The Shorter Wisden 2013

by John Wisden

  Everyone is entitled to be stupid on occasions; but Yorkshire, it must be said, have been guilty of abusing the privilege because of their tendency to always have breath to spare for a good argument. Think of the early to mid-1950s, when dressing-room disharmony – as much as the Surrey of Lock and Laker – left the county barren of titles. Think of the end of that decade, when Johnny Wardle dabbled with high explosives by disputing the decisions of his captain, Ronnie Burnet, and inevitably blew himself up. “Doesta think tha’s been a fool, Johnny?” asked a pitman bluntly when Wardle spoke at a South Yorkshire Miners Institute in the aftermath of his sacking. “Aye, I have,” he confessed. And think of some of the unedifying spectacles of the late 1960s, the 1970s and the early to mid-1980s, which led to the club looking like a ramshackle vehicle bearing an illustrious name. A lot of grown men, who ought to have known better, behaved like the stereotypical I’ve-had-it-tougher-than-thee Yorkshireman satirised by Monty Python.

  Headingley became the cricketing equivalent of the House of Medici. Divisive scheming obstructed the business of winning the Championship. The web of macho, ideological power struggles and score-settling became so convoluted that the club strangled themselves with it. The bickering sounded puerile and self-serving then, and most of the decisions taken seem to defy every principle of common sense when analysed now.

  Close was abruptly given the option of resignation or the sack after leading them to four Championships and two Gillette Cups. “How long have I got to decide?” he asked. “Ten minutes,” came the reply. The committee had already prepared different statements to accommodate whichever answer he gave. In shock, Close later vomited. Illingworth was regarded as a rebel for wanting the security of a contract, and despatched with the curt, cruel instruction that he could “take any other bugger” with him when he left. John Hampshire found the sour atmosphere intolerable, and announced he was off to discover “if it was possible once more to find joy… in cricket”. Trueman felt so isolated from Yorkshire – a jobsworth attendant even denied him access to the car park – that he wouldn’t walk through the gate on principle.

  In the matter of Boycott, the county seemed never to tire of hearing their own voice; nor did Boycott himself. His admirers worshipped him from the prayer mat. His detractors regarded him as the Tudors regarded Richard III. This provided splendid entertainment for the sort of voyeur who instinctively rubbernecks at a motorway pile-up. My favourite quote from the interminable period when the pro- and anti-Boycott factions were trying to reduce one another to pulp didn’t come from a player or an official. Illingworth, back at Headingley as team manager, was told by Mrs Illingworth, sick of the strife and animosity her husband had to endure: “The day you come home from Yorkshire and tell me you’re finished will be the happiest of my life.”

  Yorkshire struggled to cope with their loss of supremacy and had what was tantamount to a full breakdown. If there’s a plea of mitigation to be made for those torturous seasons, it is this. No county feel the weight of their past as Yorkshire do, or the obligation to maintain their reputation. No county have such a regal sense of entitlement. And no county so strongly believe that identity, ego, independence and self-worth are at stake in their cricket. As a polymath, John Arlott could express this sentiment and mean it: “I’ve enjoyed cricket more and served it better for realising it was never the be-all and end-all of everything.” No one ever said that in Pudsey.

  The fact that Yorkshire have won only one Championship in 44 years makes winning another urgent. The current president, Mr G. Boycott of Fitzwilliam, is adamant about that. On assuming office he declared: “I know what the members value and that is Championship cricket.” He was repeating only what Hutton and Sutcliffe and Rhodes had said before him; and what Hawke said before any of them. But I can hear someone – who long ago toted a barometer across God’s Own Country purely for the sake of his beloved club – saying a loud “Amen” in agreement.

  Duncan Hamilton is the award-winning author of Harold Larwood: The Authorized Biography of the World’s Fastest Bowler.

  STRONG YORKSHIRE, STRONG ENGLAND?

  An old saw cuts no ice

  CHRIS WATERS

  When eyebrows were raised over the make-up of the England squad for his first Test as chairman of selectors, Raymond Illingworth of Pudsey was unequivocal: “Just tell them that a strong Yorkshire is a strong England.” Among his choices were the Yorkshire pair of Craig White and Richard Stemp, along with Worcestershire’s Bradford-born wicketkeeper Steve Rhodes.

