The Picador Book of Cricket

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The Picador Book of Cricket Page 46

by Ramachandra Guha


  Graeme Pollock’s views are most interesting and I am indebted to him for so lucidly explaining them – even though brother Peter is the journalist!

  Neil Harvey writes right-handed, bowled right, kicks with his right foot and plays tennis right-handed. This suggests he is a more natural right-hander than a left one. When it comes to two-handed action (including wood-chopping, he said with a wide grin), he goes left. His right did the work in the drive but his left in the cut, square cut and the pull and he was most proficient in all these strokes.

  I asked him which eye was stronger. Martin Donnelly had put to me the interesting and intricate theory that the left-hand side of the brain dominated the right eye, which seemed to give the left-hander another advantage, but Harvey, now bespectacled, staggered me by saying he was weak in both eyes. ‘Ever since I was fourteen,’ he said, ‘I have seen strange shapes. I could never read the scores on the board. Our Australian team in South Africa once had their eyes tested and only Drennan had worse sight than mine. The specialist said to me, ‘‘Who leads you out to bat?’’’

  Harvey had one thing in common with Sobers. He, too, had difficulty at times in picking a bosie. Bill O’Reilly told me the tale of how Fred Johnston, the New South Wales slow bowler, once had Harvey completely at sea with his bosie when Harvey was playing for Victoria. ‘Hutton told me’, said O’Reilly, ‘that Johnston was the best slow bowler never chosen by Australia for England. And many not as good were chosen. He said he would have got over 100 wickets there every time he toured.’

  I am glad that story came from O’Reilly because I was responsible for Johnston going from Canberra into big cricket in Sydney. I asked O’Reilly whether he would mind if I used this story. ‘Do what you like with it,’ said the affable O’Reilly. ‘I would remind you of the story of the judge who received an anonymous letter one morning while his case was part-heard. As the court assembled, the judge fixed its members with a stern eye and told them he had received an anonymous letter that morning. ‘‘It ill-behoves me,’’ said the judge, ‘‘sitting where I am now, to say what I did with that letter, sitting where I was then.’’’

  Frank Woolley wrote me as follows:

  I don’t think left-handers are fortunate in being left-handers. My experience was that more right-hand bowlers can make the ball move in the air into a right-hander and away from a left-hander, which is the most difficult ball to play. Also, a left-hand batsman has to cope with the bowler’s rough and particularly in my time on a ‘sticky’ wicket. These, with covers being used, are no longer known in the game.

  Because of the bowler’s rough, a cover drive was always difficult for a left-hander, or so I found it. My left hand was always the main force in my batting. My right hand, for me, was only a steadying hand, just with my thumb and first finger, which allowed the bat to go straight through. But I am not left-handed in all things. I write right-handed, eat right-handed, play billiards right-handed and pick up most things with my right hand.

  At eighty-three, Frank apologized for what he described as his scribble. He said his right hand was full of arthritis. I thought his writing magnificent!

  Martin Donnelly, as rich a character as he was an all-round sportsman, wrote me an enthralling letter on the subject. He is a left-hander in all things – writing, eating, playing tennis, throwing, shooting and kicking.

  You ask which was my ‘motive or power hand’. I am not certain that these are the same. I would regard my left hand as the power hand because this is the one that puts most power into shots, whether off- or on-driving, slashing behind point (I almost said ‘cutting’, but few left-handers I saw really played the cut shot properly) or in hooking or pulling. However, the top hand, in my view, must always be the control hand and the guiding hand. You might even call it the motivating hand – in all shots. It must be primarily responsible for the arc through which the bat moves up and down and in so doing must harness and direct the power hand (i.e. the bottom hand), which is the hand that dictates speed and power. This is the hand with which the bat is moved in executing any stroke.

  To my mind, the golden rule in batting is that the top hand should have at all times not only a firm but a tight grip on the bat and this grip should never be changed or relaxed in the playing of any stroke (either defensive or offensive). Clearly, the hands work together, but basically, as I see it, the top hand must be the control hand, the bottom one the power hand.

