The Picador Book of Cricket

by Ramachandra Guha

  J. H. FINGLETON

  The Brilliance of Left-Handers (1972)

  Is it an advantage to be a left-handed batsman? Apart from Richards, of South Africa, it is impossible to refute the argument that the most brilliant batting in recent years has come from the left-handed Sobers, Pollock and the West Indian Lloyd. Considering their smallness in numbers, it is remarkable that left-handers have been so prominent down the years. In other days, there was the great Frank Woolley, of Kent and England, and Ransford and Hill of Australia. Bardsley, also of Australia, and Mead, of England, were heavy-scorers but they weren’t in the same brilliant class as the three named above. Percy Chapman and Jack Gregory were exciting, swashbuckling left-handers and in recent years have been the exuberant Donnelly, New Zealand, and Harvey and Morris of Australia. Left-handers, all of them!

  When Sir Donald Bradman saw Graeme Pollock for the first time in Perth, in October 1963, he said Pollock could well make in all ways the success of the Springbok tour. Pollock had just hit a century (18 fours) in 88 minutes. Sir Donald doesn’t lightly enthuse. His patronage, like that of royalty, is not widely distributed and he proved prophetic about Pollock. He hit at Sydney and Adelaide two of the most scintillating Test centuries seen in Australia.

  Those with memories mellowed in cricket said Pollock was Frank Woolley all over again when they saw Pollock hit 122 in Sydney. Many recalled how the tall man of Kent – Pollock is also over six feet – flowed forward to the kangaroo-bounding fast bowling of Jack Gregory and clobbered the ball through the off against the picket fence. Old men are apt to say, in deference to their own generation, that they will never see the like of so-and-so again; but before Pollock in Australia we had seen Sobers, who scaled even higher heights than Woolley.

  Nobody in cricket has given me more sheer delight than Sobers. His brilliance has been breathtaking. For the West Indies and South Australia, for which state he played for a number of Australian summers, he has played many of his greatest innings in Australia and the classical ease of his stroke-making recur readily to memory. One day in Sydney, on his first tour of Australia, he moved forward to play Meckiff off the front foot. Of a sudden, he went into reverse and off the back foot, with a cross bat, he hit Meckiff wide of mid-on for a huge six. This stroke was unsurpassed in its brilliancy of conception and execution. Meckiff was no slouch in pace and only a genius could so quickly and completely change the whole nature of his stroke.

  In his last innings in Sydney, for an MCC side, I saw Woolley hit a double-century, but he never hit with more power on the off than Pollock did in his Sydney Test century. One cover drive off O’Neill was unforgettable. It travelled, one thought, almost with the speed of light to the boundary. In this innings of 122 – and Pollock was then only nineteen years of age – he hit one mighty six to leg, square, and with thirty yards to spare over the fence. He scorched 19 fours, most of them on the off. He interspersed his off boundaries with some hefty sweeps to leg yet one thought the leg side was not his strength. Benaud fished for him often in this innings, with several near nibbles, but there wasn’t a chance to hand until he reached 104. His 122 was exactly half his side’s total when he was dismissed and he retired to an acclaim seldom heard on a cricket field.

  Pollock’s second fifty was hit in 57 minutes and this rich glut of strokes was shown on a pitch which, only some seven months before, was denounced by both English and Australian Test batsmen as an impossible one on which to play strokes!

  Several weeks later in Adelaide, Pollock sent 22,000 spectators into rhapsodies as he played an even more brilliant innings. The Australians had struggled over 450 minutes for 345 runs. It wasn’t thrilling to watch, and Pollock’s first fifty in 86 minutes was like a sea breeze in a heatwave. His second fifty almost took the breath away. It took him only 40 minutes! Sitting in the pavilion, Gary Sobers was one of the spectators who rose to their feet to applaud Pollock back.

