The Picador Book of Cricket

by Ramachandra Guha

  They were to return with one of the proudest records too. The tour’s opener, against the Kenya Asians, brought their only defeat. East Africa had in the last three years been the recipient of tours by powerful sides such as the Pakistan Cricket Writers’ Club (under A. H. Kardar, and including Hanif Mohammed, Imtiaz and Zulfiqar Ahmed and Waqar Hassan), the Indian Sunder CC (with Mustaq Ali as captain, the legendary left-arm all-rounder Vinoo Mankad, and other internationals in Nari Contractor, Jasu Patel, Pankaj Roy, and Tamhane) and Freddie Brown’s MCC (featuring Mike Smith, Peter Richardson and John Warr). Yet, as the South African team steamed through the rest of its sixteen-match itinerary, demolishing Kenya twice and a combined East Africa XI along the way, the hosts were to say of their visitors that they were ‘as strong a team as any that has visited us’.

  Back home things were changing, and not for the better. As, throughout the 1950s, apartheid legislation had begun to bite, so the exodus of talented black people into exile had begun. There were political figures such as Oliver Tambo, writers such as Con Themba, Alex La Guma, Bloke Modisane, Dennis Brutus, and Es’kia Mpahlele, musicians such as Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba.

  Internally, black opposition expressed itself in campaigns of passive resistance to which white South Africa responded with massive force. In 1960, the Sharpville massacre showed the shape of things to come, and aroused the outrage of the world. 1961 saw white South Africa’s response: the severing of Commonwealth ties by the declaration of Republican status. The Treaty of Vereeniging which ended the Boer War in 1902 effectively broke liberal opposition to racism in South Africa. Britain acquiesced thereby in the sacrifice of black aspirations in order to cement unity between English- and Afrikaans-speaking whites in South Africa under the flag of the Empire. Blacks were formally removed from the Common Voters’ Roll after the 1910 Act of Union, and liberalism destroyed as a credible political force within South Africa. Now, by cutting contacts, white South Africa sought to minimize liberal pressures from the world at large.

  The move was to backfire in the long run as the world turned the tactic back upon them in the shape of the boycott. Meanwhile, white intransigence was radicalizing black opinion. In 1963, Umkhonto We Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, was formed. And the movement into exile gathered pace. From the world of sport, Albert Johanneson, Leeds United’s flying winger, Green Vigo, a rugby-league legend, and of course, Basil D’Oliveira.

  D’Oliveira’s rise to fame is well known. He tells in his book how, in order to develop a technique serviceable in first-class cricket, he had first to unlearn everything he’d learned on the ‘Burma Road’ wickets of South Africa. Yet even this is not the true measure of his achievement. For D’Oliveira’s rebellion was against his third-class status both as a cricketer and as a man. In the early 1960s, county cricket had not yet emerged from what C. L. R. James ten years before had diagnosed as ‘the Welfare State of Mind’. Only a handful of men seemed able to transcend the limitations of ambition and outlook which had become the uniform of county batsmen. There was Dexter when the mood took him, there was Graveney, there was Ollie Milburn. And then along came Dolly. England fell in love as much with the spirit of the man as with the man himself.

  In D’Oliveira’s wake came an influx of coloured cricketers from South Africa to the English leagues. Cecil Abrahams, whose son John would one day captain Lancashire, spent fifteen years in the leagues. Others were John Neethling, Desmond February, Rushdi Majiet, Owen Williams and Dik’s brother Ghulam, who came at first to play rugby league and stayed to play cricket as both amateur and professional for Rochdale, where he still lives. In 1967 came Dik Abed himself, when, on the strength of a recommendation from D’Oliveira, who thought him a potential Test player, Lancashire League club Enfield signed him as their pro.

  That year, outside South Africa for the first time ever, and in competition with such names as Johnny Wardle, Charlie Griffith and Clive Lloyd, the twenty-three-year-old Abed proved his mettle with 70 wickets at 13.23 and 358 runs at 21.99. It was a good enough beginning for mid-table Enfield to ask him back. Though they didn’t yet know it, they were taking him on for a decade. The following year Abed really made his mark with 120 wickets and 600 runs as Enfield stormed away to the title. Another league title would follow in 1971, but before that Abed was to get as close as he ever would to playing first-class cricket.

