by James Philip
For David Larter the red mist was fast descending.
He bowled a rapid full toss – inadvertently – chest high past Shepherd that almost decapitated John Murray thirty yards behind the stumps. Another short ball ballooned high over the keeper’s head and bouncing twice went for a boundary.
And then a lightning fast delivery snapped Barry Shepherd’s off stump in two.[102]
‘HOWZAT!’ The bowler screamed in wholly redundant vindication at Lou Rowan.
Australia were 228 for 5
Ken Mackay was next in the firing line.
He ducked and dived, survived.
‘Right, that’s your second warning!’ Rowan told David Larter. ‘One more and you’re out of the attack!’
The news went around the circle of fielders and Ted Dexter stalked angrily up the pitch from the slips. He waved Fred Trueman away as he neared Rowan. Colin Egar strode purposefully as if to intercept the England captain.
Neil Harvey, 98 not out watching all this from the non-striker’s end had thus far somehow contrived to maintain his concentration, and his dignity. In his career he had seen most things, very little surprised or disconcerted the veteran. This however...was different. It was suddenly as if all the loss and anger, no, the rage of the tourists was being visited upon he and his fellows lurking beneath their broad brimmed floppy green caps. He had heard the ball ‘clunk’ off Barry Shepherd’s bat, known that it had gone cleanly into Fred Trueman’s hands and he had been standing within four or five feet of Rowan. In the normal run of things such incidents understandably gave rise to passing bad feeling, but this was...different.
Three balls later he was walking back to the dressing room in a state of mild shock. He had not seen the ball which ‘cleaned him up’. It was not that Fred Trueman had speared an impossibly fast delivery through his defences; he had simply not been ‘switched on’.
Alan Davidson walked out ahead of Richie Benaud.
By that stage it was near chaos on the Australian balcony but Benaud himself had kept his wits about him.
‘I’m the next one they want to knock over,’ he had observed, grimly buckling his pads.
‘Follow me, then,’ Davidson had suggested. He was another old, cool head in adversity. First rule; do whatever the other side does not want you to do. The great bowler was like Harvey a man universally respected and liked in the game; Harvey had been spared the worst of the bouncer barrage, Benaud would be peppered mercilessly. At the time neither man knew David Larter had been warned for intimidatory bowling by Lou Rowan, just that the Englishmen’s ‘gander’ was up after the Shepherd catch to Trueman that never was.
Alan Davidson felt as if he had walked into a pressure cooker. Nevertheless, he reasoned that Trueman, and probably Larter, only had a couple more overs in them in the Sydney heat; if he could see off those spells things would settle down again.
He was right.
Problematically however, both he and Richie Benaud had come and gone by then. He had ‘copped one’ from David Larter and next ball fended the tall fast man to gully; Benaud had been bowled by Trueman.
Australia had declined from 201 for 2 to 239 for 8 in thirty-three torrid minutes. The trial by fire ended only when – after bouncing Barry Jarman – Lou Rowan dismissed David Larter from the attack for the rest of the innings.
Rowan had every right – the umpire was the final arbiter of all things on the field – to warn the fast bowler a third time and banish him to the field for the remainder of the innings.
He was not entitled to do it with such evident relish.
David Larter and soon, Fred Truman and Ray Illingworth had walked up to Rowan. They were soon joined by the England captain. There were still three balls to bowl in the over.
‘David, if you’d go down to third man please,’ Dexter suggested. ‘Back to your positions,’ he ordered the two other men glowering at the umpire.
Colin Egar had joined the huddle as Trueman and Illingworth departed, muttering darkly.
‘What the Devil are you playing at?’ Ted Dexter inquired lowly of the Queensland detective, ignoring Egar.
Lou Rowan reportedly said something along the lines of: ‘Stop griping and get on with the game!’
Dexter having decided that Rowan was a lost cause had glanced to Colin Egar.
‘Presumably, we are to bowl underarm lobs to the home side in future?’