  Once again, as in Sydney, Pollock specialized in off-driving, in a lazy, languorous manner that sent the ball whizzing away. But he also pulverized Benaud and Simpson with his smiting to leg. Pollock differed from Sobers significantly in his footwork. Sobers rarely danced down the pitch, as I remember him, but this day Pollock went yards down the pitch to both Simpson and Benaud. He hit Benaud far and wide over midwicket for six; he went even better against Simpson, hitting him for two sixes off successive balls. Several years before, Les Favell had hit Alf Valentine, of the West Indies, for two successive sixes in Brisbane’s unforgettable Test.

  All Pollock’s sixes were hit towards Adelaide’s cathedral, just outside the ground. ‘Murder in the cathedral,’ murmured Bill O’Reilly. Pollock also hit two successive balls from Simpson for four so that he hit 22 runs off four successive balls. No wonder the crowd roared! I saw old-timers in Nip Pellew, Stan McCabe and Clarrie Grimmett stand with the thousands to acclaim Pollock that day. His century was chanceless, carving the Australian attack into small pieces. It is given to few to inject such enthusiasm and enjoyment into a crowd.

  In writing at the time that Pollock was Frank Woolley all over again, I had an analytical look at Pollock and wrote this:

  As soon as one looks at Graeme Pollock at the crease, one begins to think of how he could be improved. His stance is an ugly one. He holds his short-handle bat at the bottom of the handle. As he stands well over six feet, he has to pop his posterior in the air to fit in everything and he forms an ugly, elongated, upside-down figure of S as he stands awaiting the ball. In such a stance his head is far away from his feet. He cramps himself, one feels, on the leg side and, indeed, he is cramped on that side and, if he has a weakness, it is just behind square leg. But suddenly his stance is immaterial as he blazes forth with ferocious, fiery off drives that surge across the turf.

  Pollock was only nineteen when I wrote this. He proved in Adelaide that he was almost as strong on the leg as on the off, and in subsequent innings against Australia in South Africa Pollock has shown that it is merely a toss-up which is the better batsman when Sobers and Pollock are both at their top.

  I have never tired of singing the praises of Gary Sobers. So many times to me he has been absolute batting perfection. Nor is that all. He has been an amazing fieldsman, taking wonderful catches in the slips and throwing the stumps down from the field, and he is the best all-round bowler the game has known. I once described his bowling as being like a packet of mixed dried vegetables – something of everything – and, indeed, there has not been a type of left-hand bowl that Sobers has not used. In 1968, in Australia, he was worried by a piece of floating bone in his right shoulder. It hurt him, oddly, to bowl his over-the-wrist spinners. After three overs of fast bowling in the Brisbane Test, Sobers turned to slow, orthodox spin, breaking from the right-hander’s legs, and took 6 for 73 off 37 overs . . .

  I have seen Sobers play immortal innings and strokes not reminiscent of any other batsman. So, too, with Bradman, McCabe, Compton and Hammond. They displayed an individual flair in playing strokes that one could recognize immediately in one peep after rounding a pavilion corner. I have watched Sobers many times and thought he had only one chink in his armour – he doesn’t always pick the bosie, which is strange for a man who bowls a perfect one himself.

  I saw Sincock turn him inside out one day at Port of Spain with a bosie and the hysterical motions of a man who thought the ball was going the other way were a strange suggestion of clay. Nor did he pick Gleeson in Sydney one day in 1968, a snick going to slip. This incident was notable in two ways: first, the mistaken judgement of Sobers; and, secondly, the incredible whooping war dance that Lawry did on the pitch at Sobers’s downfall.

  Strangely, as I wrote earlier, Sobers was not extravagant in his footwork. When Barry Richards faced up to Gleeson in South Africa, he waltzed down the pitch before Gleeson had bowled and hit him for 4 fours in one over. This showed a blatant disdain for Gleeson’s ability to turn the ball, but Sobers always played Gleeson from the crease in Australia, and with suspicion. His foo
twork, then, was confined; but it was impeccable in the crease and his batting was helped by a long reach.

