The Picador Book of Cricket

by Ramachandra Guha

  On this tour the youngest of New Zealand’s five left-handers, John Beck, nineteen, missed a Test century by the unluckiest margin, 99 run out, and Lawrie Miller, thirty, touched the lowest point in his cosmopolitan career by making ducks in four consecutive Test innings in mid-season. You’d have thought the New Zealanders would have avoided Miller’s bat like a leper’s handshake but plump schoolteacher-batsman Murray Chapple borrowed it to open the innings against Western Province. ‘I want to see if it really works,’ he said. Experimenter Chapple scored 33 runs before Clive van Ryneveld found a hole in it to trap him lbw.

  After falling cheaply to Tayfield twice in the first Test, Sutcliffe dropped from No. 1 to No. 4 in the batting order. He stepped up from vice-captaincy to captain NZ for the last four matches after a ball broke a bone in one of Rabone’s feet.

  Only one bowler has been able to take the initiative away from Sutcliffe and make him give ground, even flinch. He is Neil Adcock, the South African fast bowler, who is 6 ft 3 in and towers over Sutcliffe like a lamp-post over a water-bubbler. The physical contrast does not overawe Sutcliffe – not even Bedser could do that. The first time Sutcliffe met the Transvaal terror several balls beat him but he courageously hooked bumpers off his collarbone. But after painful experiences on two lively Test wickets the New Zealander unashamedly admits that Adcock has troubled him more than any other bowler, including England and West Indies’ best. Once Skipper Rabone, though knocked down himself, tried to shield the left-hander by sticking at the dangerous end, like another Woodfull, and bravely refusing singles.

  Adcock and Sutcliffe were the central figures in the most sensational drama since bodyline rocked the cricket world twenty-one years earlier. The chief difference was that the batsmen under fire from Adcock’s bouncers were not tied to the stake by Jardine’s ring of leg fieldsmen.

  The scene of the drama is Ellis Park, where half-mast flags mourn the deaths of 151 people in the Christmas Eve train disaster between Wellington and Auckland. At this Johannesburg ground a few years earlier Arthur Morris made his first o in big cricket and Australians facing the Springbok fast bowler Cuan McCarthy on a greentop were within an ace of losing their first three wickets without a run.

  The pitch’s hard surface has a thicker topcoat of grass on Boxing Day 1953. It is the kind of wicket that adds yards to a bowler’s speed, feet to his bounce and inches to his smile of exultation. The South Africans estimate it to be faster – though not by much – than the Sydney wicket on which Lindwall and Miller shot them out for 173. Meeting such a bowler on such turf for the first time in their lives throws New Zealanders into confusion. Quick-flying balls from Adcock bruise several batsmen. One is bowled off his ribs, two collapse beside the wicket and another, Miller, goes to hospital coughing up blood after a blow on the chest. No wonder fast bowling on a greentop tends to make a batsman think of his wife and family!

  When Sutcliffe comes in after New Zealand’s first two wickets have gone for 9 there is no sign that his thoughts may be straying to his wife and toddlers Gary and Christine back in Dunedin. As usual his fair, curly head is capless. Immediately a ball from Adcock rears towards him he tries to flick it away. It strikes the side of his ducking head with a crack heard all around Ellis Park like a gunshot. Sutcliffe sinks to the turf, one hand pressed to his burst left ear. The other still clings to his bat.

  In horrified silence the crowd of 22,000 watch first-aid attendants bring out a stretcher to remove him. Many fear that the blow has killed him. After five minutes Sutcliffe rises on staggering feet, waves aside the stretcher-bearers and is helped from the field by his captain. The ambulance takes him to hospital, where he faints while the injury is being treated. An X-ray is taken and by the time he returns to Ellis Park in the afternoon six NZ wickets have gone for 82. Wicketkeeper Mooney hangs on, doggedly keeping the ball out for more than two hours and rubbing his bruises between overs. Though Adcock is resting after his deadly effort, the New Zealanders hardly look like reaching the 122 needed to avoid having to follow on their innings.

  The crowd shouts a hero’s welcome as Sutcliffe reappears through the tunnel from the players’ rooms deep in the stand. A pad of cotton wool is strapped over his ear. To the fieldsmen he looks dazed. The first thing he does is clout a medium-paced ball for six. The ball’s fall over the leg boundary sets the tempo for the most thrilling onslaught on Test bowling since McCabe took his hook and cover drive into retirement. Sutcliffe survives one high chance at 17. When Adcock comes back into the attack the left-hander pushes him to off amid a sympathetic murmur. It swells to applause as a cover hit races for four.

