Robin got both Alec Stewart and Graham Thorpe out when Sussex played him in the first team for the first time in a Sunday League match at Horsham in 1995 after a series of good performances with both bat and ball for the second XI. Parents of any performer who makes it to the public eye, however obliquely, will understand the suppressed excitement we used to get simply from seeing his name in brackets in the small print of the daily paper. ‘Kent 246 (R.S.C. Martin-Jenkins 5 for 62)’ added an extra dimension to one’s day and it continued to do so whenever we switched on Ceefax to follow the course of a match on television, ball by agonising ball. We were elated when a new entry in white on the screen told us that ‘Martin-J’ had got a wicket, or reached a fifty and accordingly deflated when it was a case of ‘Martin-J lbw Anderson 8’.
There were many ups and downs and once or twice he was left out of the team but for the last ten years of his fifteen at the club he was more or less an automatic choice in any form of the game, despite a growing challenge to his place from the vibrant young all-rounder Luke Wright, whose spectacular hitting in Twenty20 cricket soon caught the eye of the national selectors. Robin was less dramatic but, generally, more consistent. All that he earned as a professional was the product of Sussex’s belief in his ability and character; and his own dedication. He worked hard to build his fitness and physique and to overcome his early proneness to injury.
Throughout his career he could still be talked out by overtly aggressive opponents like Dominic Cork and he did not always have sufficient faith in himself. I believe, and so do many others, that he could have played for England but I remain proud of the way that he learned how to build an innings; overcame glandular fever and all sorts of injuries that restricted his elasticity as a bowler; controlled a youthful fallibility against fast bowling; widened his range of shots in the one-day game; and maintained his reliability as a bowler and fielder. I am sure that he did sometimes, but I never saw him drop a catch.
He would have played a bit for England, I am sure, if he had been able to convince the selectors that this was what he wanted above all else. I know that they felt – wrongly – that he was not quite as ‘hungry’ as the likes of Matt Prior or Luke Wright, who was only once preferred to him as Sussex’s first-choice all-rounder until eventually they played regularly together. Selectors take much account of the sort of overt keenness shown by Prior and Wright, and of their admirable willingness to work ceaselessly to improve, but Robin’s ambition and capacity for hard work were never openly displayed.
Selectors also like young players who, if not picked for representative teams, go abroad in the winter in search of more experience, but that was not possible for Robin once he got married. Flora had been the only girl for him since they met in their first year at Durham University’s Hild Bede College. She became a foreign languages’ teacher despite suffering two serious illnesses, one of them prolonged, in the ten years before, to their great joy, she gave birth to Isabella Mary, alias ‘Missy’, on Boxing Day 2009.
Flora frankly admitted in a magazine article that for years she hated the game so much she could not even say the word ‘cricket’. The lot of a professional cricketer’s wife can be tough, as it can be for a cricket journalist’s wife. They have to find a way to plough their own furrow, which is rather easier if you are earning the sort of high salaries now commanded by international players.
‘R.M-J’ proved himself a true all-rounder, finishing with a first-class average of 31 both as a batsman and as a bowler and taking his wickets at an economy rate of 2.96 runs an over, a figure that indicated how well he had played the role as foil to the match-winning Mushtaq Ahmed in Sussex’s Championship-winning seasons. Overall his haul was more than 9000 runs and 500 wickets and even in limited-overs cricket his economy rate was 4.31, unusually ‘mean’.
As in politics, there are always regrets in cricket. He did not score all the runs that his gift of timing suggested he might have done; nor was he often a lucky bowler like some. His best balls seemed always just to miss the outside edge and if, as they do, a slip catch went down it seemed to my subjective eyes that it was often off a ball from Robin. But his team-mates know him as a good man to have in the side when the pressure was on. He always tried might and main for the team; usually entertained; and always played the game with generosity of spirit. To a man, the umpires, a group who really see the game from the inside, spoke well of his competitive but honourable approach.