  It was hard to be entirely sure whether Illingworth’s remark was tongue-in-cheek, but it served to cement a cliché. For the idea that a strong Yorkshire does indeed mean a strong England is so deeply embedded in the game’s culture that, in some parts of the country – especially north of Derbyshire and south of Durham – it practically passes as established fact.

  Perhaps it would have been churlish to point out that, by the time Illingworth trotted out the mantra ahead of the Trent Bridge Test against New Zealand in 1994, Yorkshire and England had provided a grim twist. Yorkshire finished 13th that summer, and no higher than eighth between 1981 and 1995 – a period when first West Indies, then Australia, were the strapping Blutos of international competition and England more like Popeye shorn of his spinach. But has the national side really done better in those eras when Yorkshire have prospered, and vice versa? Or is it a myth to rival the Cottingley Fairies?

  As with many a cliché, no one seems to know where it actually comes from. Enquiries to eminent cricket historians elicit blank responses and tentative replies. “Didn’t someone like Lord Hawke say it?” Possibly. But if Ashes supremacy is the yardstick of English strength, the cliché is manifestly more fiction than fact, even dating back to Hawke’s day. When Yorkshire achieved their best run under his captaincy, with four titles in five years around the turn of the century, England lost four successive Ashes series, despite fielding Yorkshire’s George Hirst, Wilfred Rhodes, Jack Brown, Stanley Jackson and Ted Wainwright.

  And when Yorkshire won four consecutive titles in the roaring ’20s, England began the decade with three botched Ashes campaigns, even though their side included Yorkshiremen Herbert Sutcliffe, Percy Holmes, Abe Waddington and Arthur Dolphin. In the not-so-roaring ’30s, when the county secured seven Championships, Australia relinquished the Ashes only once, during Bodyline. In those years, Yorkshire supplied Len Hutton, Maurice Leyland, Bill Bowes, Hedley Verity and Arthur Wood, all of whom played when Hutton made 364 at The Oval in 1938.

  A more apposite theme continues to emerge: “When one team is strong, the other is not.” When England regained the Ashes in 1953 after a 20-year gap, it was the first of three successive wins against Australia, which along the way featured Hutton, Willie Watson, Bob Appleyard, Johnny Wardle and – when he was not in the disciplinary doghouse – Fred Trueman. Yet the Championship decade was dominated by Surrey, who claimed seven straight titles.

  Australia regained the urn in 1958-59, before grimly holding on to it for another five series, yet in 1959 Yorkshire chose the moment to embark on a run of seven titles in ten seasons, a period in which Trueman, Illingworth, Brian Close and Geoffrey Boycott all represented their country. That sequence ended in 1968, when Australia kept the urn with a 1–1 draw in England. Sure enough, by the time England next seized the Ashes, under Illingworth in 1970-71 – they went on to relinquish them only three times until 1989 – Yorkshire’s fortunes were already on the wane.

  Even as England achieved the most celebrated Ashes series victory of all, in 2005, Yorkshire were competing in the Championship’s lower flight. Four years earlier, the club had won their only title since 1968 at a time when – guess what? – England had not long fallen to the foot of the unofficial world rankings. And when England climbed to No. 1 in 2011, Yorkshire were relegated. The Test side two summers ago contained only one Yorkie – Tim Bresnan, the personification of a strong Yorkshireman, if not a strong Yorkshire.

  Debatable at best, delusion
al at worst, the famous old saying grows increasingly inapt. Nowadays, how can any county – not just Yorkshire – be strong if England spirit away their best players and systematically erode the significance of the Championship? To judge by the composition of contemporary England teams, perhaps it is time to modernise the maxim. How about: “A strong South Africa is a strong England”?

  Chris Waters is cricket correspondent of the Yorkshire Post. His book, Fred Trueman: The Authorised Biography, was Wisden’s Book of the Year in 2012.