  Movement loosens Sutcliffe’s ear pad, so at 25 first-aid attendants go out to bandage his head. Looking like a warrior in a battle scene in the gallery of the Palace of Versailles, he saves the follow-on with three wickets to go.

  New Zealand’s need for runs becomes so urgent that Sutcliffe cannot be content to try for fours. The field’s thick carpet of kikuyu takes the pace out of ground strokes. So, if he can measure the ball quickly enough for a full-blooded stroke Sutcliffe goes the limit and smacks it over the wire fence. No slogging at everything, though. Sutcliffe the six-hitter remains Sutcliffe the batsman, his bandaged brow over the ball and a straight bat ready for anything demanding it.

  That morning the team had left pace bowler R. W. Blair, twenty-two, in his hotel room overcome by the tragic news that his fiancée, Nerissa Ann Love, nineteen, was killed in the railway disaster. They were to have married a few weeks after Blair, a linotype operator, returned to Wellington in March 1954. So when the ninth wicket falls at 154 it looks like the end of the innings and the players begin to move towards the tunnel. But, with his team in a desperate plight, grief-stricken Bob Blair has come to Ellis Park to help if he can.

  Amid a hush, he unexpectedly appears on the field. Walking to meet him, Sutcliffe puts a comforting arm around his bereaved mate’s shoulders. As they go to the pitch together the crowd breaks the silence with prolonged applause.

  The innings rushes to an end packed with excitement. Sutcliffe lifts his fourth, fifth and sixth sixes off Tayfield in one over. Thousands stand to roar appreciation of each stroke. Blair swings the off-spinner for another six to bring the cost of the over to 25. It is his only scoring stroke. The score leaps by 33 in 10 minutes before Waite stumps Blair off Tayfield at 187.

  Sutcliffe remains unconquered. Of New Zealand’s 105 runs since his reappearance he has made 80, snatched from the torrent of disaster, with 7 sixes and 4 fours. Johannesburg writer Vivian Granger’s tribute: ‘The greatest eighty ever made in Test cricket.’

  Nobody doubts that. Until Sutcliffe played it, such an innings did not exist outside schoolboys’ dreams.

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  The Australian side of the 1970s was peopled by players who acquired a reputation for being mean. When they talked to their opponents, it was usually to ask impertinent questions about their paternity. For all this, they were a bunch of outstanding cricketers. Especially the trinity of Denis Lillee, Rodney Marsh and Greg Chappell. They all came into Test cricket at roughly the same time, and went out of it together. This tribute by Frank Keating illustrates how retirement, and the possibility it allows of seeing a career in the round, often prompts the best writing on sport.

  FRANK KEATING

  Down Under and Out (1984)

  Forthcoming Australian cricket will be distinctly odd. No Test cricket side will ever again be Chappelled, Lilleed, and Marshed.

  They left, as they arrived, together. They first played against Illingworth’s England side of 1970–1. Thirteen years: an awful lot of Pommie-bashing. They didn’t care at all for Pakistanis; they pitied little Indians and provincial New Zealanders; they snarled back, glare for glare, at West Indians; they might well have got on famously with South Africans had they been allowed to play them. But it was Englishmen they loathed.

  Forgetting, for a moment, that the word ‘cricket’ still has, to some, connotations of chivalry, the thre
e of them were quite superlative cricketers. Chappell, ever with an upright, cultured, haughty detachment, scored more Test-match runs than any other Australian – more than Bradman, more than Harvey or Ponsford or Trumper or Woodfull or Walters. Lillee, with the kestrel’s cruel eye, the ominous drum-roll run-up and the classic side-on action, took more Test wickets by far than any of history’s legendary bowlers – more, by a bulging sackful, than Gibbs or Sobers or Hall, or Trueman or Tate or Underwood. Marsh, squat as a mudlark scrum-half, with miner’s forearms and gymnast’s sprung heels, dismissed many more Test batsmen than even such revered and glittering glovemen as Knott or Evans, Murray or Struddy, Grout or Tallon or Taylor.

