Last in the Tin Bath

by David Lloyd

  To be fair to Strauss, he had 74 runs to his name, which by my calculations was a rather neat increase of 74 on mine, made in a climate approximately 30 degrees hotter than that of Manchester. But let’s not get bogged down by minor detail.

  For an hour, time and the Old Trafford scoreboard stood still. It was as if my defensive lunge was in suspended animation. I had followed Pullar’s tactical missive to the letter but unfortunately, exactly as I had in my early games for Accrington two years earlier, barely played a shot in anger. Modern-day spin doctors – or the England and Wales Cricket Board’s media department as they are also known – might have sold you the line that I had treble the runs I started with when Titmus finally snared me. Fair point, but everyone knows that three times nought is nought. An equally economical look at the truth would have told you that I couldn’t score any fewer in future innings. Unfortunately, I didn’t score any more in my next as Middlesex completed their landslide victory, this time the other ‘offie’ Don Bick accounting for me.

  To paint the picture during that era, the Lancashire dressing room in the old pavilion was split over two floors. The upstairs was frequented by the senior players and the lower deck – or the Dogs’ Home as it was known – was the retreat of us juniors. By the time I became coach at Lancashire, things had changed and that downstairs area was given to the visiting team with all the home players changing upstairs.

  Some will say that this upstairs-downstairs scenario was unhealthy; a sign that there had been little progress from the previous era when the gentlemen would look down their noses at the full-time professionals who stood alongside them on the field. It was all a bit like Downton Abbey.

  Not that this simple lad from Accrington ever saw anything wrong with it. Contrarily, it gave me a purpose: to get up those steps into the established ranks. It wasn’t as if the separation was done on a social or class basis. This was a meritocracy in which those in the Dogs’ Home were upgraded when awarded the county cap. So it became a massive motivation for us rosebuds to bloom into full roses and move upstairs. It was a symbolic journey for all of us, and with it came one other significant change to our status. Namely, a big increase in wages.

  It was in 1968, the year in which I married my childhood sweetheart and mother of my four children Susan Wallwork, that I was to receive my cap. I was just twenty-one. Although the financial increase that came with it – a £950 annual salary – was welcome as I began a new chapter of my life as a family man, moving up top didn’t guarantee a job for life. As a county cricketer you remained subservient to the club’s committee. Contracts were a standard two years in length, which meant that every other season a group of men who had not necessarily played the game but who had either good fortune, good business acumen or good contacts were sitting in judgement on your career. Your future was decided on their whim.

  This committee ruled the roost. Forget any divisions existing between players young and old. There was relative civility between everyone despite the split-level changing areas. The ‘us and them’ analogy was a lot more accurate when applied to the players and these chaps located at the far end of the pavilion. They were the absolute gods and us their playthings. Their position at Old Trafford was dubbed the sharp end, and where we were housed was known as the blunt end.

  There was a massive resentment towards the suits from us because of the power they held over our lives. They were in control of our destinies and there is no doubting the influence it had on how the game was played. Look at a lot of the scorecards from that period and they reveal a rather turgid style of cricket. The simple fact was that you were playing for your career, playing to maintain your living, so batsmen would do their utmost not to get out rather than concentrate on scoring runs.

  The barriers that existed at Lancashire were eventually broken down in the late 1960s by Cedric Rhoades, whose rise to prominence coincided – as tends to be the case – with the demise of others. In this instance, it was following the resignation of the Old Trafford committee en masse. Cedric was a champion of the players when he came into office, one whose initial months as chairman were seen favourably by all parties around the club. For a while, there was no sharp or blunt. Everything was smooth.

  But as can be the case with individuals who are backed so enthusiastically and in such numbers, it all went to his head. He more than slightly turned the other way from his sympathy towards the dressing room to becoming a bit of an ogre, if truth be told. Initially popular with the members – of which there were a good 15,000 in those days – for his insistence on equality, it soon became clear that he saw things in Animal Farm terms, and himself more equal than others. This club for all was soon becoming his club, a change that led to him being nicknamed Cedric Power by the players.

  Cedric was a very wealthy Manchester businessman and with his level of success came a huge ego. Having made several shrewd investments in his buying and selling over the years, and then taken control of a county club, it was pretty evident that Lancashire was just another stepping stone to other more powerful committees. Soon he was on those of the Test and County Cricket Board at Lord’s, ones which influenced the wider game and not only the bit played inside our county boundaries.

  Rhoades was a man who would rock the boat, someone who would challenge the norm, and it was felt that he was welcomed on board by the TCCB hierarchy down in London simply because they preferred to keep someone like him close rather than operating at arm’s length. This kind of attitude from him was really good for us players when he was on his way up, because he focused on providing us with anything that could help improve the team. In modern parlance, he engaged with the product and that always means the players. The more support provided, the better facilities, an increased level of backing for the captain, and the greater the chance of a team being competitive. He basically moved us forward after a period of what we felt was stagnation.

