by James Philip
He crashed 25 off Garth McKenzie’s first eight-ball over of the afternoon session. He hooked one bouncer for six, and drove and cut with such violence that the ball seemed to go straight through despairing fielders.
It was a little more cat and mouse against Richie Benaud’s spinners and oddly, he had difficulty getting Bobby Simpson’s respectable – but not top line leg breaks – away at first. However, the seam bowlers came alike to him, first he battered McKenzie out of the attack, then Alan Davidson, leaving Ken Mackay to hold up one end and take fearful punishment trying to slow down the rate at which overs were being bowled, and therefore the speed at which the match was being torn out of the Australians’ grasp.
It was an immortal cricketing afternoon.
The Sydney Cricket Ground had filled to capacity with hundreds, possibly thousands, locked out and standing in the surrounding streets and parks trying to follow the cut and thrust of the contest by the ebbs and flows of the roaring of the great crowd. There are still people alive today who will take an Englishman aside in Sydney and recount how they heard the crack and ‘recoil’ of Dexter’s bat as he put the Australian attack to the sword that afternoon as they stood outside the ground!
The statistics of the thing are remarkable yet they only tell a tiny part of the emotional, mythic tale of the day.
Dexter went from 15 not out to 157 in one hundred-and-seven minutes. He hit 6 sixes and 23 fours. The first chance he gave was his last.
When he was out; caught brilliantly by Neill Harvey half way to the leg boundary off a mishit that must have gone a hundred feet high, England were 263 for 5. Tom Graveney had contentedly leaned on his bad handle – scoring a mere 31 runs – enjoying, admiring and once or twice, wincing as the carnage proceeded.
Just 39 more runs were required for a famous victory as John Murray marched out to join Graveney. The whole ground was buzzing, and a little shell-shocked. As for the Australian team well, Benaud’s men had come as close as any band of cricketers beneath those distinctive floppy green caps had ever, or were ever likely to come, to throwing in the towel.
Ken Mackay, having stood in the face of the hurricane for the last half-an-hour, his bowling figures showing he had conceded 62 runs in that time had been almost too mentally ‘washed out’ to join the celebration of Dexter the destroyer’s departure.
At the tea interval England had progressed to 267 for five, John Murray having inadvertently tickled a Benaud googly – pitched too close to his legs - for four.
After tea the anticlimax was palpable as the players trooped out for the final act of the series and the tour. Thirty five runs were still needed but while Graveney was in the middle no Australian seriously believed England could be thwarted.
Memories of that last over at Melbourne, of how tantalisingly close to going two up in the series...if only David Larter, that most inept of number eleven batsmen could have been removed...now came back to haunt Benaud’s men.
If Tom Graveney knew that John Murray, the Middlesex stumper was not among the first rank of English batsmen, he knew also that Murray was no mug with the bat. The man had scored hundreds in the County Championship and it was only the strength and depth of the Middlesex batting that had kept him down in the lower middle order most of his career. Murray was an upright, organised batsman with a nice range of orthodox shots, and on a flattish wicket – which the Sydney track still was, occasional quirks excepted – he had a sound defence. The rest of the England tail, Lock and Trueman particularly, were hitters, no fools with the willow in their hands, but Murray was a cut above that; if he ever gave up wicket-keeping he had the makings of a classy – a thousand runs a year – county bat. So, while Murray was at the wicket there was no real pressure on Tom Graveney to hold the innings together.
He set about playing himself in anew.
There was no rush.
Graveney and Murray pushed singles, and then Graveney drove McKenzie, recalled for a final paroxysm of pace in an attempt to break the partnership for four through the onside.
England moved sedately on to 276 for 5; just 26 outstanding.
The fascination of cricket is that it just takes one ball to change everything and the pitch, invariably has the last laugh; not that Tom Graveney was in the mood to see the funny side of it when the next ball from the young Australian fast bowler pitched and skittled practically along the ground at eighty to ninety miles an hour – daisy cutter style – and flattened his wicket.