When he became a father he resolved to seek a job in teaching, agreeing with Sussex that he would leave in July to prepare for a new life at Hurstpierpoint, who had chosen him to teach Geography, Religious Studies and Sport. They must have been increasingly pleased at the prospect as their new recruit produced a series of exceptional performances with both bat and ball, in his last season, including match-winning centuries on ‘sporty’ green pitches at Bristol and Derby. He was given a rousing send-off in his last game at Hove, a televised forty-over match in which he smote a couple of sixes to underline my one regret about his career, namely that he did not bat high enough in one-day games to build any lengthy innings. It was a happy evening, supported by some 2000 of his loyal supporters at Hove. Sussex won comfortably against a weak Worcestershire XI.
After the game Judy, Flora and I were invited into the dressing-room by Mark Robinson, the coach who had built outstandingly well on the foundations laid by his predecessor, Peter Moores. The departing all-rounder was presented with a huge frame containing his favourite pair of green corduroy trousers, hitherto worn at all end-of-season parties, now signed by all his mates. He gave an impromptu speech expressing his thanks and telling the youngsters to follow the code that had guided the club since their days of disunity and failure fifteen years earlier: in a nutshell the message was ‘all for one and one for all’.
The chairman, Jim May, who with Tony Pigott, Robin Marlar and one or two others had been a largely unsung architect of the revolution that overturned the well-meaning but complacent old Sussex committee before the 1998 season, issued a generously worded tribute to Robin, calling him ‘a fantastic servant to the club over fifteen years’ who had played a vital role in their success and was also ‘one of the genuinely nicest guys in the game’.
That was pleasant to read and so were the national averages at the end of the season. Robin was second in the batting, with six Test batsmen immediately below him, having scored 629 runs in 13 innings, mainly on lively green pitches; and 17th in the bowling, having taken 30 first-class wickets at 19 runs each in his nine games. Sussex were top of the second division when he left and they duly finished as champions of that division, thus bouncing back at once to the top grade that they had left the previous year mainly because of weariness while contending for all the one-day titles simultaneously.
26
PLAYING THE GAME
I am batting against Guildford on the ground where Surrey play each season. Their county second XI fast bowler Eric Neller is thundering in again with heavy tread and angled run, like John Price of Middlesex. It is a half-volley, swinging away towards the slips. He usually curves it like a banana from his hand, sometimes to catch the edge but on this day, for once, always the middle of my bat. It is one of those rare occasions when it seems the simplest thing in the world to stroke the ball sweetly through extra cover for another four because my feet are moving into the right place without thinking. I have made a hundred against the Old Cheltonians for the Marlborough Blues earlier in the week and I have seldom been in form like this before. Never will be again, in fact, for I shall never have so much time to play as I did in these carefree summer vacations.
I remember that week so well, I think, because usually I lacked confidence in my batting. I saw demons in opposing fast bowlers that I was quite capable of dealing with, but it is fatal to go into bat thinking about them. It was the biggest reason for not making the most of what I had been given, and also the main reason for my pride in the way that Robin overcame the same doubts. It is a cliché but I s
trong mind is crucial in sport. Mine has usually been weak, even now when I think too much about a three-foot putt.
I once lost a three-set tennis singles at school when I had been six-love, five-love in front. The Australian cricket captain Steve Waugh used to speak of applying mental disintegration on his opponents: mine was usually self-inflicted.
I have been more or less as thin as a palm tree since I was about sixteen. Until then I might almost have been described as well-built. For a few happy years I was incapable, it seemed, of bowling a ball anywhere other than straight at the middle stump and therefore returned analyses such as eight for 16 for my prep school. The St.Bede’s Chronicle records that I took 55 wickets from 173 overs at an average of 5.5 in first XI games in 1958 and scored 352 runs at 39.1. According to the report M-J ‘captained the side very well. His knowledge of the game and his keenness were an inspiration to the rest of the team.’ That sort of thing tends to go to your head.
The trouble was that my head got further away from my body when belated puberty arrived and I never again enjoyed the same natural accuracy with my bowling.
