FN1 Personal interview with a relative of the SAS officer sent to investigate. The army officer who had PTSD was medically evacuated to the UK, and recovered.
FN2 While Surrey were county champions seven times in the 1950s, they lost to the Indian tourists of 1952, the Australians of 1953 and the South Africans of 1955.
FN3 Sorry, but one of cricket’s finest witticisms cannot be allowed to pass: it is based on the Yorkshire and England bowler who dismissed Don Bradman for nought at the height of his powers. If a Cockney is someone born within the sound of Bow bells, what is the definition of a Yorkshireman? So asked Michael Carey, the cricket correspondent of the Daily Telegraph in the 1980s. The answer: someone born within the sound of Bill Bowes.
FN4 Love could not know that Dr W.G. Grace would represent England not only at cricket but also, in his dotage, at bowls.
FN5 It is not just the sight of cricketers taking the field, as a white waterfall flowing down the pavilion steps, which excites us; it is the sound, too. One follower of the game, blind since childhood, told me his favourite cricket sound is that made by studded boots as the players leave their dressing-room and clatter down steps on to the grass.
FN6 In literary terms, a trend is at work here: the author, Love, comes from ‘the middling sort’, to use the new phrase, and likes to think that an elite member of society, like Sackville, can admire someone from the lower orders like Romney. (George Eliot does the same in Adam Bede.) It creates a warm feeling, in writer and reader: we English people are all the same at heart, patricians and plebs. Or, as a modern politician might try to persuade us, ‘We are all in it together.’
FN7 Also found as ‘Hodswell’ and ‘Hadswell’.
FN8 My guess, in the absence of any scientific evidence, is that bowling reached 70 mph after the legalisation of round-arm in 1828; passed 80 mph when Harold Larwood reached his prime; and touched 90 mph with Frank Tyson in 1954–55.
FN9 Cricket balls were first manufactured in Australia by A.G. Thompson’s in Melbourne. When I visited their factory in 1986, a senior member of the firm told me, off the record, that when they started production just after the Second World War, their Kookaburra balls were made without a prominent seam, and were therefore easier to bat against, on the unofficial instructions of Don Bradman. The first Test series in which their machine-made balls were used was the one against England in 1978–79, very low-scoring because of the proud seams, but that did not last.
FN10 After the eight-ball over had been abolished in Australia in 1979, to allow more advertisement breaks per hour on television, Ian Brayshaw, who represented Western Australia, told me how the state’s left-arm spinner Tony Lock – of Lock and Laker fame – would fire through six balls at a tailender, then toss up the seventh, tempting a wild mis-hit. The case against the eight-ball over was that a bowler took extra time in walking back to his mark, conserving his energies. After England’s 1950–51 series in Australia, E.W. Swanton, in Elusive Victory, estimated that the eight-ball over ‘cost the best part of an hour’s play per day’.
FN11 Len Hutton told me, more than once, but not for publication: ‘You can go a long way in cricket [pause] – with brute force and ignorance.’ He was referring, ruefully, to fast bowlers.
FN12 Levett cheerfully shouted to Paul Farbrace, who kept wicket for Kent before coaching Sri Lanka and England, after he had dropped a skyer: ‘I’d’ve caught that between the cheeks of my arse, old boy!’
FN13 Andrew Flintoff, hero of the 2005 Ashes series, did so in a chip van.
FN14 French for ‘blackguard’.
FN15 A stroke like a well-timed cover drive is so satisfying primarily because an enormous number of muscles are involved, especially in the arms, wrists and hands. In neurological terms, the ball is first tracked by the eyes and motor cortex, and compared with similar balls the batsman has seen in the past. His brain then makes calculations about the pace of the ball and its trajectory, and about the state of the pitch. Bursts of nervous impulses then go from the brain of an experienced batsman, who has played the stroke many times before, to the correct muscles (the energy is more diffused in an inexperienced batsman). If the ball is hit in the middle of the bat and dispatched to the boundary, a mass of sensory receptors send a message to the brain, from which it takes great satisfaction, such has been the complexity of the task achieved.
FN16 The term dates from the time when a team would have only a couple of bats to share amongst all the players, so when a batsman was dismissed he would leave the bat at the crease for the next man. The batsman left undefeated at the end would carry his bat from the field.
FN17 The previous year of 1873 had seen the hanging of Mary Ann Cotton, a serial murderer whose husbands and children tended to die mysteriously – until traces of arsenic were found in them.
FN18 Cricket: A Weekly Record of the Game records in November 1890 that Australian sympathisers donated £250 to Bates, including £147 raised by ‘a football match’ between Carlton and Port Melbourne. The money served to bring up his son, who also played for Yorkshire, before becoming a mainstay of Glamorgan when they joined the County Championship in 1921.
FN19 Another local saying is ‘If Yorkshire are strong, England are strong.’ But England have been at their strongest in the periods of 1953–58, 1969–71 and 2004–12, when Yorkshire were not winning the Championship. They were supplying their best players to England, however, often including the country’s captain.
FN20 His surname was subsequently changed to ‘Wellesley’.
FN21 Here and throughout, statistics are correct up to the end of the 2015 World Cup.
FN22 Viv Richards told me he learnt how to field by watching Graham Vivian at cover on New Zealand’s tour of the West Indies in 1971–72, but this does not tip the balance.
FN23 Native-born players gave themselves the nickname of ‘Currency Lads’. As Cashman and Gibbs explain: ‘Local “Currency”, in the ordinary sense, referred to bills or notes which were issued by private individuals and were convertible – sometimes – into “Sterling”, or English money, at a discount. The names were thus adopted to distinguish the Australian-born cricketers from the British-born.’ In some fixtures, the rivalry was boiled down to the basics: Natives v Emigrants.