  They worked together. When Lillee bowled, the other two took the tandem in turns. The legend ‘c Marsh b Lillee’ was inked into schoolboys’ scorecards almost a hundred times in Test matches – a staggering figure when you realize that history’s next double act of bowler and padded henchman at the time was that of Botham and Taylor with 52 – followed, by the way, by such appealing duos as Grout/Davidson (44), and Oldfield/Grimmett (37), one more than Murray/Roberts for the West Indies, and Marsh’s separate swagbag with Max Walker.

  And if Marsh didn’t pouch the nick from Lillee, more often than not Chappell, at slip, would. In his last Test match, a fortnight ago, Chappell beat Colin Cowdrey’s record of 120 catches. Half of them were sponsored by Lillee’s outswinger.

  I saw them first on the Friday of the Lord’s Test in 1972. It was ‘Massie’s Match’, when Lillee’s Perth clubmate bewildered the English with his massive, gently curling, frisbee swingers in the heavy, clouded, atmosphere. At the other end, the gangling Lillee had looked angry and menacing and fast. That afternoon, England hit back: Australia lost their openers for 7 runs: Greg Chappell, as palely frail and straight-backed as a model girl, joined his shoulder-rolling, gum-chewing, combative captain and brother, Ian. They shored up the innings in a stand of 70-odd, the elder man lecturing the kid between every over. Epic stuff. When Ian went, cursing, the young man – who had not scored a boundary in those first three hours – plonked his left foot down the pitch and dismissed Snow, Price, Greig, Gifford and Illingworth to all points. He went to his century in the last over of the day – and next morning he was joined by the tubby Marsh, who peppered the pickets with 6 fours and 2 sixes in a merry half-hour. They had announced themselves to England.

  It was later on that tour that, by chance, I shared a lift with the young Chappell. We sat together in the back of the chauffeured limousine. I started with time-of-day small talk. I received not a single word in reply. When we arrived at his London hotel, the Waldorf, he was asleep. I gently woke him. He got out, and slammed the door without a word to me or the driver. Ever since, I have been in awe, or certainly wary, of his cold-fish disdain. Opponents, too, have been intimidated by his almost sneering silences. Tony Lewis said the other day that he did occasionally punctuate them, as he moved from end to end at slip, ‘by letting the batsmen know an atrocity or two about their parentage’. But, for the most part, there seethed a contemplative hauteur.

  Lillee and Marsh were always, at least, less sinister, more extrovert, about their Pommie-bashing. On the whole they were carefree confident that their deeds would outweigh their devilry. You dared ask for their autograph. Actually, one fancies that the two of them – at thirty-six, Marsh is eighteen months older – learned their first rudiments in aggro, not from the gangland boss, Ian Chappell, but from the captain who first picked them for the Western Australia state side, Tony Lock, the spiky, competitive émigré to Perth who used to bowl for Surrey and England with Jim Laker. Lock was not even afraid to pooh-pooh the chivalries of public-school cricket within earshot of Peter May.

  Lillee’s longtime nickname was ‘F.O.T.’. Only dear friends dare call him so. It recalls the day, as a stringy colt in his first state season, that he was daydreaming in the deep, picking his nose at deep fine leg. Bellowed the infuriated skipper, Lock, from short leg – ‘C’mon, wake up, Lill! Yer an Effin’ Ol’ Tart!’

  Marsh, incidentally, answers to the name ‘Bacchus’ not because, as he once did, he beat the hitherto unbeatable Douggie Walters in a marathon lager-drinking contest – did I hear thirty-six cans of Swan on a flight from London? – but because there is a place in Australia called Bacchus Marsh. Actually, ‘Romney’ might have been slightly more original.

  Together, F.O.T. and Bacchus have been involved in a few tawdry episodes. They each egg the other on, just as they do when they are concentrating only on the cricket. A few years ago, in Perth, Lillee went out to bat against England with one of his sponsor’s experimental aluminium bats. When the England captain, Brearley, objected that it would ruin the ball, Lillee said he was quite prepared to leave the advertising gimmick at that – till Marsh, batting at the other end, insisted that he was quite within his rights to stay. The spoiled schoolboy’s sit-down strike lasted fully ten minutes.

  Neither of them admits who first came up with the idea to bet against their own team at Headingley a couple of years ago. The bookie says it was Lillee. In the last innings, Australia needed only 130 to win at a doddle. Marsh and Lillee secured odds of 500–1 that England would be victorious. England won. Lillee collected £5,000, Marsh £2,500. ‘There was no question of us not trying to win the game for Australia,’ insists Lillee – and with 17 runs he was the third top scorer. But, for many cricket-lovers in Australia, the stench remains.