  THE LEADING CRICKETER IN THE WORLD, 2012

  Michael Clarke

  GREG BAUM

  At Bangalore in 2004, after the 23-year-old Michael Clarke had made a fizzing century on debut for Australia, team-mate Darren Lehmann declared he should play every Test for the next ten years, even if it meant forfeiting his own place. At Brisbane six years later, when Clarke stood in as one-day skipper against England, he became the first Australian captain in living memory to be booed by a home crowd. In 2012, he passed 200 four times in Tests, a feat not achieved even by Don Bradman – and the hallelujahs rang out.

  Excitement, disappointment, re-endearment, respect: this is the not uncommon J-curve for a major cricketer. In Clarke, the plotted points read something like this: infatuation, disillusionment, rehabilitation and, last year, awe. It is a capital J-curve, exaggerated in proportion to his talent.

  Clarke arrived with a gift, but in public estimation then acquired baggage, and has taken until recently to shed it. Like Steve Waugh, he is from Sydney’s unpretentious western suburbs. Unlike Waugh, he was seen to develop pretensions – glamour girlfriend, fast car, endorsements portfolio – until it seemed Australia saw more of him straddling the centrefold crease than the batting crease. In a country in which the buzzword for two decades or more has been aspiration, this would not have mattered, except it led to a presumption that he was neglecting his cricket and squandering his privilege.

  Clarke’s rise coincided with Australia’s decline. This made him an easy scapegoat, most acutely at the end of the 2010-11 Ashes fiasco. When a dressing-room altercation two years earlier with the flinty Simon Katich finally became known, the public sided with Katich, believing the scrapper had taken the pretty boy down a notch. And when Clarke decamped briefly from a tour of New Zealand to deal with the break-up of his relationship, the late Peter Roebuck tore strips off him for dereliction of duty.

  In Cricket Australia’s high office, Clarke was thought to lack the necessary gravitas. To this day, it is hard to imagine him delivering a Bradman-style dissertation, or even a Mark Taylor-style reflection. He speaks plentifully, but with a side-of-the-mouth tic, and an almost perverse resolve to stick to the team-first dictum, even when a little personal elaboration would cause no offence. He is no one’s idea of a statesman.

  But nor is he the shallow and indolent playboy of popular imagination. He works hard at his game; the legacy is a chronically sore back. He spurned the modern cynosure of the Indian Premier League at its formation to stay home with his ill father. When he suspected Twenty20 was retarding his development, he gave it away at international level altogether. Fortified, Clarke began to answer critics and doubters in the only idiom he knew: runs, runs, and more runs.

  In Clarke’s batting maturity, five precepts are evident. The first is range. With an unerring eye, he affronts the ball on the rise as assuredly as anyone can ever have done. Yet he also plays so late that bowlers and slips throw up their hands in anticipation of the lbw that rarely comes. For bowlers, there is almost no margin for error; for Clarke, a repertoire lacking only the hook shot.

  The second is the natural’s gift of timing. Late in 2012 against Sri Lanka, while hampered by injury at Hobart and Melbourne, he would stab down on yorkers with no thought other than of survival, yet still the ball would squirt from his bat like a pip from an orange.

  The third is a delightfully twinkle-toed approach to spin bowling, so at odds with the modern modus of swatting from the crease.

  The fourth is temperament. He is capable of batting for hours and days at a consistent tempo, through lulls, beyond spurts and notwithstanding scares. Sometimes, even when compiling an enormous score, he looks oddly vulnerable, almost inept, particularly to bowling aimed at his head. But he shrugs off these moments as he might flies, regards a gram of luck as the reasonable corollary of kilograms of estimable batting, and his innings rolls on.

  The fifth, encompassing all four, is strength of character, irreconcilable with his erstwhile image, but now undeniable. Immediately on returning to New Zealand after sorting out his domestic crisis, he answered the howling reproof with a century.

  In the wake of the Ashes, Clarke replaced Ricky Ponting as Test captain and, as Australian cricket modernised, he was made a selector too. This imposed on him a heft of responsibility few previous captains have had to bear, liable to crush a faint mind. His stream of runs increased to an outpouring. In his first 21 matches in charge, he averaged 69, with eight hundreds.

