by James Philip
It helped that the ball was now old and scuffed, and softening all the time; and that Benaud’s wiles were being negated by the slowness and the lack of bounce of the wicket as the sun baked it ever drier. But actually, none of that really mattered because it was Tom Graveney’s day.
His hundred came up in the last over of the evening session in one hundred and thirty-eight elegantly forceful, chanceless minutes. As if to bookend the day he clipped Garth McKenzie’s last ball of the session to the mid-wicket boundary with the disdain of a man swatting a bothersome bluebottle.
At the close of play on day one: England stood at 281 for 4; with Graveney unbeaten on 108 and the resolute, immovable Barrington on 80.
Anybody looking at that day’s scorecard in the Bible of cricket, Wisden - Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanack – would look at that overnight score and think: ‘yes, probably about par for the course’.
However when the third ball of the next morning’s play from Garth McKenzie with a seven over-old new ball in his hand went ‘through’ the top of the pitch kicking up a mini crater, the dust from which drifted across the wicket as the batsman, Tom Graveney stuck his bat under his arm and departed, the head scratching began in earnest. Practically everybody thought that the wicket had been too dry at the outset. That it might play like a second or third day track. But that it was starting to disintegrate at the start of the fourth session of the match was...a surprise and in that split second, England’s score suddenly started looking formidable.
Problematically, thereafter from a batsman’s point of view most of the time the pitch actually played fairly predictably; the fly in the ointment – and it was a big one – was that every now and again something outrageously untoward would occur and there was not really a lot one could do about it except hope one missed the ball, or that it missed one’s stumps, or one’s pads when one was standing directly in front of those stumps. Equally problematically, unless your name was Kenneth Frank Barrington, you happened to be in prime form and you had nerves of tempered steel, it was impossible to carry on playing normal, perfectly playable deliveries on their merits without now and again mistrusting the evidence of one’s eyes. In the way of these things Barrington seemed to avoid the random impossible deliveries; it was as if he was batting on a flawless featherbed and everybody else was trying to lay bat on hand grenades!
John Murray came and went. Tony Lock ‘wore’ a couple of deliveries that bounced spitefully off a good length before edging behind to Jarman. Fred Trueman plunged forward as if determined to get his nose over the pitch of every ball, surviving over thirty minutes for his fifteen runs without ever once laying the middle of the bat on ball. Immediately after Barrington went to his century, a moment’s relaxation, perhaps relief took over the fast bowler’s reflexes and he perished attempting to deposit Richie Benaud’s googly into the grandstand.
It was 328 for 8 at that juncture.
Soon it was 329 all out with Garth McKenzie finishing with five wickets in the innings. Faced with almost half-an-hour to survive before luncheon the Australian openers, Lawry and Simpson both gave the wicket a flurry of very long, suspicious looks as they marked their guards.
By that time there were several ‘craters’ on a ‘good length’ where deliveries had not so much disturbed as ‘destroyed’ the surface. Every time a man looked up the wicket to focus upon the incoming bowler his eye inevitably noted the ever-widening ‘crater field’ between him and his approaching nemesis.
One English correspondent recollected later that somebody behind him in the press box had muttered ‘you can almost hear the knives being sharpened for poor Athol Watkins’.
There had only ever been six curators – as head grounds men were termed in Australia – in the hundred or so year history of the Sydney Cricket ground. The present incumbent, Athol Watkins, had been in post since 1958. Although the stadium hosted Australian rules football and rugby matches in the southern winter – both of which cut up the square ‘badly’ most years – a curator was always judged on the standard of his cricketing Test Match tracks; and that morning Watkins’s ‘track’ was threatening to blight his reputation forever.