  His 1968 form was enough to persuade Surrey that perhaps Tom Reddick, the ex Notts and long-time coach in South Africa, was right when he said that in county cricket Abed would get a hundred wickets a season and plenty of runs too. White South Africa aside, no one, least of all Dik, could possibly have begrudged Basil D’Oliveira a single atom of his fame. Yet in some ways it must have been easier for Dolly as a trailblazer: certainly his move into the ranks of county cricket was not hindered by the romance of his story, and the accompanying publicity. By the time Abed’s chance came, the romance had faded with the novelty. And counties around this time were short on patience anyway: they preferred to sign ready-made stars from overseas. Abed scored 215 runs at 71.66 and picked up a few wickets in two trial games for Surrey seconds. They told him they were looking for a bowler. A month later he took seventeen wickets for Warwickshire’s reserves against those of Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire. He was told he hadn’t got enough runs. He must have wondered just what he had to do.

  What he did was to carry on the only way he knew. Enfield was famous for its local showers, which somehow always fell on Dill Hall Lane, and always on a length. Abed, renowned for his accuracy, would hit that length time and again. Photographs show him in delivery stride, perhaps a touch open-chested, though with right arm high enough to conjure fast-medium devils from the Dill Hall pitch. If subtle variations of pace and swing were not enough, he also possessed a wicked leg-cutter, which no less a judge than Neil Hawke called the best in Lancashire.

  Winters he would return home to play for Roslyns, South Africa’s premier non-white club, and coach. In 1970 he caused no end of a panic at Newlands when he applied for press facilities to cover the Springboks’ first Test against Australia. Since the press box was zoned white, it was illegal for Abed to enter it. He had to make do with a specially reserved seat at the front of the non-white Railway stand.

  The fourth Test of that series would be the last South Africa would play for over twenty years. Included in the Springbok side for that Test was Pat Trimborn, who had played against Abed in the Lancashire League the previous season. Trimborn’s figures had been 407 runs at 27.13 and 90 wickets at 10.34, while for Enfield Abed had 424 at 22.31 and 105 wickets at 10.40 each. The two had never played against each other in South Africa and never would. These figures aside, no comparison was possible. Yet, as if by magic, the South African selectors could tell them apart, could divine in those figures some mark by which to distinguish an international from a player not good enough, apparently, for even a single first-class game.

  In 1971 Jack Cheetham suggested that Abed was one of two non-white players (left-arm spinner Owen Williams was the other) who should be asked to accompany the Springbok team to Australia. This announcement came out of the blue: the SACA had not thought to consult SACBOC. Predictably then, the plan died, as did the tour itself. Abed will not be drawn on whether he would have accepted such an invitation. But if his reports on the 1970 series are anything to go by – in which he is scathing about any principle of selection but that of merit established in open trials – he would have refused.

  In October that same year, around the time the touring team would have been leaving for Australia, Abed married Janny Visser, a Dutch girl he had met two years before on holiday in Greece. The decision to marry effectively forced him into exile from South Africa: since Janny was white, their marriage would have been illegal in the country of his birth.

  Dik Abed continued to play for Enfield until 1976, when he felt the time had come for a change. ‘It is a very sad day for us indeed,’ commented Enfield secretary Alan Higson as Dik announced
his retirement. In ten years with the club, the devils of Dill Hall Lane had brought him 969 wickets, and 5,528 runs. Moreover he had proved himself a model professional as well as an excellent coach. No wonder he was pronounced ‘irreplaceable’.

  Dik moved to Holland, where he now lives with Janny and their children, Rasool and Anissa, and manages a sports complex in The Hague. He is active in Dutch cricket and will tour South Africa in March 1993 with the national side, the tour being part of the Dutch preparations for the ICC tournament to be held in Kenya in 1994.

  Of events in South Africa he says, ‘The changes taking place . . . at the present time have come at least forty years too late for a lot of non-white cricketers who no doubt could have made the grade, given the opportunities and facilities.’ If the faintest trace of bitterness underlines the sorrow in those words, it is the bitterness of one who sees the frustration of whole generations exemplified in his own.