  In his early days you would not only see him, you would hear him too if you popped down to Old Trafford. He was very vocal in his support of what we were doing, and displayed an almost religious devotion to getting down to every match he possibly could, business commitments pending. Talk about being hands on. He would be vociferous in the members’ viewing areas and convivial in the bars at social events, often with a glass of Tio Pepe in hand.

  His relationships with his captains highlighted how he operated. He had the support from the dressing room because of his pledge to ‘back you to the hilt’. Tell him what you required and it was inevitably delivered because of his control over the rest of the committee. He was like a puppeteer, pulling everyone else’s strings, and once you acknowledged as much you knew how to use him to your advantage. Good old Cedric Power would get sufficient nods for a majority on every major decision in those first few seasons, and it was arguably only neglect of his responsibilities at Lancashire that turned the Yes-men into Nos as the years passed by.

  My own thoughts on him mirrored this. Having fallen for his powers of persuasion early on, and even used my understandings of his working to my advantage during my own captaincy years that would follow, I was taught by my predecessor Jack Bond that the way to get a proposal through an indifferent committee was to float it to Cedric a fortnight in advance. His predictable reaction would be to dismiss it out of hand in the first instance, then adopt it as his own when it came to the actual meeting, and sing the praises of the notion, promoting it as a Rhoades revelation once it had been ticked up.

  You see, Cedric was so fond of his own influence that he wanted everyone to know about it, including the best plans he had pilfered from others and passed off as his own. It was this kind of behaviour, the constant striving for recognition, that altered my view of him as time went by. I could see that he was too driven by personal gratification, the shared fault of many chairmen at sporting clubs. At the opposite end of the spectrum, you have men like Sir Jack Walker, whose stewardship of Blackburn Rovers was taken from a Victorian schoolboy’s book. He believed in being seen
but not heard.

  For the majority of Rhoades’s tenure I was an admirer and supporter, but his unerring pursuit of control at the club proved a huge turn-off for me. His entrance was made when he led a vote of no confidence in the committee, a motion which resulted in such dramatic but necessary change. In the end, however, just like those he replaced, he overstayed his welcome.

  Our on-field change in fortunes at Lancashire was down to several factors. I hate to use the word modernising when we are talking about those Swinging Sixties, but it is appropriate because a change in English cricket’s domestic landscape really suited the characteristics of our developing team. Yorkshire – or ‘that other lot from over the Pennines’ as we referred to them – were invincible when it came to what they termed ‘proper crick-eet’, but conversely the introduction of one-day matches suited us.

  It certainly made the side we were putting together infinitely more competitive overnight, because we were a collective of generally quite young blokes who had been brought up in local leagues that promoted the ‘give ’em nowt’ attitude. You had to work hard for your runs and become inventive at times to find the boundary. Tight bowling was backed up by tigerish fielding – there were no inner fielding circles to be adhered to, we just made it policy to form a ring around the opposition batsmen and squeeze hard to limit their singles.

  When the Gillette Cup was launched in 1963, it didn’t coincide with immediate silverware at Old Trafford. But once we broke the duck with the inaugural John Player Sunday League title in 1969, the proverbial floodgates were open. That trophy was defended successfully the following summer, one which marked a hat-trick of one-day trophies when we also won the Gillette Cup at Lord’s.

  This period coincided with Jack Bond – a great Lancashire stalwart who has done just about every job going at Old Trafford across seven decades – taking over the captaincy. It was no coincidence that under Jack’s leadership we started to function much more effectively as a team and to win matches. He fostered a real team ethos and the relatively young nature of our squad bought into his vision. He was the bandleader and we played to his tune, trusting his judgements and feeling trusted to perform. Suddenly, both as individuals and as a unit we started to play with more confidence. He knew how to get people to follow him and develop the staunchest loyalty with the most gentle acts of persuasion.

  The breakthrough for any batsman harbouring serious ambition is always their first hundred, and I got mine against Cambridge University. But I would not be alone among first-class cricketers in dismissing that effort as my maiden moment. It was discounted in my mind because of the standard of opposition, so even though I considered the threshold crossed on the one hand, I was still shy of it on the other. You are always striving for that elusive three-figure score in Championship cricket and for me it came against Gloucestershire at Bristol, and did so on the say-so of Jack who delayed a declaration, knackering the game up in the process.

  His decision to wait for me to get over the line rather than push all-out for victory proved a magnet for grumblers as it dictated that the game would inevitably end in a draw. But the reasoning of Jack, this absolute champion father figure who we all loved, was that once I had that first one under the belt, it would really kick me on as a player. He sacrificed the outside chance of a win – maximum reward in the short term – for greater returns in the matches and seasons that followed. He considered that allowing me to get that magical hundred would lead to more of them in the future, and if that was the case the whole team would benefit.

  This was an example of how Jack got blokes to play for him. A great leader of men, he so obviously cared about the team’s results but more importantly the players working as a unit to achieve them. He had the attitude you would want to bottle and sell to aspiring leaders all over the world.

  As a captain he was totally unselfish, and he ensured that we all had fun. He was the kind of cricketer who would fill bars rather than empty them, but what a devotion he has shown to the game. At the age of eighty-two, he was still helping part time on the groundstaff at Old Trafford. Only a serious hip operation over the winter prevented him starting the 2015 domestic season in his full capacity. In my opinion, it is evidence of the kind of unconditional love for our sport seldom few can match, and deserving of a knighthood.