What was not commonly known at the time was that while the MCC had been in Tasmania two torrential overnight rain storms had practically flooded the Sydney square and the ground staff had had to resort to extraordinary measures, including bringing in heaters to prepare ‘some kind of wicket for the Test’. Everybody remarked on how verdant the outfield was given the time of year without it seemed, giving a thought to the reasons why. Two or three sunny, dry days ahead of the game would have made all the difference but Athol Watkins had not been that lucky. Therefore, the pitch which had the look of a used, older strip was actually anything but and just beneath the surface moisture lay un-drained, undermining the billiard table trueness of the original, frantically rolled wicket.
The violent summer rains had caused unprecedented flash floods and filled rivers empty or reduced to a trickle for years from Brisbane to Adelaide, causing damage and disturbance, and the loss of several lives in Victoria and New South Wales. In retrospect if Australians had realised that the storms presaged months of scorching heat and drought that dragged through the southern winter to late September 1963, there would have been less complaints about minor weather-related ‘sporting anomalies’.
Poor Athol Watkins must have been tempted to find a cupboard in the ground staff shacks to hide in at lunch time on the second day of the Sydney Test.
By then Australia had stumbled to 8 for 3; Lawry, Simpson and Brian Booth were out, Lawry third ball of the innings to a Trueman delivery that moved marginally away from him – with no real blame attaching to the pitch – and caught the edge. However, Simpson and Booth were both on the receiving ends of impossible deliveries from Brian Statham, a ‘bail-trimmer’ to dismiss Simpson, and a ‘first-baller’ which leapt at Booth’s throat. If Neil Harvey had not survived a confident appeal for LBW off the penultimate ball of the abbreviated pre-lunch session the catastrophe would have been total.
It was overcast that afternoon and the pitch flattened somewhat beneath the grey skies. Now and then a ball misbehaved but Harvey and debutant Barry Shepherd batted with style and obduracy respectively for over an hour before the last veteran of Don Bradman’s 1948 ‘Invincibles’ in the Australian side was rapped on the gloves by a David Larter thunderbolt and the ball flew in a slow, parabolic arc into the hands of Brian Statham in the gully.
With his side perilously placed at 33 for 4, Norm O’Neill bustled out to the middle. Benaud had sent Shepherd out ahead of him in the pre-luncheon carnage, hoping above hope that the experienced man might be preserved for the post-lunch battles to come.
Carlton-born O’Neill, whose back foot game was ideally suited to the bouncy wickets down under had burst into Test cricket on the previous England tour, confounding many by his form in England in 1961 when he was named as one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year. He averaged over forty in Tests and over fifty in his first-class career; and he was a man for a crisis.
Just not this one; David Larter sent him back to the dressing room without troubling the scorers with another ball that kicked at him like a mule from a good length. The ball took the shoulder of O’Neill’s bat and Fred Trueman dived forward and held the ball an inch above the turf.
Both umpires looked at each other; both unsighted.
The batsman hesitated.
‘Did it carry, mate?’ He asked of the fielder.
‘Aye, lad,’ the Yorkshireman nodded.
O’Neill trudged off.
Enter ‘Slasher’ Mackay.
Brian Statham had taken David Larter aside after his opening tearaway, somewhat erratic and ill-directed lightning fast first over. The gist of his advice had been along the lines of: ‘Stop wasting your energy, use your height and bounce on this wicket; throttle back, bowl at three-quarters pace and make sure you make the batsmen play every ball.’ The lanky fast bowler took his advice and
thereafter absolute, as opposed to general, chaos ruled.
Ken Mackay fought valiantly, Richie Benaud clouted several wayward deliveries to the fence and Garth McKenzie swung lustily but Shepherd and Alan Davidson apart the innings disintegrated. Barry Shepherd was the last man out, bowled hooking at a short ball that tried to cut him in half below the knees, the debutant had made a valiant 41 in an Australian reply of 116, some 213 runs behind England.
David Larter had taken 6 wickets for 40 runs in eleven overs and three balls.
There was never a scintilla of a possibility that England would not enforce the follow on and most of the fifty-five thousand people in the ground that Saturday afternoon, watching on with a mixture of horror and disbelief, must have feared the match would be as good as over before the close of play.