  PHILIP SNOW

  The Fijian Botham (1959)

  Bula. A simple enough name. Comfortingly so, as Polynesian ones go, for unaccustomed eyes. Its pronunciation is just as simple: it tones in, broadly speaking, with the surname of Field Marshal Sir Redvers Buller.

  It was just as well for New Zealand, this simplicity: for it became a household and headline name throughout that country.

  Back in its native Fiji, Bula is one of the common words meaning ‘Hello’, ‘How do you do’ or ‘Greetings’. During the war, when the Islands were glad to be swamped by divisions of Americans and New Zealanders just ahead of the Japanese, it was the first word the troops learned.

  It has further meanings, ‘Life’ and ‘Alive’. And it is in that context that it relates to this subject. For Bula’s name is properly: Talebulamaineiilikenamainavaleniveivakabulaimainakulalakebalau. Which is in itself as brief a version as can be of a long story recording for posterity that a certain Fijian named Ilikena returned alive from the hospital at the village of Nakula on Lakeba Island in the Province of Lau. The Ilikena who returned in such good shape was father of eight children, one of whom inherited his father’s name of Ilikena, and was also, as is customary, given a second name, from the Bible, Lasarusa (Lazarus). Fijians invariably have a third name: it might derive from anywhere. Well, our hero’s final name told the story of his father’s return from hospital in the briefest manner possible, even if it was a little over-exact, geographically speaking . . .

  Not all Fijians have quite such episodic names. The few who do happen to have them cannot claim distinction in other respects.

  Bula is the finest batsman produced by the Fijian people. When he was seen in New Zealand in 1948, on the first overseas tour ventured on by the All-Fiji team for fifty years, the experts judged him to be of the very highest class in that country, which was stronger then, with Wallace, Donnelly, Sutcliffe (at his best, which was magnificent), Hadlee, Cowie, Burtt and Rabone, than it is now. So highly was he thought of that, when New Zealand was beginning to bring its thoughts seriously to bear on forming its team for what proved to be its most successful visit to England a year later, Walter Hadlee asked me whether Bula might feasibly be a candidate for the New Zealand side. We looked together into the rules. It seemed that if Fiji did not play any internal first-class cricket its players were eligible to play for the nearest country of first-class standard, which was New Zealand, a thousand miles distant. It was thought, however, that his selection might raise difficulties within New Zealand itself: the argument could reasonably be offered that New Zealand ought to be able to pick its side wholly within its own shores, even though its resources are slender. Nevertheless, the existing law did provide for the possibility. But it was really never more than an academic possibility: it was evident that Bula, although he would have been delighted to have had the wider experience in England and despite the jovial companionship and the complete lack of colour-consciousness of his New Zealand touring colleagues, would have been too homesick too early.

  For, along with his simple name, he is also an uncomplicated character. From the obscurity of cricket in the Fiji Islands the name of this humble villager, who had in that year 1948 been born twenty-six years earlier in a house of total thatch looking like a haystack with one or two openings for doors, was, overnight as it were, on everyone’s lips in New Zealand; in its four-letter form it was called after him everywhere – on trains, buses, trams, ships and aeroplanes.

  He acknowledged it all with an impressive modesty. Many were the times when he was invited to broadcast his views on big cities, European women, climate, civilization and life in general: each time he would no more than smile gently (this would have been a tremendous hit on television if New Zealand had had it) and with his boldly carved lips enunciate carefully: ‘Shorry. I do not speak English good enough. Very shorry.’ . . .

  Quiet and self-contained, Bula’s modesty lies deep. He has no ambitions, except a tour of England. He knows his skill at cricket, but the knowledge has never unbalanced him: never was there less suspicion of side about a man. When he was hitting his enormous sixes, and so many of them, captains of opposing sides in New Zealand told me after the matches that there was never the slightest sign of emotion on his face. Straightening up somewhat from a rather crouching stance, he would half pull, half drive the most guileful spinner in one fluent, powerful, majestic motion clear over the stand. No glimmer of satisfaction on his face, no trace of response to the acclamation of the crowd, no comment.