  Moreover, he quickly revealed himself as an intuitive and adventurous leader in the Taylor mould. Never, if he can help it, does he let a match stand still, or simply run its course. He makes judicious declarations, sets designer fields, rotates bowlers often, and is unafraid to tear up the rulebook, trusting instead in his instinct. When trying to bowl out stubborn Sri Lanka at Hobart, he gave an over to wicketkeeper Matthew Wade. In the bald context of this essay, perhaps that sounds gimmicky. In the match, it altered the rhythms. Australia won.

  In 2012, we witnessed a full flowering of the lavish batting talent announced so spectacularly all those years ago in Bangalore. The year began with 329 not out against India, the biggest Test innings ever played at the SCG, curtailed only by his own declaration, with Bradman’s (and Taylor’s) 334 one hit away. Even then, some suspected he was playing for public favour. A double-century followed at Adelaide before, at the start of the 2012-13 season, free-hitting back-to-back doubles against South Africa. He rounded off the year with his first century in a Boxing Day Test, against Sri Lanka, compiled while nursing a pinched hamstring that reduced him to walking between the wickets, but made no appreciable difference to the sweetness of his strokeplay. His score, 106, was also his calendar-year average; only Bradman, Sobers and Ponting before him had reached New Year’s Eve on such a plane. And his 2012 Test aggregate of 1,595 placed him nearly 350 runs clear of his nearest rival, Alastair Cook.

  As 2013 began, Clarke deserved to feel content: all the caps fitted. He was 31 – prime batting age – rich in form and circumstance, with a low-profile wife and few of his old affectations. He had earned rave reviews as a batsman and captain; under him, an experimental Australian team had lost only one of seven series, to top-ranked South Africa. The ambivalence of public and critics was forgotten, except in one detail: a perception that he should bat higher than No. 5. While an in-form Ponting was ahead of him, it didn’t matter, but a succession of greenhorns had since been exposed. Clarke could reasonably answer that it had been decades since the best batsman axiomatically arrived at No. 3. But No. 4 seemed sensible.

  Still, mountains loomed. The retirements of Ponting and Mike Hussey a month apart left Clarke as the only fixture in Australia’s batting order, isolating him as no one had been since Allan Border, and imposing on him an Atlas-size burden, as a still-insubstantial team contemplated two Ashes series. Though his own man as captain, he depended on Ponting for almost grandfatherly support; that is gone. More even than Ponting ever was, Clarke is both captain and batting fulcrum. And it looks like being the making of him.

  THE LEADING CRICKETER IN THE WORLD

  2003 Ricky Ponting (A)

  2008 Virender Sehwag (I)

  2004 Shane Warne (A)

  2009 Virender Sehwag (I)

  2005 Andrew Flintoff (E)

  2010 Sachin Tendulkar (I)

  2006 Muttiah Muralitharan (SL)

  2011 Kumar Sangakkara (SL)

  2007 Jacques Kallis (SA)

  2012 Micha
el Clarke (A)

  Players can be chosen more than once for this award.

  50 YEARS OF TOURING ENGLAND

  The ride of a lifetime

  TONY COZIER

  Nepotism has got itself a bad name, so I’ll plump for “fatherly favouritism” as the catalyst for my career, which has tracked cricket’s most exciting, erratic and exasperating team for more than half a century. This year, sober to relate, marks 50 since I first covered a West Indies tour of England.

  Jimmy Cozier was, at various times, editor of three West Indian papers, before setting up his own, the Barbados Daily News, in 1960. In England in 1950, he had been the lone Caribbean chronicler of a series that first established West Indies as a genuine force. Presumably he considered his only son his logical successor. His present on my eighth birthday was the 1948 Wisden; seven years later, he got permission for me to be excused from school in Barbados so I could file for St Lucia’s The Voice (circulation 2,500) during the Kensington Oval Test against Australia. He sent me off to university in Ottawa to study for a journalism degree, but the arctic winters and lack of cricket on the curriculum prematurely ended that venture.