  Davidson (and here was another mighty left-handed smiter of the ball!) was a better user of the new ball than Sobers. Davidson was the best left-handed user of a new ball I have seen. Voce bowled a more dangerous bouncer than Davidson or Sobers and I think Fleetwood-Smith was a better over-the-wrist spinner than Sobers. Fleetwood was faster through the air and also spun the ball more. Bradman often mauled Fleetwood and, had they been pitted, would have done the same to Sobers. Spin didn’t worry the Great Man and his footwork would have quelled Sobers’s spin at the outset.

  But you don’t measure Sobers’s bowling against a Bradman. There has never been another bowler like Sobers. The Australian Bill Johnston, one of the most delightful characters ever to tread a cricket field, was another splendid left-hand bowler with the new ball but neither Davidson, Voce nor Johnston could bowl spinners. I once advocated the thought in the London Sunday Times that Sobers was not only the greatest all-round cricketer of all time, but there was nobody else even to approach him. Sir Donald Bradman later also expressed the same opinion.

  There is an abiding memory of the centuries I have seen Sobers hit. In retrospect, there never seemed a period in them when he didn’t look like hitting a century. Some centurions struggle, go slow and fast in patches, have their lucky streaks, possibly bog down in the nineties and emerge, at last, gasping at the three-figure mark. There was nothing like this about Sobers. He just flowed on and on, his technique and stroke play on a pedestal.

  His best shots were the two most spectacular and most productive – the drive and the pull. In the drive, he had a full flow of the bat and, like Pollock, he possessed an intuitive genius that enabled him to cleave the fieldsmen on the off side. There was no stroke he could not play. He could cut – Martin Donnelly says later that few left-handers cut – and square-cut and force majestically off his toes. This requires the very epitome of timing. I have written in another place of his very own inspirational stroke when he stood tiptoe, as if in defence, only at the very last fraction of time to swivel his body and send the ball screaming past square leg. This stroke was pure genius.

  Sobers was a complex study when he came to Australia in 1968, coming from a heavy county season with Nottinghamshire. His cricket appetite was clearly jaded. He made touring history by not playing for his own country in the opening game at Kalgoorlie. I met him, during that match, at the Australia Open golf in Perth and there was no mistaking where his sporting interests had been diverted.

  He played in the second game, making a superlative century, but he omitted himself from the third game, in which the West Indians were beaten by a combined team. The team manager, Mr Gaskin, was a hearty concurrer. He concurred with Sobers dropping himself, he said, because it was wrong for the West Indians to depend too much upon Sobers. My own thought was that the place of a touring skipper at the beginning of a tour is on the field, to build team spirit and confidence.

  Sobers played at Adelaide, against South Australia. The West Indians put up such a woeful display that Sobers summoned them behind closed doors and tongue-lashed them. Mr Gaskin again concurred. The things that Sobers had said, commented Mr Gaskin, needed to be said. It might have been thought that somebody needed to say a few direct things to the skipper, pointing out that his approach to the tour was not all it might be. Although one who had been through the mill could recognize the signs with Sobers. He had gone stale with too much cricket in England. It was no longer a game to him: it was hard work, and he had to drive himself.

  It was not surprising, therefore, that Sobers should have turned often to the golf course for relaxation. He played golf at every opportunity and several times on the eve of a Test, when he surely should have been at the nets with his fellows, even if only watching. His team lifted itself against Victoria and New South Wales but then Sobers went back on his tracks. Instead of going to Brisbane for the last first-class match before the Test, he returned south to Melbourne ‘on business’. This, too, met with Mr Gaskin’s approval.

  The West Indies hit rock bottom against Queensland, but their splendid win over Australia in the first Test saved Sobers and the team management much criticism. They took too much for granted in that victory. In no time, they sloughed again and, finally, were no match for Australia, losing the series 1–3.

  I don’t think Sobers likes the responsibility of being captain. Unlike Frank Worrell, altogether a different personality who was always with his ‘boys’, Sobers is a loner. Some of his men grumbled that he left them too much to themselves. Manager Gaskin said Sobers didn’t attend the nets before the third Test in Sydney because he was having treatment for his corns. Those corns didn’t stop Sobers from having eighteen holes of golf that same afternoon!

