’s nerves; they burst from him, demanding satisfaction; often he holds the ball on high as proof. Refusal is a wounding injustice.

  Events made Tallon what he is, toughened the outer man. Of four brothers who learned the game on a back-lawn wicket prepared by their father, Les Tallon, Don was the most gifted, though Bill became an inter-state player too. At thirteen, Don was chosen in the Queensland schoolboys’ team, at fourteen he was peeping over full-size pads as he kept in ‘A Grade’ matches with the men in Bundaberg’s Hinkler Park (named after the aviator, another famous son of the sugar-and-rum town, 217 miles north of Brisbane). At sixteen the boy from Bundaberg played for Queensland Country against the Englishmen in 1933 and stumped Sutcliffe for 19. At seventeen he was in the state eleven. He became regular state keeper at Christmas, 1934, went to work in a Brisbane motor car company’s store. His keenness laid him open to criticism for too frequent and too dramatic appealing, to convince Brisbane umpires (so southerners said).

  In three more years his swiftness and safety had won him first place in the estimation of the cricketers whose opinions matter in these things: bowlers. Some bowlers in other state teams used to say they wished they had him out there in the middle with them. Secondarily, he could out-bat all other Australian keepers. The brilliance of his 193 against Victoria in 1936 set all Australia talking.

  Omission from the 1938 tour of Britain put him in a ferment of bewilderment and frustration. It hurt him like a kick in the face. Some professed to know (Lord knows how) that each of the three selectors had Tallon’s name in his original pair – D. G. Bradman (South Australia), Walker and Tallon; E. A. Dwyer (NSW), Oldfield and Tallon; W. J. Johnson (Victoria), Barnett and Tallon – but that the Queenslander was crushed out in the final squeeze. I have reason to doubt that he was on all three lists, but I believe he would have been chosen had he been keeper for one of the older cricketing states. Oldfield, swallowing disappointment himself, lamented the omission of the younger man. Fishing for reasons, some said it must have been because Tallon stood back to medium-pace opening bowlers. (The bowler most concerned, Geoff Cook, and the keeper both knew that the best chance of wickets off Cook’s pronounced outswingers was by catching; while the ball was new Tallon stood back to make dead sure of them; he stumped a number off Cook when the ball was older.) Another theory was that he lacked experience in taking spin bowling, whereas his rivals were familiar with Fleetwood-Smith, O’Reilly, Grimmett and Ward. None of the explanations was adequate. War was approaching – he might never achieve his lifelong ambition to play for Australia in England. He feared that his only chance had been wrongly denied him. Men’s hands were against him.

  After that, Tallon gritted his teeth and set out to show how wrong his omission had been. Between then and his disappearance into the Army I believe he reached the highest pitch ever attained by a keeper. He had the satisfaction, a bitter satisfaction, of setting up a series of records. In the season of 1938–9 he evicted 34 batsmen in Queensland’s six first-class matches – figures no other keeper has approached in an all-Australian season; four times in ten innings at least 6 men fell to his deft glovework. At Sydney he caught 9 and stumped 3 NSW batsmen to equal Edward Pooley’s world record of 12 in a match for Surrey, which had stood for seventy years. At Brisbane he dislodged 7 Victorian batsmen in an innings to equal another world record by Smith, Farrimond and Price. He passed 100 wickets for Queensland in thirty-two matches – remarkable in a team lacking a regular leg-spin bowler, a wicketkeeper’s best friend. His hands were so unsparing that batsmen became resigned to the fate awaiting a trailing toe or a touch with the bat. Before the Hitler–Hirohito war stopped first-class cricket he scored a hundred before lunch (in ninety minutes) against NSW, and is the only batsman to have achieved the feat at Brisbane.

  This superb keeper had to wait until he was thirty before he played in a Test match, in 1946 in New Zealand. By then, Queensland had gained the googly bowling of Colin McCool from NSW. Tallon welcomed him suitably with six catches and stumpings in their first match together. The pair became an outstanding combination. Their first united effort against Englishmen yielded four stumpings and two catches in the match and brought Tallon’s total for Queensland to 170 wickets in fifty games in which he had worn the gloves. When he missed stumping Edrich off Cook, broadcaster Jack Fingleton broke the staggering news to listeners by saying: ‘A most astonishing thing has just happened . . .’