Against Fred Trueman with his tail, not to mention his gander well and truly ‘up’, Brian Statham bowling a perfect, very brisk line and length, and finally a life-threatening two over salvo from Larter, Bill Lawry and Bobby Simpson batted like two men squinting, and leaning into a hurricane hoping above hope to survive long enough for the eye of the storm to pass overhead.
Both openers were dropped – by Graveney and Cowdrey – in the slips, both regulation knee high chances which ought to have been pouched with ease, and near the end Bill Lawry got into a fearful tangle half-hooking, half trying to evade a short ball from David Larter and had David Sheppard – probably the poorest fielder in the England team - ‘sighted’ the ball a little earlier he might have trotted in from the boundary from long leg and got underneath the steepling top edge.
Ted Dexter led the applause when the two Australian batsmen left the field.
At the close of day two Australia stood at 29 for no wicket and those of a profoundly optimistic outlook were dreaming of scoring another 184 runs to make England bat again.
The following – Sunday - morning the England captain had scheduled a ‘talk’ for the benefit of the press, radio and TV men; mainly to give them sufficient material to ensure that they would leave the party alone for the duration of the rest day.
David Sheppard was preaching at a nearby church that morning and he and Colin Cowdrey had gone off together. To ‘share the load’ Brian Statham had accompanied his captain to the ‘talk’.
By now the ‘Dexter-Gubby Allen’ imbroglio of the night before the Test was all over the papers, a thing that deeply vexed Dexter since he had not spoken to anybody about the affair outside of the touring party.
‘Are you happy that Mr Allen has confirmed the rest of the tour itinerary will be as per contract, Ted?’ This from Ian Wooldridge of The Daily Mail.
‘Thank you for letting me know that, Ian,’ the England captain replied, dryly. Gubby Allen had spent the last two days wining and dining old friends, and haunting the waking hours of the Australian cricketing great and good. ‘If I may I should like to talk about the cricket.’
Collectively, the travelling press had been increasingly impressed with the way Dexter had stepped up to the impossible challenges of the last couple of months. They fancied they had seen him grow in stature both as a man off the field and a captain on it. However, many of the older hands also detected the tell tale signs of a man who had been under so much pressure for so long that sooner or later, like a volcano, he was liable to blow his top.
When it happened that was going to be very good press!
‘We know that Gubby’s arrival has caused certain tensions within the party...’
‘Is it true that there are discussions about the tour continuing under the auspices of a Ted Dexter’s England XI?’
‘Is it true that MCC intend to sack you after this match?’
After trying to speak to the situation in the Test Match Dexter wearied of the barrage of interrogatives designed to feed the maw of the Australian press, and what he confessed to friends he construed to be the ‘egos and the fantasies of certain pen-pushers who were serving little or no useful purpose in Australia’, shook his head and stood up.
‘I think that’s enough for now, gentleman. My time will be better spent playing golf. Good day to you.’
Dexter later confided to Jim Swanton that this was the day he realised that he had been mistaken in believing that he had ‘some kind of duty’ to the press. That was naive; men wrote what they wanted to hear or see, not what he said, meant or anything his players had actually achieved on the field. He had made the mistake of taking the whole ‘pack of them’ into his confidence and now ‘they’ seemed to believe that they owned his soul. But no more! In the same way a cricketer had to earn his spurs on the field; so in future individual ‘scribblers’ would have to earn his respect in print. There would be no more general ‘talks’ to provide journalists with ‘easy copy’ for the morning in the absence of play on a rest day. The ‘idlers’ would have, in future, to actually work for their stipends!
On Monday before some forty thousand spectators – the majority hoping for a miracle - the denouement of the Test was delayed until after lunch but only because England’s catching was profligate, half-a-dozen chances going down. Had all the catches been held Australia would have struggled to raise three figures. As it was Benaud’s side was bowled out for 111, with Bill Lawry, repeatedly dropped by Englishmen suddenly finding themselves with two left hands, eighth out for a dogged 34 which was worth one hundred and thirty-four on any other wicket in any other situation.