Coincidentally, dark clouds were sweeping over the city; the prelude to a brief, squally shower as dusk fell. For the moment the clouds simply raised the increasingly stifling humidity.
Answer came there none.
Dexter turned away, visibly disenchanted.
He waved to Tom Graveney.
The Worcestershire batsman was a very occasional leg break bowler. In his twelve year Test career he had bowled in just six matches – but not since 1957 - and taken a solitary wicket at a cost of 122 runs.
‘Tom,’ Dexter explained acidly, ‘if you’d be so good as to finish the over, please. Take a care not to intimidate the batter!’
Chapter 23 | Fifth Test – The Battle
To give Lou Rowan credit it took a brave man to wag a finger in the face of the England captain. However, unable to resort to the use of a nightstick or a firearm his admonishing digit was hardly likely to quell the passions in play that evening.
‘I shall report you!’ He promised, reaching for the charge sheet.
Dexter throughout had not lost his temper.
In fact as the crisis deepened he became cooler, steelier by degrees.
‘Too whom?’ He queried haughtily, never a thing likely to go down well in these parts. ‘The Chief Constable?’
To which Rowan retorted with a warning of some kind.
Dexter just walked away leaving Tom Graveney spinning catches from hand to hand trying not to smirk too broadly.
‘Right arm over,’ he informed Rowan, letting the umpire know he planned to bowl from his left side as he looked down the wicket. ‘I’ll just be sending down a few leggies,’ he added, having no notion if the other man had ever seen him turn over his arm before.
‘There’s no need to take the Mickey!’
Graveney shrugged – you just could not help some people - the field re-arranged itself, the close catchers gathering around Barry Jarman. The Australian wicket keeper was as baffled as everybody else and understandably, distracted.
Jarman played all around Graveney’s first ball – which to nobody’s surprise more than the bowler’s was actually well directed at the stumps – which did not spin in the air or off the wicket and thudded into the batsman’s pads on the half-volley. Jarman had hardly moved his feet; he was almost standing on his stumps. Even he thought he was plumb leg before wicket.
Graveney appealed, as did the wicket keeper.
Nobody else bothered; it was one of those LBW dismissals that the batsman himself would give out if he had the umpire’s view of events.
Lou Rowan contemplated a moment and shook his head.
Graveney blinked at him.
‘Thy’s wasting thy time with him, Tom,’ Fred Trueman observed sardonically, walking the length of the wicket from his post at leg slip where the ball had rolled, to return it to the bowler. ‘If we want to win this one we’ll have to bowl them out or run them out!’
Ted Dexter must have been sorely tempted to leave Fred Trueman bowling at the Paddington End and bring back Brian Statham at the Randwick End. Instead, he summoned Tony Lock to replace Fiery Fred, who despite his protests was probably at the end of his physical tether after his herculean burst in support of the young tyro David Larter.
Twenty minutes later the batsmen appealed against the light and Colin Egar, without consulting his partner indicated for the players to leave the field some forty minutes before the scheduled close of play.
Australia had lurched to 258 for 9.
THE BATTLE OF THE SCG...
MODERN BODYLINE!
NEW DEXTER CONTROVERSY!
‘Of co
urse the umpires are in charge in the middle,’ Dexter retorted to press men outside the dressing room, ‘but a captain has a right to speak frankly to a man!’
Oddly, there was little or no animosity between the teams or individual cricketers, although it went without saying that Fred Trueman rubbed several of his opponents the ‘wrong way’; that was just life.
Dexter, Cowdrey and David Larter went into the Australian dressing room to ask after Norm O’Neill, whom they found heavily bandaged but otherwise sitting up and taking his medicine, in this instance a cold beer. No man was more relieved than Larter and practically every edition of the Saturday papers carried a famous picture of him sitting on the bench next to O’Neill sharing a drink.
Richie Benaud’s terse remarks said it all: ‘We play hard but fair. I’ve got no complaints. This is Test cricket; it is supposed to be the pinnacle of the game, and it is meant to be testing.’
The problem was with the older generation.