  On the eye question, I checked with an eminent ophthalmic surgeon who said there was no basic rule about eye dominance and certainly gave no support whatever to my hopeful, but embryonic theory about the right eye being dominant in left-handers and the left eye dominant in right-handers. However, we did establish that M.P.D. is left-eye dominant. Incidentally, the simple test on this one is to point your index finger at a focused object on a wall and then to close each eye in turn. The eye that sees the finger in line with the object is the dominant eye as opposed to the one which throws the finger off to the left or right.

  I hope not too many right-handers find, as I did when I tried this test, that their right eye is the stronger one. If a right-hand batsman’s shoulders are not allowed to come round too far to the bowler, thus giving him what is known as a two-eyed stance, the left eye does much more work in batting for the right-hander than the right one!

  Martin Donnelly was also a magnificent footballer, capped for Oxford and England. Only the war and his later studies at Oxford prevented him being an All Black. Stewart Harris, the Australian representative of the London Times, who has an office next to mine in Parliament House, Canberra, remembers Donnelly with awe playing against Harris’s Cambridge side. Harris said Donnelly was the most brilliant handler of a football at five-eighth he remembers. Modestly, Donnelly says his Oxford half-back, Ossie Newton-Thompson, threw a perfect dive-pass, which, says Donnelly, enabled him to get moving quickly and play well away from the forwards. He observed that when he played for England against Ireland, Ireland, 22–3, had their greatest victory to that date over England!

  Donnelly and I once figured in an unfortunate incident in a club game in England. He bowled little – he says he bowled a ball that spins at the bowler’s end and goes with the arm at the other end – and we both detected a sniff on the face of the batsman when Donnelly was given the ball. The batsman was E. W. Swanton and, as I recall it, he was plumb lbw to Donnelly’s first ball, which was as straight as a barrel. As umpire, I didn’t hesitate. E. W. S. gave one of his most noted stares down the wicket – but he had to go! Both Donnelly and I were members of the Arab Club, of which E. W. S. was founder. We are both still members!

  Arthur Morris is left-handed in everything, and left-footed also. He says his left hand was definitely stronger – and his left eye also stronger. ‘I don’t use my top hand very much in batting,’ Morris told me. ‘I think I drove mostly with my shoulders and wrists, but I didn’t drive in any pronounced fashion, neither to the off nor on. I think I was more a square player and forcing them off my toes.’ And, I might add, an exceptionally good player, too.

  There is the case for left-handers, as I see it, although it is to be noted that some of the famous left-handers don’t agree on all points. What can be agreed upon, however, and especially when remembering their meagre numbers, is that left-handers have been far more outstanding in brilliancy in recent years than their right-handed fellows.

  Pondering that, I wondered whether left-handers might not profit from having the right hand the top one on the bat when I reflected that many golfers consider the top left hand to be the dominant one in a right-hand golfer. Golf can teach batsmen a great deal in driving. So many batsmen are bottom-hand conscious and I can think of no better illustration than Bobby Simpson. Simpson played golf off scratch and he possesses a glorious golf swing, fluid and full. Yet, when he came to batting, his bottom hand was the dominant one and he never drove as freely as nature equipped him to do. I think, in the main, this was brought about by the period in which Simpson played.
He, with others, saw a vacancy in the Australian Test team for an opener and, in making himself into an opening batsman, Simpson concentrated upon defence and so used his bottom hand more than the top one.

  Yet, if there is anything in my theory, why are there so few prominent left-hand golfers? I asked Gary Player this once and he said he could recall only one, Bob Charles. Arnold Palmer said Charles was not the only left-hander in tournaments, only the best known, but he could not name any others. Palmer said it was a matter of statistics, that a smaller number of left-hand players were willing to dedicate themselves to the game, but he looked a little blank when it was pointed out to him that there were a large number of champion left-handed tennis players, Laver and Roche, to name two. Many would contend that Laver has been the greatest tennis player of all time.

  Palmer says definitely that golf is a right-hander’s game and that courses are made exclusively for right-handers. I wonder would the mighty Jack Nicklaus have hit them even further had he turned about and got even more punch out of his right hand as the top one? The prospect is mind-boggling!

  Several of us had dinner one night with Gary Player in Canberra and he advanced the theory that golf was the most difficult of all games to play. I couldn’t agree with him. Golf is a forward game, with every shot played the same way with obvious variations in power and technique yet with the backswing invariably the same, differing only for an intentional slice or pull and that only in a slight degree. The ball is never played backwards – and the cut and the glance are two of the most telling strokes in cricket – and the cover drive, one of the most brilliant strokes in cricket, would correspond to the golfer’s nightmare – the socket or shank!