  He might have sacrificed that one match down at Nevil Road to further my cause, but as a reader of match situations he was without peer. For that alone, he was worth his place in the XI. His leg-spin bowling did not make it out of the nets, and he would often slip himself down to No. 9 or 10 in the batting order, particularly if we were in need of quick runs. Yet whenever we were absolutely in the mire, he would be the one to front up and get us out of it.

  On occasion, he was like a wheel-on tactician and a fine one at that. In recognising his worth in replacing the lauded Brian Statham as captain in 1968, the club made arguably their best ever decision. If you require evidence of that, you need only assess the state of the trophy cabinet during his period in office. Five pieces of limited-overs silverware in as many years was simply sensational, given the lack of success that preceded the sequence.

  The club I joined was one in need of a new direction; the most appropriate direction being up. For too long it had dwelt around the bottom end of the Championship. Statisticians would have told you that there had been signs of improvement, as despite a period of six years cemented in the bottom five, Lancashire finished a rung higher up the ladder every season from 1962 to 1965. Then again, they had started the sequence next-to-bottom in a seventeen-team competition, proving that statistics, like the dresses that come out of the wardrobe on Oscar night, reveal as much as they conceal.

  Others without Manchester postcodes clearly recognised Jack Bond’s worth too. When his playing days came to an end with Lancashire, by virtue of his decision to step aside and groom me for the captaincy, he was viewed as an asset around the shires and it was no real surprise that he was snapped up by Nottinghamshire for a season and handed their club captaincy. In later life, he became an England selector.

  If Jack had fortune on his side, it was in the introduction of the 40-over-a-side John Player Sunday League at exactly the right time for the developing team he fronted. This was a brand of cricket that suited our style. Northerners like us were used to playing matches over the course of a weekend afternoon in the local leagues, so this compressed format was pretty familiar. In contrast, the stereotypical profile of a southern county team was that it was stocked full of public schoolboys who were brought up on the longer game. This was all new to them, and it was only really Sussex and Kent that adapted with any sustained success.

  Stereotypes exist for a reason. Four decades on we saw Leicestershire, a county whose four-day fortunes were on the wane, reap similar rewards for embracing the Twenty20 format. Perhaps it was because the less-heralded performers on the circuit were more in tune with the 20-over Wednesday night knock-outs so popular around the Midlands. There was clearly something behind their ability to pick up a method ahead of the chasing pack and run with it successfully – three titles from five finals-day appearances in the opening nine years suggested they got it.

  We embraced the change positively. The 40-over format promoted versatile cricketers who could both bat and bowl, given the eight-over restriction on a bowler. The youthful nature of the first-team squad at Old Trafford meant that sharpness in the field was almost a given. But Jack reinforced the need to sharpen up even the best among us with regular practice. This definitely had an influence on my thinking in years to come, in both my own captaincy and coaching appointments.

  Despite being our most senior player Jack practised what he preached, most memorably in the 1971 Gillette Cup final at Lord’s. Kent were winning that game easily with Asif Iqbal at the crease and in complete control of their chase of 225. Our old man of thirty-nine was at extra-cover, and I was at long-off, with Jack Simmons bowling, when Asif skimmed one into the covers. Bond took off like a salmon t
o grab the ball one handed, and a game that was dead-and-buried was resuscitated as Kent’s Pakistani star departed for 89. One catch completely turned things around. It was a bit like the Decision Review System now – seconds earlier you would have been pressing the red button for us, now it was green. We went on to win by 24 runs.

  Jack’s big thing was to use that inner ring field to put the squeeze on during the middle-overs. He had the tools to take wickets up front in the shape of Peter Lever and Ken Shuttleworth, with Peter Lee in support. He would then know exactly when to employ the two spinners: the slow left-arm of David Hughes complemented by Jack Simmons’s off-spin. He would have four fielders on the off-side to prevent the ball going through, and those two bowlers were masters of keeping it tight. It was a bit of a pre-runner to the defensive periods of modern 50-over matches that we have tried to eradicate. But in its era it was terrific, innovative stuff.

  Remember, there were no fielding guidelines in early List A fare, the only restrictions being on the number of overs an individual bowler could bowl, so there was a skill at getting your fielders in exactly the right spot. This is where Jack was mustard. These days, point and extra-cover are routinely stationed on the chalk lines of the thirty-yard markings, but he would use his instinct to place fielders in the ultimate spot to both cut out singles and prevent boundaries.

  He was also an advocate of keeping wickets intact when we batted to have a real dart at the end of an innings. We wouldn’t try anything too risky until the final ten overs and then the policy was to absolutely smash it. Not quite to the extent of the premier teams at the 2015 World Cup, when a dozen an over became the norm, but at a fair lick for the age. Look down the line-up of that particular Lancashire team and it was packed with internationals, and those that weren’t could have been. Cricketers of the calibre of Harry Pilling, David Hughes and Jack Simmons were big players in our one-day success.