  Even Marsh, however, thinks Lillee went too far the following winter, when he spitefully kicked the Pakistan captain, Javed Miandad, at the wicket. One day, says Marsh, even Dennis will admit that was wrong. Lillee meanwhile sticks to his original story: ‘It wasn’t a kick; I just tapped his rump with my boot.’

  The following season, against New Zealand, the crucial match reached a marvellously dramatic climax. There was one ball left and New Zealand needed just one sixer to win. Greg Chappell shamefully ordered his bowler to bowl an underarm daisy-cutter all along the ground. It was impossible to hit. The captain’s long suspected meanness of spirit was at last fully revealed.

  And yet, the great multitude of cricketers enjoy their game when – indeed, because – it is noble and generous and forgiving. Foes must be honoured. And the young Chappell, at the wicket, had a poise and grace and grandeur when he drove through mid-off that had been seldom matched in the long litany of lore. Alas, in a way, but his talent did outshine the poverty of his sportsmanship. And as Chappell stood there in the field, glowering grim at slip, next to him would be Marsh, gloved and padded, bouncy, bristling with belligerence and buried in his green cap . . . and, far away, the macho man, Lillee, would lick his right index finger as he turned on his mark; a preliminary stutter into his stride; then the momentum would gather, and so would the gale that billowed the back of his shirt, and so would the noise from the baying throng; now, as the gold chain whirled and glinted, the stride would lengthen, and the batsman would swallow, scared; the cocked grenade would be primed as it pumped away under Lillee’s chin; the crowd’s tattoo would reach crescendo as, in a feverish jingle-jangle of arms and elbows and legs, out would come the pin in a whirr and a stretch and a grunt . . .

  Then Chappell, deadpan at slip, would unbend, Marsh, in the gloves, would return the ball with a smug, sadist’s grin, and Lillee would set off back to his mark . . .

  Three very missable men, who will very much be missed.

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  International cricket was once dominated by England and Australia. This bipolarity was first seriously challenged by the West Indians, who in the 1960s came to be the acknowledged world champions. Over the next two decades, other countries also started asserting their presence. The Indians, long accustomed to being thrashed overseas, won series in the West Indies and England in a single year, 1971. In 1983 they surprised everyone, including themselves, by winning the World Cup. Two of their cricketers stood out — the opening batsman Sunil Gavaskar and the fast-bowling all-rounder Kapil Dev. They each displaye
d a sense of self-belief and consistency of form unprecedented in their country’s history. They also had a surprising taste for breaking records. The two superstars of Indian cricket are here profiled by two contemporary British writers.

  SCYLD BERRY

  Gavaskar Equals Bradman (1983)

  They stand together now, the ‘boy from Bowral’ in the Australian bush, Sir Donald Bradman, and the guru of Indian batsmanship, Sunil Gavaskar. In Delhi yesterday, with a scintillating innings against West Indies, Gavaskar equalled the world record of 29 Test centuries that Bradman has held for over a generation.

  At the best of times comparisons are odious, and all the more so when they are made in India’s capital at the end of a long hot summer. For a start, how can the opening batsman for one of the weaker countries in the modern era be compared with Australia’s No. 3 who batted after Woodfull and Ponsford in the days of yore and spin?

  Both giants of the crease are small men. Perhaps, if a conclusion has to be reached, the supporters of either side might agree that the difference between them is the same metaphorically as it is literally: that Gavaskar, at 5 ft 5½ in, falls marginally but perceptibly short of Bradman at 5 ft 6¾ in.

  However, by happy coincidence or design, Gavaskar drew level with ‘the Don’ by means of an innings that was Bradmanesque. He thrashed West Indies’ four fast bowlers as Graham Gooch has done, and almost no one else. His hundred yesterday was one of the fastest recorded in Test cricket in terms of balls received – 94 in his case. For contrast, Ian Botham’s two epic centuries in 1981 against Australia came off 86 and 87 deliveries.

  Gavaskar reached his nirvana with a drive for four through midwicket, much as Geoff Boycott did when he scored his triumphal hundredth hundred at Headingley. But dhotis and sandals were flung into the air yesterday afternoon, scattering kitehawks into the bright sunlight, not flat caps as in Leeds. As Gavaskar acknowledged the applause of the thousands present, and of tens or hundreds of millions not present, Viv Richards strolled up from slip to shake his hand, getting to know the man he has to beat.