His story is typical of country cricketers around Australia, whose ambition often outweighs the opportunities before them. Some wither on the vine, others make sacrifices to save themselves from doing so. Glenn McGrath is famous for taking his boots from Narromine, near Dubbo, to the city. His mum saved some money to buy him a caravan, which they towed from home to Hurstville in the Sydney suburbs. McGrath lived there on his own for thirteen months, while working at the bank and spending hours in the nets at Sutherland Cricket Club. Holland preferred to stay with Southern Lakes and commute when necessary. But then Newcastle is not Narromine.
Let’s hand over to Dutchy’s wife, Carolyn, to bookend the stories of Bill and Robert.
‘The first thing I wish to say is how very proud Bill—Grandad, as we all knew him—was of his youngest son, Robert. Robert achieved academically and also in the sporting arena, and this was of great delight to his parents.
‘Robert’s father became a fierce supporter of the soccer he played but he also became a huge cricket fan, and when his son was first chosen to play for New South Wales as a leg spinner there was no one with a bigger grin than Grandad. However, when Robert was chosen to play for his country, that grin became the biggest smile you would ever see.
‘Robert, Bob, Dutchy was selected to be Australia’s 326th Test cricketer, making his debut against the West Indies in the second match of the 1984–85 series. Grandad and Grandma would always enjoy packing the thermos and muffins and turn out at the cricket in Newcastle. They would stay all day and enjoy every moment. Of course, Craig, Rohan and Naomi (our three children) were always at the cricket, so it was pretty much a double-delight day for them to watch the cricket and see their grandchildren.
‘They would hang off every word whenever Robert’s achievements were mentioned in the newspaper and added their own interpretation if the newspapers were not positive. Robert played district cricket from when he was fourteen years of age and first-class cricket for over ten years. He still plays golden-oldies cricket today at age 69. Robert now places all his knowledge into coaching and administration. So as you can imagine he provided much delight for his parents. Bill was so proud of Robert, his brother Bill junior and all his grandchildren.’
The man who left Northern Ireland in 1927 aged fifteen, died peacefully in Toronto 62 years later. He led his life the hard way, getting his hands dirty and beating the odds. Billy’s story is very typical of the generations who have made a great land the place it is. If you wonder why Australians are competitive, imagine arriving after eight weeks at sea to a country that has fires in one state and floods in another during the same week. You have next to no possessions or money and are immediately told to report to an employment agency that sends you 333 miles inland to a town you have never heard of to do a job for which you have no skills. You say goodbye to your parents and six siblings and have not the faintest idea when, or if, you will see them again. The sun burns your pale skin and the dust chokes your young throat. You are thirsty, hungry and just fifteen years old.
Bill and Marjorie’s second son, Robert, made the journey from enthusiastic schoolboy cricketer to the Australian Test team. His particular talent, the leg break, is the most difficult to foster and every bit as difficult to perform under the spotlight. He played in a New South Wales side that won three Sheffield Shields. He twice took 10 wickets in a Test match—both at Sydney—against the West Indies in 1984 and New Zealand eleven months later. He also spun his name onto the honours board in the away dressing room at Lord’s with his 5-wicket haul in 1985. In all, he managed 316 wickets in 95 first-class matches at 31.19 each. Good job, Dutchy.
It was Dutchy who met me at Sydney airport. I was to play in the Newcastle grade competition for Southern Lakes. He greeted me warmly and introduced Bob McLeod, an academic who ran a building firm and opened the batting for the club: slowly, I was to discover. On the drive north, they told me about the club its ambitions, limitations and charms. On arrival in Toronto, they hung a left and took me to Awaba Oval. I loved it. Then down the main street of this one-horse town, past the workers’ club and the fish and chip shop to the small marina at the water’s edge. From there we turned right and headed out of town, a mile or so, to Coal Point. They had found me digs in a small apartment on the edge of Lake Macquarie but to allow me to find my feet after the journey from England, the Holland family were putting me up for a week or so. I stayed for three.
That night there was a reception in my honour in town. The chairman, Les Edwards, said some generous words of welcome and the players gathered enthusiastically around me. They gave us chicken drumsticks, sausages, party pies and beer—either Tooheys New, a pale lager, or Tooheys Old, a dark stout that kept the mining community happy. I was knackered and suddenly terrified. These good folk clearly expected a decent return from the new pro. I was twenty years old, embarrassingly overweight and not quite as good as they, or I, thought I was.