The Worcestershire veteran had tried unavailingly to jam his bat down on the ball, heard the death rattle behind him and without a look back begun the long lonely walk to the dressing room.
The Sun was already low in the sky, any minute now it would begin to cast long shadows across the ground. Suddenly the gentle stroll to an inevitable victory was forgotten; now the prospect of the early onset of the evening and the vulnerability of the England lower order to the vagaries of the wicket oppressed Graveney.
A wise old cricketer will always remind those of a brasher mindset that ‘you might think you are doing all right at the moment but add another couple of wickets to your total and see how clever you feel then’.
276 for 6 became 276 for 7 when, wary of another ‘daisy cutter’ like the one which had accounted for Graveney, Tony Lock pressed forward doggedly and a good length ball from McKenzie clipped the shoulder of his bat.
Bobby Simpson clung to the catch and hurled the ball high in the air in exultation.
Fred Trueman played the hat-trick ball with his broad chest, refusing to show the pain of the blow.
A collapse once initiated is very hard to stop, it gains its own momentum and tends to scramble the minds of each batsman who has to hurriedly don his pads, pull on his gloves and make his way out to the middle.
Richie Benaud bamboozled John Murray.
He passed his bat three times on the outside edge, almost bowled him with a googly and much to his surprise did bowl the Middlesex wicket keeper with his ‘flipper’, a ball that skidded straight on.
‘Well, this is a fine pickle,’ Trueman complained as he was joined by Brian Statham.
‘Just don’t tell me we’ll get them all in singles,’ the Lancastrian retorted, recalling the legendary occasion over six decades ago just after the turn of the century when those two Yorkshire immortals Wilfred Rhodes and George Hirst had come together for the last wicket and snatched an improbable victory against Joe Darling’s Australians at the Oval in 1902.
Neither Trueman or Statham was Rhodes or Hirst – Wilfred Rhodes had finished his England career opening the batting with Jack Hobbs, while George Hirst was the most successful all-round cricketer of the golden age.
Fiery Fred was having nothing to do with that nonsense.
‘No, you keep the beggars out and I’ll lay about them!’
Unable to think of a better plan Statham concurred. It was his sixty-seventh and Trueman’s fifty-fourth Test, both men – aged thirty-two – had been professional cricketers their whole adult lives. Nevertheless, both men were a little surprised by how calm they were in the impossibly stressful situation in which they now found themselves.
Brian Statham tried to play Richie Benaud with his pads, advancing clumsily down the wicket to kick him away, or moving to the off and raising his bat high, well out of trouble to block the turning ball. There were impassioned cries for leg before wicket; in those days the laws permitted ‘kicking away’ the ball and in Australia, umpires tended to be reluctant to give LBWs since most balls pitching on a ‘good length’ were likely to bounce over the stumps.
Trueman meanwhile tried not to smile when Benaud allowed McKenzie to bowl the next over from the Paddington End. The young tyro was obviously a spent force; it took one fast man to know how another would be feeling at a time like this. Benaud had over-used the young man that winter and now he might come to rue it.
Trueman swung hard, his bat proscribing an axe-like arc.
The first heave to the leg side failed to make conta
ct and the Yorkshireman almost fell over.
Try watching the ball next time!
CRACK!
The ball flew...and flew impossibly far into the Noble Stand for six. Trueman gave his bat a quizzical look as if he had expected to find it broken in half.
McKenzie tried to bowl him a bouncer.
Trueman missed it as it whistled over his shoulder.
The next ball was wide of his off stump; it met the flailing edge of the bat and flashed over second slip’s head to the fence.
Benaud walked up to his young speedster.
The message had obviously been ‘bowl at the stumps, please’.
Trueman dug out a well pitched up ball destined for the base of his middle pole, fended off a delivery that bounced waist high and played and missed at the final ball of the over.
Sixteen runs required and over an hour left in the day assuming the light was not lost when the sun fell behind the stands. The great stadium had fallen silent bar the inevitable cat calls and miscellaneous yells of inebriated encouragement.