  Yet, in the drive and the use of the top hand, golf, I repeat, has an important message for all batsmen because the drive is the very foundation of good batsmanship. It is the safest of all shots because the bat comes to the ball full face, minimizing risks; it pays the richest dividends in runs scored and, finally and most importantly, it has a demoralizing effect upon bowlers. No bowler, and particularly a fast bowler, likes to be driven. A bowler is encouraged when he sees a batsman cutting or deflecting, taking risks, but no bowler likes to be consistently driven. It is then that he tends to drop the ball short so that the drive, as I see it, is the dominant stroke in batting. It paves the way for the other strokes.

  It is their ability to drive that makes Sobers and Pollock two such brilliant batsmen. Whether nature has given them an advantage over right-handers is something to be pondered. All that remains for me is to express my thanks to so many brilliant left-handers for telling me so much about themselves.

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  For the English, the summer of 1948 was not a happy one. The less partisan fans could, however, glory in the classic technique of one of the world’s greatest new ball bowlers. Ray Lindwall’s action was the spur to this meditation on fast bowling by John Arlott. In 1948 there were no English exemplars in sight. But, as previously noted, Lindwall and Miller were soon to be answered by Statham, Trueman and Tyson.

  JOHN ARLOTT

  Fast and Furious (1949)

  On Friday 25 June 1948, spectators at Lord’s Cricket Ground saw the contemporary inheritor of a great tradition. On that day Ray Lindwall, of New South Wales and Australia, showed himself to be in direct line of descent from the great classic fast bowlers.

  He bowled from the pavilion end, running fifteen rhythmic, gradually lengthening and accelerating paces to the wicket. Perhaps he delivered the ball with his arm lower than the nicest technical purism would approve, but he bowled fast indeed. He ‘moved’ the new ball away from the bat in the air and, by dint of delivering from the extreme edge of the crease and by virtue of his body action, he sometimes made the ball come in to the batsman off the pitch. With him, however, as with his great predecessors, the destructive agent is speed. Three English batsmen, two of them long enough at the crease to be seeing the ball well, were clean bowled by sheer speed. Or the ball was pitched that dangerous fraction short of a length about the line of the off stump, the batsmen were unable to decide whether or not to play the ball and, in their indecision, edged a catch to slips or the wicketkeeper – the second classic method of dismissal by fast bowling. The ball rose sharply from the pitch, it was upon batsman after batsman before his feet or bat were in proper position for a stroke. Lindwall was successful – more than successful enough to justify the tradition to which he belongs before the eyes of English cricket.

  That tradition is more than 150 years old, for before 1800 the famous underhand fast bowler, Brown of Brighton, was said to have bowled a ball which beat bat, wicket and wicketkeeper, passed through long stop’s coat and killed a dog on the other side. But the first of the line with characteristics obviously in common with Lindwall was Alfred Mynn, ‘the Lion of Kent’ of the 1840s. Six feet tall and sixteen stone in playing trim, Mynn bowled in the days when it was illegal to bowl with the arm higher than the shoulder. G. F. Watts’ drawing of Mynn bowling shows his arm swinging round the barest legal fraction below the shoulder, but his action was smooth and he controlled the ball. Mynn made fast bowling the ambition of every young cricketer in the country – and that threw up a generation of fierce slingers who were positively dangerous on the rough pitches of his day. This was the school of bowlers curbed by Pilch and Felix and whose successors were finally thrashed into extinction by W. G. Grace. Nevertheless there were among them good bowlers, particularly after the introduction of overarm bowling. Scores and Biographies says of John Wisden that his bowling was ‘very fast indeed and ripping’; Jackson, Tarrant and Freeman of Yorkshire, too, were bowlers too fast for any batsman’s comfort.

  They led to the classic fast bowling. That is, in short, an attack designed to hit the stumps or compel the catch to slips or wicketkeeper by the speed of the ball bowled to a length or just short of a length. The great fast bowlers have had a fairly long run and a smooth high delivery. Some, like Mold of Lancashire and Gilbert of Queensland, have bowled off a short run-up, but they have been suspected of throwing. There have been fast bowlers, too, with a low action, usually described as ‘slingers’, but they lack the steeply hostile ‘rise’ from the pitch which distinguishes the great fast bowlers.