We practised the next afternoon. The net pitches were concrete and Dutchy made the ball bounce steeply. The faster bowlers made the ball bounce too, past my nose. I returned the compliment when I bowled. There was a fielding session of sorts but it was a shambles. We practised at Ron Hill Oval in town, where the second grade played. At least 40 people came every Tuesday and Thursday, and most expected a real go.
There were two separate associations in which Southern Lakes had teams: four of them played in the District Competition and two in the City and Suburban, which was more knockabout. There were junior teams too, and I had a couple of games for the Under-21s. Although the two associations have since merged, the structure remains similar today.
Dutchy was player, captain and president—had been so since 1975 and stayed president until 2005. That is some clubman. He played first grade from 1961 until 1998, which hardly seems believable. In that time he took 799 wickets for the club to go with the 316 for state and country. This is not to mention other rep games and activities. Then he played lower grades until 2011. After that, he became coach and mentor. Now he is the curator of two fields and many pitches. Can there have ever have been a cricket club more indebted to one man? To this day, he spins them as hard as the old fingers will allow and last March toured South Africa for the first time where, he said, big men slogged him into trees. He is close to 70 years of age, still slim, fit and in love with the sport that has given him a way of life.
If the spirit of cricket is best illustrated by respect for the game and a determination to leave it in a better place than the one in which you found it, Dutchy is a fine example. To this day he plays with a fiercely competitive edge but with the lightest touch. He is a gentleman in the truest sense of the word.
Our first game of the season was against Wallsend and we were hammered. Annoyingly, their opening batsman, John Gardner, who had left Southern Lakes for Wallsend at the finish of the previous summer, made runs. He then sat at the bar in the workers’ club drinking middies of Tooheys New and telling us where we went wrong. ‘Tosser,’ I thought. I’d buy him a beer now.
The Toronto Workers Club was a feature of life that season. Cold beer was served in cold glasses of all sizes—5 ounce, 7 ounce, schooners and more—and cricket was spoken day upon day, night upon night. We ate burgers, pies or fish and chips. Occasionally, I splashed out on a steak but the pennies were tight. We played the pokie machines, more as recreation than anything, and watched the little money we had fall down the blackhole of hope and despair.
I moved into the apartment by the lake and missed Carolyn’s cooking. A rumour went around that there were sharks in the lake, thus I missed the Holland family swimming pool too. I was homesick but hid this with endless hours in the nets facing Dutchy’s brilliant leg spin. I ran club practices with enthusiasm and the rest of the time was back at the pad by the water to watch hour upon hour of cricket on television.
The flat was a well-appointed studio on the ground floor of a double-brick house—very typical of Australian residential development of the time and the lake w
as but a cricket pitch from the glass-fronted sliding doors. It was owned by Peter and Sue Merilees, whose constant encouragement and support was appreciated by a young boy ever so slightly lost. I couldn’t make a damn run for the club and moped at home most evenings, wondering why the gods were so cruel. Peter’s happy disposition and Sue’s jolly approach to all things homely were invaluable allies. They are still there. Dutchy and I went over to see them early in 2016. It was as if the world had stood still.
The cricket, though not better than anticipated, was every bit as tough as a young Englishman might have expected. Batsmen hit the ball hard, bowlers hit the bat hard and fielders threw in hard. No one played for laughs, only to win. Sometimes selfishness overrode common sense but in the main the greater good was at the heart of the players in that league. This was in contrast to the professional county game, where self-interest dominated so much of the cricket at second-eleven level.
I had played three first-class games for Hampshire the previous summer, none of them with any specific triumphs, but I had not disgraced myself. I was surprised by the gulf in the standard of county players. Gloucestershire, for example, had Mike Procter, Zaheer Abbas, Sadiq Mohammad, Brian Brain, Andy Stovold, John Childs and David Graveney to shore up Alastair Hignell, Jim Foat, Jack Davey, Julian Shackleton and Andy Brassington. This is in no way meant to be disrespectful to the latter group of five, only to point out that this was a pretty typical team sheet around the shires: made up of world-class cricketers, county cricketers and good club cricketers. Frankly, in 1979 and 1980 Hampshire were worse—barely a decent Minor Counties side until Malcolm Marshall and Gordon Greenidge returned to play in the latter part of the summer after the West Indies tour of England. First-class cricket in England has always been spread too thinly but the counties can’t see it, stuttering along as they do, utterly dependent for survival on income from the English Cricket Board’s (ECB’s) sale of international television rights.