Benaud bowled.
Statham defended, kicking at or dropping his bat on ball after ball.
McKenzie was withdrawn from the fight; replaced with Alan Davidson keen to wrap up the innings and to end his illustrious career on the best of all possible notes.
Trueman knew if he started swinging at Davidson before he had got a feel for the pace and bounce of his adversary that he would be easy meat to the veteran Australian swing bowler.
He got in line, tried to play straight and successfully batted out a maiden over. As very nearly, Brian Statham contrived to do to Benaud despite being defeated every other ball.
‘Bugger!’ Fred Trueman was heard to mutter when his long-time partner in crime edged the final ball of Benaud’s over onto the knee roll of his left pad and the ball popped up into Neil Harvey’s hands.
England then stood at 286 for 9.
It was getting very dark.
Possibly, dark enough for Trueman to have gone to the umpires and ‘appealed’ the light, and thereby saved the match; but Fiery Fred was not built that way!
‘You stay down your end unless I call you through for a single, lad,’ he told David Larter. ‘Don’t move a muscle unless I call you.’
The tall Northamptonshire fast bowler had had nightmares about that last over at Melbourne in the Second Test, now it was all happening again!
Trueman fended off Alan Davidson’s first delivery.
Swung and missed at the second.
Miss hit the third into the outer, yelling ‘Two!’ as he set off up the wicket.
288 for 9; 14 runs needed.
Ball four of the over skittered back past Davidson’s despairing left hand between him and the stumps and ran away for four, clouted flat-batted with immense muscular power if not elegance.
292 for 9; 10 runs needed.
The fifth ball of the over missed Trueman’s off stump in a furry of dust, feet and flashing blade.
Richie Benaud called in the field to save the single before the next ball to stop Trueman stealing the strike for the next over.
The Yorkshireman responded by thumping the sixth ball of the over – aerial for two-thirds of its trajectory - to the mid-wicket boundary.
296 for 9; 6 runs needed.
Trueman crashed the penultimate ball of the over to mid off; no run.
Benaud again ran up to his bowler.
Davidson took a deep breath and ran in determined to keep Trueman from stealing the strike for the next over.
He bowled a short-pitched delivery which he hoped might go sailing high above the batsman’s head; on the dying wicket it went through at little more than medium pace at around shoulder high and Fred Trueman went after it with every sinew.
The ball soared away into the grey pre-dusk sky.
Fred Trueman’s hit landed over eighty yards away on top of the picket fence at long leg; and was, therefore – after the umpires had conferred for a moment - adjudged to be only a ‘four’.
England teetered precariously on the edge of victory or defeat.
300 for 9; 1 behind Australia, 2 runs needed to win.
And the best spin bowler in World cricket was about to bowl to one of, if not the least accomplished number eleven batsmen in the international game – then a remarkably strong contender for that dubious title - on a five-day old disintegrating wicket.
David Larter looked at the darkening skies, squinting.
‘Just hit the beggar for six!’ Fred Trueman suggested, his tone indicating that he thought this was a thing done as easily as it was said.
‘Seriously?’ The tall young fast bowler queried nervously.
‘Aye, you haven’t got a snowflake’s chance in Hell of keeping the beggar out for a whole over, lad.’
David Larter had already come to the same conclusion.
Richie Benaud collected all his men around the bat, none more than six or seven yards distant.
Both umpires were gazing narrow-eyed into the gloom by now. They had been exchanging looks for some minutes as if to say ‘what do you think?’ in the absence of an appeal to them by either of the batsmen or by the Australian captain.
People in the crowd that day say it was ‘night time’ when that last over commenced; the lights in the back of the stands and in the stairwells were burning bright.
Benaud bowled the first ball of the over and the ball thudded into Barry Jarman’s gloves.
At the non-striker’s end Fred Trueman swung his bat meaningfully.
The towering Northamptonshire quick bowler nodded.
He got the message loud and clear.