If I have a serious regret it is that following the game professionally has left too little time to play it myself. Most of us, whatever our age, go out to play cricket in the hope of winning, scoring a hundred and taking a large handful of wickets. Ironically for those who regularly experience all these joys, the challenge of the game is rather different. Peter May, still generally regarded as the finest English batsman to have started his career after the Second World War, once told me that he finally stopped playing the game because it was too much of a strain to be expected to score a hundred every time.
Peter did his bit after retiring early from the first-class game with a glittering average of 51 and 85 centuries, 13 of them for England. He played some club cricket and various charity matches after that but, essentially a shy and modest man, he found it hard work being a celebrity and the centre of attention.
He was not, of course, in any way typical. The majority of us want to go on playing as long as possible, fondly imagining, perhaps, that we are still improving. Alas, age cannot be denied. There are examples of remarkable cricketers who have somehow kept themselves fit and supple enough to play regular cricket at an advanced age – the former Bedfordshire wicket-keeper David Money, for example, played regularly until he died in his eighties and so too did another amateur keeper, the renowned cricketing scholar Gerald Howat – but for most of us the flesh becomes weaker (or fleshier) no matter how willing the spirit.
Cricket is often used as a metaphor for life and there is no doubt that in both the ideal combination is one of youthful virility and the wisdom that can only come from experience. Ah, that supple movement that once came so easily! It was W.G. himself who said that he gave the game up finally because the ground began to seem too far away. I remember thinking as a young bowler that I would stop playing when I even threatened to become one of those stiff-backed mid-offs who would feebly fail to get down quickly enough to cut off a firm drive from one’s bowling that ought to have been gathered up effortlessly in two swift-swooping hands.
What a joy it was to feel on top of the job in the field, threatening destruction to any batsman who contemplated risking a run! Or to bowl with barely a hint of stiffness or pain. Or to go out to bat in one of those occasional patches of form when it all seemed easy.
Memory does not erase – but does tend to push to the back of the mind – the days of dreadful self-doubt, when opposing fast bowlers seemed much fiercer than they were; or when the stiff arm would keep dropping the ball short, with inevitable consequences; or when that steepling catch seemed eminently missable; or when that fast-travelling slip catch did nothing but sting the outside of a tentative hand as it moved too late to the blood-red bullet hurtling in a blur somewhere to right or left.
All that Robin achieved, of course, I should love to have done myself. I enjoyed my brief, belated flirtation with county cricket but most of the games I played after leaving school were for local club sides – Cranleigh before I married, Albury and Horsham later – and for wandering sides, including MCC, Free Foresters, the Arabs, I Zingari and the Marlborough Blues.
There was always an enjoyable OM cricket week at the school in July, comprising two-day matches and a boozy night or two after which the phenomenon of ‘pillow spin’ was too often experienced when one finally got to bed. My purple patch occurred, I think, in the summer after I had left Marlborough, 1964. A Blue was predicted for me but the debilitating failure of confidence returned as an undergraduate, notably one day in the freshman nets at Fenner’s in April when I knew I was being watched from behind the nets by the captain, Ray White (Cambridge, Transvaal and Gloucestershire) and George Cox, the wise old Sussex professional who coached Cambridge at the start of the summer term.
For some inexplicable reason my feet would not move and I failed to get into line against an unexceptional quick bowler, a failing more likely to occur to me personally in the constricted space of a net than in the middle. No doubt they made up their mind then that I was not made of the right stuff, an opinion probably enhanced when I suffered a migraine shortly after receiving a painful blow on the knee during one of the trials.
I do mean migraine, not headache. Since adolescence I have suffered occasionally from the classical form, partially losing my sight before the onset first of flashing lights, then of the ‘blinding’ headache. For many years I used also to be physically sick, several times, before the attack would begin to go away but the discovery of the drug imogran put a stop to that and helped towards swifter recovery. I discovered far too late that dehydration made an attack much more likely, especially on the cricket field or golf course.