Gubby Allen unwisely started talking about ‘the spirit of cricket’, and a malicious rumour abounded that the Duke of Norfolk had fired off a cable ‘deploring the conduct of the England team’ the moment he received a report of the first day’s play.[103]
Moreover, Lou Rowan was said to have complained to the ground authorities that he had been ‘abused by the English players’ who ‘seemed to claim for everything under the sun’.
It all made for a febrile atmosphere on the Saturday morning of the match. Richie Benaud, that shrewdest of cricketing men, went out onto the field with Australia’s last two batsmen, Garth McKenzie and Barry Jarman ahead of the England team so that he could publically shake Dexter’s hand – albeit in passing - as the tourists took the field.
Ten minutes later Jarman got an inside edge to a Ray Illingworth off break onto his pad and thence into Tony Lock’s hands and the Australians were all out for 262.
Jarman had ‘walked’ without looking to Colin Egar, standing at the Paddington End.
When England batted David Sheppard, an unhappy, peripheral figure in the controversy of the previous day soon departed, closely followed by make-weight opener Ray Illingworth and Ken Barrington was obliged, yet again, to put down anchor to steady the boat. Colin Cowdrey, unexpectedly coming in ahead of Dexter was another who seemed out of sorts that morning; unnaturally hurried in his strokes, his bat not so much ringing as sounding hollowed out, cracked. Nobody was surprised when he tamely edged behind just before luncheon.
England had stumbled to 54 for 3.
Unknown to most Ted Dexter had been summoned to the telephone in the Secretary of the New South Wales Cricket Association’s office at a little after eleven that morning to take a call from the Governor General, Viscount De L’Isle.
No transcript of their conversation which by common consent lasted at least twenty, possibly twenty-five minutes was made, or if one was, it no longer survives but De L’Isle’s personal papers make clear that he and his Staff had closely monitored the MCC tour and gone to great pains to extract the maximum ‘moral boosting’ benefits for the British public back home and in Australasia, and ‘Commonwealth re-building value’ from it. What he did not want was for a sporting ‘misunderstanding’ to in any way undermine relations between the Antipodes and the Old Country at the very moment the Governments of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Rhodesia and South Africa were finalising the framework of the most ambitious long-term international aid agreement in history.[104] Such an endeavour was only possible with the whole-hearted support of the peoples of those countries and De L’Isle did not want anything to jeopardise the remarkable groundswell of good will that presently existed in those lands, particularly in Australia!
He also mentioned to the England captain, just to put things ‘in perspective’, that ‘the way things are looking in the Coral Sea we might soon be in a shooting war with the US Navy!’ With which he concluded: ‘so if you would be so good as to encourage your chaps to play up and play the game without unnecessarily antagonising our hosts I would be eternally grateful, Ted.’
De L’Isle and Australian Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies had burned the midnight oil and planned to be seen together watching the cricket later that day, and socialising at a reception that evening.
‘His Excellency wishes the eleven well in the rest of the Test,’ Dexter reported tersely to his men during the luncheon interval.
‘Ted had that puffed out chest look he often had when he was in the mood to crash the ball all over the shop’, Ken Barrington would chuckle whenever he was reminded of that day.
Tom Graveney had taken the field in Dexter’s ongoing absence just before lunch. Afterwards he played the bowling easily, stroking half-a-dozen fours as he and Barrington put on fifty in less than an hour off bowling that grew more innocuous as the ball got older. Richie Benaud came on at the Randwick End and bowled steadily while his four seamers alternated from the Paddington End.
At 111 for 3 Tom Graveney called for a long single off Alan Davidson and Ken Barrington ran through without hesitation. Neither batsman paid much heed to the desultory appeal of the fielders as the stumps were thrown down at the Randwick End.
Graveney looked up and met the sheepish frown of Alan Davidson, wondering why the crowd was so noisy. He had made his ground without trouble – been well over the crease and almost past the stumps before the throw came in – and for a moment had no inkling what had happened.
Lou Rowan had raised his finger.
‘OUT!’