  Though Tallon was an automatic choice as Australian keeper, he had a sleepless night before the team for the first Test against England was announced. This shadow of doubt had pursued him ever since his pre-war omission from the tour of England; his fellow players’ reassurances could not banish the fear that he might be denied his rightful place, as in 1938.

  Never has a Test field been so dominated by a keeper as the Sydney ground when England batted in December 1946. The toss had given the Englishmen first use of the wicket. Tallon would not fit into the widely accepted part of a keeper passively waiting in the background for crumbs; he asserted himself as startlingly as a suit of armour striding forward from its corner to carve the joint. The scorebook credited the keen Queenslander with six victims in the match; to watchers it seemed more like sixteen. He menaced the batsmen incessantly from the rear; he beset them from the sides, darting and pouncing, and from above, with triumphant leaps.

  Hutton (39) drew back near his leg stump and glanced an off-spinner from Ian Johnson. Instantaneously, a white apparition appeared in the path of the ball and suffocated at birth a stroke destined for fine leg. The speed of it all was ghostly, but once the ball had sunk into his gloves Tallon showed that he was flesh and blood by holding it aloft and dancing a few exultant steps. No other keeper possessed the anticipatory agility to make the catch in the way he did. Nine runs later Compton (5) leaned forward to drive a leg break which McCool pitched outside the off stump. When ball and bat met, Tallon was a yard outside the off stump ready, as the ball spun away, for any chance of a stumping or a snick. But the bat’s edge sped the ball wider, into short slip’s territory. Over his shoulder Tallon saw it strike Johnson’s chest and fall. Spinning half around and diving backward, he shot his right glove under the ball as it neared the ground. It all happened so quickly that Tallon was rolling on the grass, with his left hand flung up in appeal, before we comprehended what he had achieved. Even after witnessing it, such speed of mind and action seems incredible. Only the world’s greatest keeper could have done it. Two runs later he caught Hammond (1) off another leg break from McCool, and the back of England’s innings was broken, the Ashes lost.

  In his hour of triumph Tallon was hurt. Trying to save a ball from Miller which swung wide to leg in England’s second innings, he had to stretch, and his left little finger was dislocated. He ran to the dressing room, a masseur jerked it back into place, and he resumed. Before lunch next day Fred Freer’s faster ball worsened the trouble; Tallon wrung his hand in pain. The injury dimmed his brilliance in the next two Tests – in fact, a risk was taken in playing him while the finger was tender – b
ut in the final Test he added six more scalps to his belt. Oldfield and he are the only two keepers who have taken 6 wickets in an Anglo-Australian Test twice. Tallon became the first to remove 20 batsmen in a rubber (16 caught); Oldfield and Strudwick, 18 each, had shared the record for twenty-two years. Tallon’s innings of 92 at Melbourne, besides being highest Test score by an Australian keeper against England, contained some of the most polished stroke play seen in the rubber. His 35 wickets in first-class matches beat his own record for an Australian season.

  India’s captain, Amarnath, who entered international cricket in 1933, said after the 1947–8 tour of Australia that Tallon was the greatest keeper he had seen.

  Before he got to Britain at last, at the age of thirty-two, Tallon underwent an operation on his tonsils, but he kept wicket so impressively that he was chosen one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year. Watching him, Duckworth told me: ‘He gets smoothly to balls that would have had me scrambling. In fielding the ball with gloves on he is the cleanest I ever saw.’ Yet England did not see him at his superlative best; he touched it several times, but without the match-after-match consistency of his pre-war peak. The 1948 summer was too chilly for the Bundaberg sport-storekeeper. As the Australians were travelling through a village one asked: ‘Where’s the King’s Arms?’ Tallon grunted back: ‘Around the Queen, in this weather – if he’s got any sense.’ Midway through the season he had to break from his lifetime habit of wetting his chamois inner gloves. On a misty May day at the Oval, the first time Lindwall let himself go in England, the fast bowler came galloping out of the fog like Dick Turpin’s ghost. One ball whizzed over a batsman’s shoulder; Tallon sighted it late, just had time to throw up one hand to save his face. He ripped off his glove and shook his hand in the air to cool it. His right middle finger was bruised. In the second Test a dive for a leg ball from the fast bowler damaged his left little finger again and it was X-rayed.