It was, naturally, much easier to excel at cricket when the mind was as free of care as it was as a student on vacation and, of course, when pitches were as good as they usually were at Marlborough in July. But I shall never forget the extraordinary sight of the black and yellow bruises that covered a line down the left side of Jake Seamer’s torso when he changed in the dressing room after playing for the Marlborough Blues against the Eton Ramblers. The pitch had become damp after rain and then begun to dry under a hot sun, the classic formula for bowlers of all types. Eton had the Wiltshire captain Ian Lomax, a brawny local farmer, who had ‘run off’ with Henry Blofeld’s first wife, Joanna. (Henry’s first two wives were both called Joanna, which, given his tendency to muddle names, was convenient for him.) He was too hostile and physically dangerous in these conditions for most of the Blues but Jake, by then well past fifty, bravely held the fort.
The fastest bowlers I personally encountered were C.S. Smith of Cambridge and Lancashire and the young Bob Willis. Smith, knighted for his services to architecture, had a Fred Trueman-like action with a long final drag and several witnesses reckoned him to be as quick as Trueman. He played against Cranleigh CC every year, either for MCC or for Peter Wreford’s XI.
One or other was a fixture in alternate years in Cranleigh’s own very enjoyable cricket week, played on the vast flat ‘Common’ that staged a widely popular tennis tournament every August.
I had my successes against Smith, scoring a hundred against him and some less exalted bowlers in one of these games, but on another occasion he greeted me with a bouncer which I managed to hook for six over square-leg, only for my cap to fall onto the stumps and dislodge a bail. I walked reluctantly as everyone said ‘bad luck’ but the square-leg umpire, Harry Hodges, later told me that he would have given me not out on the grounds that my stroke had been completed when the cap came off.
Against Willis my fall was rather less noble. I hung around for a while as this deceptively awkward looking young beanpole, mop-haired, silent and mean, ran through Cranleigh playing for the Cobham club, Avorians. At the time he was starting to make his first appearances for Surrey and either that winter or the next one he was called out to reinforce Ray Illingworth’s side in Australia, starting his often under-rated international
career with immediate aplomb. My streaky innings against him ended with a top-edged cut to fly-slip. Two of my team-mates, John Vallins, later headmaster of Chetham’s, the renowned music school in Manchester, and Eddie Harper, a noted musician himself, got behind the high bounce of Willis’s short balls more stoutly than I had.
It was strange I found, when facing fast bowling, how sometimes one could summon the necessary will and sometimes not. That was true of batting generally. The best innings I ever played, I think, was in a Foresters match at Vincent Square in Westminster when, opening the batting, I rattled to fifty in the first few overs of the match before, all too characteristically, offering a catch to extra-cover and departing with the knowledge that I could have scored many more with a little more application. That day, however, I had played by instinct and certainly above myself, one reason, perhaps, why I suffered a paralysing migraine almost as soon as I got back to the pavilion.
I had another miserable attack soon after another of my better innings, in a final of the Surrey twenty-over competition, the competitively fought evening knockout tournament started after the war and named after the wives of the founders. The ‘Flora Dora’, like any knockout sporting competition, always gave scope for giant-killing and I was on a winning side in the final twice, first for Cranleigh, then for Albury, both smaller clubs than the like of, for example, Guildford and Farnham.
Our Cranleigh side, circa 1963 to 1973, had some very good cricketers, including (apart from Peter May’s rare appearances) the genial Cliff Eede; a brilliant stocky little wicket-keeper in Peter Adams; the Surrey second XI all-rounder Rod Turrell, who could have succeeded as a professional; and John Bushen, a left-handed batsman of rare talent who would undoubtedly have starred for Surrey had he wanted to do so. The club could call on staff from the adjacent public school and often did so. John Holdstock was a regular, a stuffy opening bat who seldom failed. Peter Carroll, on his way from Sydney to get a double Blue at Oxford before becoming, amongst other achievements, an extrovert captain of Royal St. George’s Golf Club, played for a season before getting a strong taste for socially less eclectic clubs like IZ and the Arabs. The village team had also been strengthened from time to time by the imposing hitter Nigel Paul, briefly of Warwickshire, and Ian Campbell, who as a schoolboy at Canford in the mid-1940s had scored more than 1000 runs in successive seasons.
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