Whereupon, he had turned his back on the batsman and walked away from the stumps to speak to Colin Egar.
‘He gave you out,’ Davidson explained. Other Australians who had been too far away to tell if Graveney had made his ground were celebrating. The bowler was gesticulating towards his captain and presently Benaud approached, smiling broadly. ‘He was in by a yard, mate,’ the veteran bowler informed his skipper.
Benaud’s smile evaporated. No cricketer had a problem getting the benefit of the doubt now and then, that sort of thing was just the rub of the green. Good and bad luck evened out in the end. But if a man who was ‘well in’ was given out that was well, not cricket...
Ken Barrington walked down the pitch.
‘Did you fall over or something?’ He asked, not knowing why Graveney was still standing by the broken wicket.
‘Er, no...’
For Alan Davidson, like Neil Harvey playing in the final Test of an illustrious international career, seizing every advantage was second nature. But ‘winning fair’ tasted good and what had just happened tasted ‘sour’.
Lou Rowan looked over his shoulder, clearly irked that Graveney was still in the middle. He waved for him to go.
The Englishman turned away, stuck his bat under his arm and ‘walked’.
That evening the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, for whom this was only the second televised Test series, replayed the ‘run out’ on its national news programs. The grainy pictures, filmed from an oblique angle by a camera sited in the stands at mid-on – ABC only had two cameras at the ground – clearly showed that both the batsman’s bat and his right foot were well and truly ‘in’ before the wicket was knocked down.
The replay also showed that Rowan was almost certainly unsighted by Davidson’s attempt to get in a position to back up if the incoming throw had missed the stumps. Normally, an umpire will try to position himself so as to be in line with, and preferably standing still at the time the throw hits the wicket; Rowan had had no opportunity to do either and therefore, when he gave Graveney out he was probably making an intuitive, ‘gut’ call. At the time it seemed he had made an inexcusable blunder; with hindsight we need to recognise that he simply made a split second mistake in good faith.
In raising his finger and walking away he was probably trying to avoid further confrontations. He had made a hard call; wisely, he was removing himself from the immediate scene.
As one correspondent put it after the tour was over: ‘he got it wrong; Graveney ought n
ot to have been given run out but the people calling for Rowan’s head ought to be reminded that nobody actually died.’ [105]
Dexter nodded acknowledgement to Egar; ignored Rowan other than to check his guard the first time he was facing the bowling from the Randwick End.
His innings was no dashing, cavalier counter attack, or at least, not up until the tea break. Before the interval it was a knock of remarkable circumspection. A brace of scorching hits through the off side apart, the England captain defended carefully, cautiously and at one point was being outscored by Ken Barrington.
At the interval England stood at 154 for 4, the match closely balanced. As on the previous day clouds began to form as the players emerged for the evening session, the humidity was rising and the light a little washed out although not yet fading.
Ted Dexter spanked Ken Mackay’s first ball for four – straight back over his head – and as if he had just hit a drive down the fairway held the pose, bat high over his shoulder for two to three seconds in satisfaction.
Having been 17 not out at the break Dexter went to 87 in fifty-five violent minutes. It could not last; those who live by the sword perish by it and so it was with England’s mighty Achilles. Where another man might have throttled back, taken a care to go to a famous hundred he attacked with ever more, barely controlled ferocity. Going for a fourth successive boundary hit off Garth McKenzie he lofted the ball into the deep and Norm O’Neill, visibly recovered from his recent painful encounter with David Larter and wearing his bandages like badges of honour ran to get beneath the steepling ball.
That was 240 for 5; but England was in command.
Ken Barrington reached three figures as the light started to die and even though John Murray was bowled by Richie Benaud’s googly for just 4, the tourists still had their noses fairly and squarely in front at 260 for 6 at the premature close of proceedings.
Sunday was a miserable grey day which kept most of the cricketers in their hotels rubbing shoulders somewhat uneasily with the press. The golfing contingent, led by Dexter and Cowdrey disappeared for the morning before cool, steady rain shrouded Sydney for the rest of the day.