  I often saw Sobers on the cricket field going through the motions of a little wedge golf shot. Obviously, he found on the golf course the mental relaxation denied him on a cricket field. He continually wore a frown on the field (one saw it through binoculars) and, when taxed with not bowling himself enough in Adelaide, replied wearily: ‘I am not a cricket machine.’

  For all his frowns, for all his worries, for all his apparent cricket staleness, Sobers still managed to hit two peerless Test centuries in Australia in 1968. One was in Adelaide, 110 in 132 minutes with 2 sixes and 15 fours; the other in Sydney, 113 in just over two hours, with 20 fours. In Adelaide he batted in his now customary position of No. 6 and ran out of partners. He fell in trying to keep the strike. It took a lot to budge him from that No. 6 position.

  Sobers cast a spell over the Australian attack in each innings but in each case his century was too late to give full value to his side. He came to bat at Adelaide at 4 for 107; at 3 for 30 in Sydney. A century innings from him in either city at No. 3 or No. 4 would have had much more effect upon his side’s innings.

  Sobers has now hit 25 centuries in 86 Tests (I can’t accept those matches in England in 1970, hastily arranged when the South African tour fell through, as Test matches, which, surely, are between one country and another). Bradman leads with 29 Test centuries. Hammond has 22, Harvey and Sobers each 25, Sobers passing Barrington in Sydney. Sobers again hit his peerless form in England in 1970 but retention of keenness will be a big factor if he is to pass Bradman’s 29. The cricket yoke is beginning to tell on Sobers.

  I like to recall Sobers in that thrilling over at Swansea in 1968 when he hit Malcolm Nash for 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6 – over long on, long on, long off, midwicket to the on, long on, midwicket to the on. Two hits went right out of the ground. This was a world’s record for an over in a first-class match. Nash was philosophical about it. ‘I suppose I can gain some satisfaction from the fact that my name will be permanently in the records book,’ he said. He wanted to have the ball mounted – but it never came back the last time Sobers hit it out of the ground.

  And so I return to the original theme of this chapter – is it an advantage to be a left-handed batsman? Is driving easier for them than a right-hander? Or, and this is a point which gave me much thought, are some left-hand batsmen really stronger in the right hand and does this give them an advantage in driving in that their top hand, the main driving one, is the right hand? Golfers, right-handed ones, know how important is the left arm and hand in the drive and how abortive the stroke becomes if there is too much right hand, and too soon, in the shot.

  Pondering on this, I wrote to Graeme Pollock, Gary Sobers and Frank Woolley in England, asking them pertinent questions. Pollock and Woolley were good enough to answer immediately and with most interesting information. I spoke at length with Arthur Morris and Neil Harvey in Sydney and, after speaking with Martin Donnelly, he was good enough to put his magnificent thoughts on paper. Gary, not surprisingly, didn’t get around to answering!

  Pollock agreed with me that left-handers excel in the drive and, in his own case, says he has an advantage in that his top (right) hand is the stronger one. He plays every single-handed
game right-handed. He writes right, throws right, plays tennis right but as soon as the two hands are required, such as in cricket and golf, he goes left-handed. But Sobers, Pollock writes:

  is left-handed in everything he does. This is probably the reason for his strong on-side play off the back foot, where his left hand dominates.

  Left-handers are probably fortunate because most bowlers tend to move the ball away from us. This gives you lots of room in which to play your shot, whereas with the ball coming into the body you are inclined to become cramped. It is said that left-handers are weak outside the off stump, but this is only natural because of the terrific concentration of bowling directed at this side of the wicket.

  The same can be said for right-hand batsmen when facing a left-arm quick bowler from over the wicket. How many right-handers are suspect outside their off stump to this type of bowler? Left-hand batsmen have to contend with this angle of attack for 90 per cent of their batting time. The biggest bugbear for left-handers is the rough outside the off stump from the third day onwards of a Test. Off-driving then has to be treated very carefully. Only when the ball is right up can the shot be played with any confidence. This is the reason why all left-handers like to bat first because this eliminates for a while the problem of rough outside their off stump.