  In the last decade of the nineteenth century, fast bowling in English cricket reached its finest flowering. Then, Tom Richardson and Lockwood of Surrey and C. J. Kortright of Essex overshadowed many of their contemporaries who were yet very fast bowlers indeed. At any other period Kortright must have taken an automatic place in any England eleven but such was the greatness of Richardson and Lockwood that he did not play in a single Test match. From their day until 1939 there were fast bowlers in England. And if in 1939 the standard was already falling, there were then ten bowlers in England faster than any in the country today.

  Australia had run parallel with us. From that Ernest Jones who bowled through W. G. Grace’s beard, to Gregory and Macdonald who swept through the post-war English cricket of 1921, Australia had produced the men who bowled fast in the classic manner. Macdonald returned to England to play for Lancashire – and to be a model of the way to bowl at speed – through many an English season. The West Indians Constantine, Griffith and Martindale, the New Zealander Cromb, and the South African Kotze, maintained the tradition in the other countries of cricket.

  Yet, when, on that dull June day of 1948, Lindwall, carefully nursed for months to such a peak, bowled really fast, he bowled to batsmen to whom true fast bowling was a misty idea in the recesses of memory.

  There have been somewhat similar phases in both English and Australian cricket in the past, but none quite so pronounced. When Gregory and Macdonald destroyed the best of English batting in 1921, they were only slightly faster than bowlers then bowling in county cricket. There were at least eight bowlers in England then who forced the wicketkeeper to stand back – today no county wicketkeeper need do so except for convenience in making catches off swing bowling. When Larwood, Voce, Allen and Bowes won
the Test series of 1932–3 in Australia under Douglas Jardine, Australian cricket had, in the Aboriginal Eddie Gilbert, a bowler faster than any of them. It was the method of its employment rather than the speed of their bowling that defeated the Australian batsmen.

  In England in 1948 there was no bowler bowling at the speed of Gover of Surrey immediately before he retired in August 1947 – at the age of thirty-nine. Pritchard of Warwickshire, quite fast in 1947, has often found it possible to reduce his pace to fast-medium and still bowl successfully in terms of taking wickets cheaply.

  What has happened to English fast bowling? Will it ever revive?

  Before we can offer any reply to these questions we shall be wise to look back to the days of Tom Richardson, to examine the problem of the fast bowler. Tom Richardson was a strong man, he had a magnificent physique and he loved bowling. He would walk, on the morning of a match, from Mitcham to Kennington Oval with his cricket bag on his shoulder and then cheerfully bowl all day. Yet Richardson, for all that mighty moustache, was done with first-class cricket by the time he was thirty-three. Lockwood’s career ended when he was thirty-six. Richardson and Lockwood were professionals. Kortright took less than 100 wickets in first-class cricket in the scattered matches he played after he was twenty-nine: he was an amateur.

  Fast bowling is not economical for a professional cricketer: he cannot afford to bowl fast and finish in his early thirties when he might be a batsman and play until he is forty-five. Notice how many of England’s fast bowlers were amateurs during the inter-war years, when young men were considering the economic aspect of their careers. Fast bowling may be spectacular sport but it is poor business.

  Even apart from its financial aspect, it is doubtful if fast bowling is as rewarding in itself as it once was. The so-called bodyline bowling was practised by bowlers, but it was dictated by the batsmen. On perfect wickets nowadays, fast bowlers may bowl their hearts out. If they aim at the stumps the batsmen play them defensively. When the ball has been pitched just outside the off stump, in the classic manner, for slip catches, the modern batsmen have merely raised their bats above their shoulders, put their pads in the line of the stumps and allowed the ball to sail harmlessly past. The fast bowler’s opening spell, when he is fresh and the ball new, is short: he cannot afford to waste it. So the bowlers, in effect, decided to give batsmen something they must play. So they bowled the ball which runs into the batsman and denied him reliance on the pitch of the ball by slipping in an occasional bumper. This type of bowling was, historically speaking, an automatic development of cricket. Thus bowlers made batsmen play their keenest bowling – an aim with which it is difficult not to sympathize.

 

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