Trueman and Statham both took a brace of cheap wickets[92]; and David Larter was again the primary destroyer with 5 for 29, with Tony Lock’s left-arm bafflers remarkably claiming only a single wicket in the match.
England had won by and Innings and 102 runs in a little over fourteen hours play; the series was level at one apiece.
In the excitement of the moment Brian Statham’s record breaking wicket haul went barely remarked; likewise the fact that Fred Trueman with 230 victims to his name was hard on his heels.
There was everything to play for.
Chapter 18 | Newcastle-upon-Hunter
Ironically, given the furore about the itinerary the early conclusion of the Sydney Test gave the tourists an unexpected two-day holiday before they boarded the train – bizarrely as it turned out - called the ‘Newcastle Flier’ to the next stop on their odyssey over a hundred miles north of the capital of New South Wales.
Newcastle was then, and to a lesser extent is now, an industrial port city. It was a railway and coal town with power stations and factories spreading out mainly from the southern shore of the estuary of the Hunter River. The urban and industrial sprawl, as grey and drab as the brown muddy waters of the river were in stark contrast to the forests inland, the beaches to its north and south and the marvellous azure of the ocean to the east.
The rains which had caused all the problems in the preparation of the wicket down in Sydney the previous week had caused local flooding and threatened navigation, the Hunter having been in spate for several days. However, the tourists, after their two days off and the itinerary which, unaccountably only permitted of a maximum of three days cricket against moderate opposition in the week before the Fourth Test at Adelaide, arrived in Newcastle in greatly finer fettle than at practically any time since they had left Western Australia.
Moreover, everybody was buoyed by the good news from Brisbane where David Allen had recovered sufficiently to be released from hospital, and was now convalescing with the family of one of the members of the Board of the Queensland Cricket Association. Optimistically, he was hoping to be fit enough to rejoin the party – albeit in a non-playing capacity - in Adelaide in a week’s time. Meanwhile, Fred Titmus, his arm still in a sling was back in harness; although unable to bowl and unlikely to play any part in even the New Zealand leg of the tour in March, he was a welcome wise presence at net sessions and winning countless young friends and admirers by organising impromptu nets for the youngsters who congregated to watch every MCC practice session.
Titmus had already been approached by two Sydney grad
e teams in search of a coach, and looking ahead to the next season, a proven international-class finger spinner. Representatives of the Sports Department of the University of New South Wales had also ‘sounded him out’ about his future employment.
Several other men had received overtures of a similar kind, including Dexter, who had received an open-ended invitation to register to play for Victoria the following Australian season.
When the tourists read that Gubby Allen had decreed that it was highly inappropriate for men ‘contracted to the MCC to entertain what amounted to thinly-veiled bribes and inducements from Australian teams and companies which must distract them from their current business’ his sentiments went down like a lead balloon.
Fortunately, ‘the big man of English cricket’ had remained in Sydney, forsaking the ‘fleshpots’ – if there were any – in Newcastle. Another small mercy of the trip was that very few cricket correspondents had followed the team north and those that had, showed very little interest in the cricket at the No. 1 Sports Ground.
MCC, importing two local youngsters from Canberra and Wollongong into their side so as to rest two of the dwindling roster of fully fit bowlers available to it – Statham and Larter – bowled out the home side twice for under a hundred, winning by an innings and over two hundred runs in two-and-a-half mundane, undemanding days. Nevertheless, the game attracted crowds beyond anybody’s expectation, with several thousand coming through the turnstiles even on the last morning when there was no prospect of the contest continuing up to, let alone after the luncheon interval.
Sadly, one hugely respected and liked Australian commentator and correspondent who had stayed behind in Sydney passed away during the first day of the MCC’s match against the Northern New South Wales Country XI.