  He would flick some dust off his bare feet or peer at his battered bat. With his great stretches forward, his shin-high sulu (white skirt) would float out above the top of his pads: he would tuck it back and prepare to deal wholesomely with the next ball – if possible, over the head and upstretched hands of the extra boundary fielder just put there.

  In a tour lasting two months, he had twenty-nine innings and scored a thousand runs in them. It is a far call from 1,000 in May, and there is nothing very heroic about the same number of runs absorbing May and June, or any other two months. Bula’s distinction was that all his innings were exhibitions of systematic and scientific big hitting for a side making its way against established teams. It was the first time he had batted on grass. It was a lot of runs also for the son of a man who had fifty years earlier played in a one-innings contest between all the men and boys of two villages, fifty-three a side, all fielding, and had been one of the 104 batsmen in the two innings that day to fail to score.

  Bula’s greatest innings was against the first-class Province of Canterbury captained by Hadlee and including the Test players MacGibbon, F. B. Smith and Leggat, and Hitchcock, the Warwickshire player. The Christchurch press lauded it as one of the most satisfying exhibitions of batting ever seen: this compliment embraced international sides back to Parr’s All-England XI of 1864. The match was played on the best three consecutive days for cricket I remember – each day richly golden, almost too sensuously so for cricket purposes, with a haze over the hills looking beyond Port Lyttelton, the gentlest of breezes playing in the stands, and a big crowd exulting in the rare spectacle of figures in gleaming white shirts and skirts, with noble heads of hair, shiny bronze legs and bare feet flashing in the sun, brilliant white teeth radiating natural goodwill in the dignified features of the Pacific Islanders.

  Bula, at No. 3, scored 63 in the first innings: there were four great sixes, all over a high faraway stand, and six thumping fours with so much air in them as to qualify almost for two more runs each. In the next innings, Fiji had to make 354 to win, a formidable task for a Fijian team. Bula went in at 7 for 2. It all depended on him; much of the batting on the tour did. He made his way out again, his enormous bare calves bulging between the pad straps, to the wicket, with a gait which is half roll, half lope, like a big-seated footballer. Something of Compton’s gait about his, but with longer, raking strides and more of a heavy thrust forward like Wooller’s. He put his left foot right down the wicket to meet each ball, this time, with the responsibility all his, using what has subsequently become recogn
ized as the Bailey prod with the straightest of bats. Unpredictably, without the flicker of an eye, he would make the same deliberate movement, but this time it would not be to suffocate the ball by prodding but to assassinate it by lambasting it into some quiet street lying in the shade of the stand. He made 120. His effort brought Fiji to within 36 of the 354 required. And as soon as we had lost, he was first down, in response to the crowd’s usual request for South Sea songs, to the front of the pavilion. There, in the circle formed by the team, his voice was the most harmonious. Fijians have fine voices, excelled only perhaps by Maoris and Tongans. Lauans are part-Fijians: as one of them, Bula’s singing derived extra quality from the mixture . . .

  In the first two matches of the tour he gave his autograph in full in his habitual elegant copperplate. But he soon realized that if he continued to do this there would be time for little else on his tour. So it became ‘I. L. Bula’. The press and scoring-box had taken the same line of least resistance much earlier.

  His autograph was naturally more in demand than any of ours, or, at times it seemed, than all of ours put together. Despite his repute, I could not quite understand this, as in my own collecting days the object had been to obtain a comprehensive set of autographs of all members of a side. I suspected that Bula’s signature was being obtained several times over to be used as a powerful swap on the autograph market, but I think the explanation was really that Bula was so much on the field (always in the short and hectic fourth innings which Fiji invariably batted in) that he was just not available for the purpose as much as the rest of us. Whatever the cause, he would always be a good last in our bus or train, having been besieged by the hunters up to the last minute (where they all came from, I do not know: there was at this time a polio scare in New Zealand and children were advised to avoid crowds); and we would always leave to choruses of children calling out their esteem and affection for Bula, who would wave politely back, not without a look of embarrassment towards the rest of us. Some words lend themselves splendidly to being called out. ‘Bula’ is one of them. My lasting impression of farewells to strings of New Zealand towns is to the strains of ‘Boo-lah’, ‘Boo-lah’ . . .