He had not even seen the last ball after it had pitched!
Benaud came in again, his arm came over...
David Larter tells the story best:
‘To be perfectly honest I sort of glimpsed the ball as it came out of the bowler’s hand – it got quite high, around my eye level – and then I lost it in the background but that might have been because I’d closed my eyes by then. I just swung the bat as hard as I could and hoped, really. I knew I got some sort of contact because the bat jarred and turned in my hands and then Fred was shouting at me to ‘RUN LIKE HELL’ and that was what I did. I didn’t discover until the next day that the ball had actually gone for four...’
Chapter 25 | Homecomings
Strictly speaking the MCC’s tour of Australasia went on for another month after the conclusion of the Sydney Test but even in normal times, the New Zealand leg of the tour would have been regarded as an adjunct to a long and wearying odyssey; very much an afterthought. On previous tours MCC had arrived jaded and carrying numerous walking wounded. This said at that time New Zealand had never actually beaten England in a Test, and the visitors usually swatted aside their hosts with little difficulty.
True to his word Ted Dexter had publically resigned the England captaincy on the morning after the heart-stopping dramatic finale of the series. He had wrested back the Ashes and the Governor General was keen for him to spend the next few weeks on a public speaking tour of the continent organised under the auspices of the British Council; pending his ‘future employment’.
David Sheppard had also stepped down from the party, joining Viscount De L’Isle’s Staff as an ecumenical advisor, again, pending decisions as to his future employment in Australia.
In both men’s cases this was simply a convenient way to formally tie them into the administrative machinery of the United Kingdom’s presence in the Antipodes, a temporary measure given that both men had expressed their desire to return home at the earliest opportunity.
Of the other tourists four men stayed behind in Sydney as guests of the New South Wales Cricket Association: Fred Titmus, still convalescing from his shoulder injury[106]; David Allen, now recovering from his brush with death from fever in Queensland, and Geoff Pullar, left behind to rest up and shake off his ‘wear and tear’. Fred Trueman had confessed, after the Fifth test, that he had actually been playing i
n pain ‘ever since Melbourne’ and had decided, belatedly, ‘now that the Ashes have been sorted out’ to take ‘the doctors’ advice and rest up’ awhile’[107].
In place of the missing men Yorkshire’s Philip Sharpe and Northamptonshire’s Roger Prideaux, two of the best young batsmen in England, and seam bowler Tom Cartwright of Warwickshire had – after a middlingly harrying forty-eight hour flight in an RAF Comet 4 converted to a ‘bare-bones cargo plane’ – joined the rest of the party at Sydney Mascot Airport.
Colin Cowdrey was able therefore to lead a somewhat reinforced and rejuvenated party across the Tasman Sea to New Zealand.
Inevitably, the cricket lacked the excitement and the drama which had periodically illuminated and set on fire the Ashes series, and without Dexter at the helm, there were unfair accusations that the whole affair was a little like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. Notwithstanding, Colin Cowdrey was a charmingly affable substitute and his batting graced two of the three easily won Tests against MCC’s hosts.
On wickets not dissimilar to those at home in May and June the New Zealand batsmen struggled against Brian Statham and Len Coldwell, and David Larter was a holy terror in the only match he played in – the Third Test - at Christchurch, a match in which Roger Prideaux scored a sparkling hundred on his international debut.
Ken Barrington who had had the misfortune to break a finger in the field at Auckland in the First Test always rued missing out on a hatful of runs in the series but Colin Cowdrey and Tom Graveney’s form at both Auckland and Wellington meant he was not missed. Otherwise, there was little of lasting note to report from the series, other that is, than that the party was treated like royalty wherever it stopped.
Long before the tour eventually petered out in Christchurch practically every man on it had been positively deluged with proposals for jobs, and invitations to appear here, there and everywhere. Each of the Australian State Governments had set aside funds to employ ‘English cricketers’ and at least half the team had had firm offers of professional contracts with state or grade sides in the next Australian summer.