I was a decent young talent, signed by a first-class county, but that summer I was unable to take a trick in Newcastle grade cricket where, incidentally, the standard of club cricket was below that in Sydney. I took some wickets but struggled badly with the bat, going from bad to worse the more I practised and the harder I tried. By the end of that season, each of my innings had become a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom.
There were many differences between amateur cricket in England and Australia, not least the standard and attitudes. A key one for me was the lack of opportunity to play during the week, or on Sundays, in Australia. In England, you can pick up a game anywhere, pretty much any day, but not in Australia, where there is no culture for a recreational game and no history of wandering cricket. I was sure that a few innings away from the pressure of performing in grade cricket could revive my game but I couldn’t find a match in which to play them.
I was invited to play one midweek representative game in Gosford for a Newcastle team against a Sydney rep team in the Tooheys Cup. Bob Simpson, Allan Border, Steve Rixon, John Dyson and others played. It was a valuable exercise and I did fine, taking 3 wickets and guiding us over the line with a calm, unbeaten 12 from number six in the order. Dutchy played and took 3 wickets too, so I guess Southern Lakes knocked over the Sydneysiders and won the laurels.
After a couple of games—and before the run drought had truly set in—Dutchy suggested I take over as captain. He had done it for years and felt that a new hand on the tiller might benefit everyone. It was fun and the guys responded well. Wayne Hackett, a great lad and a big, strong new ball bowler, ran in all day, as did the former captain. The ball swung out at Awaba and so I bowled a heap of overs too. Between the three of us we kept most opponents under control. We just didn’t get enough runs. In hindsight, I should have dropped myself down the order but was nervous of appearing weak.
God, it was hot there. An airless heat that sucked the oxygen from the lungs of willing men. In general, I like the heat but after just six or seven overs on a Saturday morning, you sure knew you had been in a fight. In the first match I played, Dutchy came over and said, ‘Good stuff mate, have a spell,’ and in a moment of splendidly confused interpretation I replied, ‘A spell? Christ, I’ve just bowled six off the reel and it’s 38 degrees!’ A spell in Oz is a rest. A spell in England is a period of bowling.
Awaba Oval was surrounded by a white picket fence. Beyond it was the bush. Huge gum trees towered above thick scrub and undergrowth that swallowed well-struck cricket balls. We could take an age in there looking for balls, for this was snake country—red-bellied black snakes and the more dangerous brown. We saw one on the footpath from the dressing shed to the oval one afternoon, before it hurried away to the very hiding place that gobbled up the hits for four and six.
I loved that cricket ground. It had a character of its own, and demanded character of those who played upon it. The pitch didn’t have much pace and therefore results were hard to force. You could play good cricket and finish a match with next to nothing. You could lose the toss on beautiful Saturday morning and spend hours in the field, only to arrive the following Saturday to see it pissing down with rain. What’s more, I was paid a few bucks to work at the oval—paint the sightscreens, fix up the pickets, roll the pitch and mow the outer—which made wet weather doubly depressing.
Not much has changed. They use it for the lower grades these days, having smartened up Ron Hill Oval in Toronto for the first team. The pickets had gone, replaced by wire, which is cheaper but looks pretty unattractive. The dressing sheds are a monument to another age, with splintering floorboards and peeling paint. The view of the play is good, though, and there is plenty of space. The path where the brown snake lay has been concreted over but, on the Saturday before my visit, the fourth-grade team had seen a brown snake in exactly the same spot, basking in the afternoon sun.
Awaba Oval wasn’t the only place I worked that season of 1978–79. Bob McLeod hired me to tile and grout for his building firm. What a hoot that was. My immediate boss was a ripper bloke called Bruce—oh yes, he was. Bruce was a dead ringer for Frank Zappa—same hair and moustache—and smoked as much dope. He would pick me up at 7.30 am in his ute, we’d stop for a sausage roll somewhere, and start on the bathrooms and kitchens at about eight. Then we had a smoko around 10.30—a roll-up cigarette and a cup of tea or a can of Coke. Come lunchtime, I was up for a sandwich. Bruce, who was a skinny bugger, had a joint. Next day, same pattern. On the third day, I tried the joint too and fell poleaxed to the floor. It was a first and not to be repeated, for there was serious weed in Bruce’s blend. On the fourth day, he drove us out to a creek where the water was clear and clean. We swam and then Bruce smoked his joint and me a roll-up, after which we crashed out to sleep. As the summer days wore on, his brickwork lost its shape and my grouting missed its mark. We howled with laughter and figured we’d better crank it up pre-lunch because post-lunch was hopeless. Sometimes in the evening, Bruce asked me out to his tin shack in the middle of nowhere but I couldn’t do the dope and, anyway, he soon faded into oblivion. I wonder where Bruce is now.
One night I took a sheila to the drive-in cinema to see Grease. When Danny put his arm across the back of the seat of his Chariot and made a pass at Sandy, I tried the same. That faded into oblivion too.
One afternoon a week I practised with Phil Slocombe of Somerset and Richard Williams of Northamptonshire, who were playing for other Newcastle clubs. A couple of gifted local lads mucked in some days, one of whom could really play. His name was Greg Geise, the son of the Geise who had bowled at Boycott and was offered the shoes for twenty bucks. He was on another level from the players I had grown up with, both technically and in the power of his shot-making. Just eighteen years old—tall, strong and confident of his ability—he would have walked into the Hampshire team of the moment. To attract the attention of the New South Wales selectors, he knew he had to play grade cricket in Sydney and it was another five years before he got his chance. In all, Geise played eight Sheffield Shield games. Dutchy
says his 84 at Adelaide played a major part in an important win against South Australia but that the acquisition of Imran Khan for the summer blocked his further progress: either that or Greg didn’t quite have the mind for Shield cricket. A cricketer can have all the talent in the world but his temperament counts for as much, otherwise no deal.
I spent Christmas with Slocombe and a mate of his on Bondi Beach. It rained for much of the day and we retreated to a drab apartment, ate takeaway chook and drank beer. Bondi in 1978 was not Bondi in 2016. Not close, not recognisable, not even very safe back then. Older folk say the streets were lined with needles and the storm drains dumped the worst of stuff into the shallowest water. I live a part of the year there now in a wonderful apartment on the rocks at North Bondi that the owners bought in 1981, much to the horror of many of their mates. ‘You wait,’ said Edmund Graham, the landlord, ‘Bondi will be summer gold one day.’ The place is worth a small fortune now. Back then you could not have paid me to return.
I made two other trips to Sydney in my plodding dark-grey 1963 Holden, with its column-shift gears and padded leather bench seat. I met up with Paul Terry, my Hampshire contemporary, to go to the first floodlit match at the Sydney Cricket Ground—coloured clothes, white balls, black sightscreens and all under the banner of WSC. Unable to control the crowds outside the ground, Kerry Packer opened the gates and let everyone in. It was a thrilling experience. Australia played in canary yellow and the West Indies in shocking pink. It was the night Packer knew it had all been worthwhile, the night that changed cricket forever.
Since arriving at Coal Point in late September, my voracious appetite for the game had been satisfied by television. The ABC showed the six-Test Ashes series against England and Sheffield Shield matches. Channel Nine showed WSC. I couldn’t get enough of it. I was a cricket junkie.
England won the Ashes 5–1 against Graham Yallop’s understrength Australians, effectively a second eleven that was lambasted in the media. Though Boycott had a poor tour after the death of his mother and the loss of the Yorkshire captaincy—he told the selectors he wasn’t up to going but they persuaded him otherwise—David Gower, Derek Randall, Bob Willis, Ian Botham, Mike Hendrick and Geoff Miller were simply too good in a team ruthlessly led by Mike Brearley. Most of the best Australian players were playing alternative matches around the rest of the country for Packer. I went to watch England play Northern New South Wales at No. 1 Sportsground Newcastle but didn’t stay long. The truth is that I had begun to doubt myself.
A Beautiful Game Page 5