FN24 So nice, so genteel, were the arrangements for MCC members that The Age informed its readers, or their servants: ‘The police regulations for the traffic of licensed vehicles attending the match are as follows:– Disengaged cabs to stand on south side of Wellington-parade, to have their horses’ heads towards the west, and to extend from sixty feet east of entrance to the Yarra Park, the two first cabs to stand within twenty feet of the entrance. Engaged cabs to stand along south side of the three-rail fence, and to have their horses’ heads facing eastward, and to extend westward from 17 feet from corner post. Omnibuses to stand on south side of parade along the fence, to have their horses’ heads towards the east, and to extend westward from twenty feet west of entrance to Yarra Park. Traffic to the ground through Jolimont will not be allowed.’ Woe betide the equine head daring to point east by south-east!
FN25 Cricket’s first international match, between Canada and the USA in 1844, did not contain a century of any kind. The scores at the St George’s Club in New York on 24–26 September were: Canada, 82 and 63, beat USA, 64 and 58, by 23 runs.
FN26 The pair made some amends when the second Test was played a fortnight later, again at the MCG. Even though Spofforth relented and played, Greenwood scored 49 and 22, while Hill took five wickets and scored 49 run out and 17 not out, as England won by four wickets.
FN27 When England toured Australia in 1903–04 and played against Marsh at Bathurst, Herbert Strudwick – who went on to set a world record for the most first-class dismissals, 1495, since surpassed – thought Marsh threw, on the basis that he alone seamed the ball on a flat pitch. But not another Aboriginal fast bowler for Queensland, Albert Henry: ‘He was certainly the fastest bowler I have ever seen, for a few overs,’ Strudwick wrote in Twenty-five Years Behind the Stumps. One ball from Henry in Brisbane hit the screen ‘at the second bounce . . . and came half way back to the wicket.’
FN28 Dear Tiger,
The greatest privilege of my ten England tours of Australia was to share a press box with you, and see how fearlessly you spoke the truth to power, and preached the value of wrist-spin when it was almost extinct. In 1980 I asked you about Ray Bright, who was labelled a left-arm spinner, although he didn’t spin the ball much by anyone’s standards let alone yours. ‘Would you take Ray Bright on the tour of England next year?’ I asked. Your instant reply: ‘I wouldn’t take him on a trip to Manly!’
P.S. Given that the 1930s was the highest-scoring era, even more so than today, and you took more than 20 wickets in four consecutive Ashes series (it would have been more than 25 if a wash-out hadn’t limited the 1938 series to four Tests), perhaps you should be bracketed with Warne as the best of all wrist-spinners.
FN29 In a press match at the Karachi Gymkhana I won the fielding prize of 800 rupees for the best catch of my life. I had to dive to my left and half-forward to catch a skimming drive. The cost of my tetanus injection was 1000 rupees.
FN30 It is surprising these maharajahs did not take a leaf out of the Sultan of Morocco’s scorebook. When cricket was introduced to Morocco before the First World War by The Times correspondent W.B. Harris, the custom was for everyone to bat and bowl as normal, then for the Sultan to fill in the names in the scorebook afterwards. The highest score tended to be made by himself, or one of his favourites.
FN31 It was Pavri who slightly underestimated the age of Parsi cricket when he wrote in 1901: ‘The Parsis seem to have begun the game of Cricket about fifty years ago and for the knowledge of the game their thanks are due to the Englishmen, chiefly the military officers of the Marine Battalion, stationed at Bombay, who inspired a love for it among them.’ Pavri, while completing his medical studies in London, played for Middlesex against Surrey at Hove in 1895: as Sussex fielded K.S. Ranjitsinhji, this was the first Championship match in which both counties fielded an Indian.
FN32 Nathaniel Curzon was not interested in games but in becoming India’s Viceroy, which he did. As Lord Curzon, he was, in the words of the limerick, ‘a most superior person’.
FN33 I owe special thanks to the librarian at Bombay’s Central Library for allowing me to consult the back numbers of the Bombay Gazette, which had been neither micro-filmed nor preserved in air-conditioned archives and were therefore on the verge of disintegration.
FN34 According to the census of the following year, 1891, Bombay’s population was 821,764, but most inhabitants lived far from the Fort and Colaba, in outlying slums that had already grown up around the spinning and weaving mills, railway workshops and tanneries, which made Britain’s wealth. By 1896 this breeding ground for bubonic plague was claiming the lives of more than 1,900 people per week.
FN35 But when Tata visited Whitehall, he was treated with disdain, and when the Viceroy heard about his plan, he guffawed that he would eat his hat if Tata produced one ingot of steel. Before he died in 1903, Tata went to America and met President Theodore Roosevelt, to ask for American experts to go to India to do geological research and identify the best location for a steel plant. Yet Roosevelt’s first question to Tata was: ‘How is Parsi cricket going on?’ The American president also sent through Tata a message of encouragement to Parsi cricketers. He sent the experts as well, and steel production commenced in Jamshedpur – named after the late Tata – in 1912. The needs of the British army in the Middle East were thus supplied in two World Wars.
FN36 However, it is the name of his younger brother, Homasji Kanga, that lives on in Bombay. The Kanga Shield was considered to be the best club competition, higher in standard than The Times of India Shield, because it used to be played in the monsoon season when pitches are livelier.
FN37 The majority of Parsis, however, were to find themselves on the wrong side as Indian independence dawned. Bombay saw anti-Parsi riots in 1921 when, according to Eckehard Kulke in The Parsees in India, ‘anti-British aggressions on the part of Hindus and Muslims were diverted to the weaker Parsis’.
FN38 Modern Parsi history has had to be revisionist, minimising the loyalty towards the British which the majority of their community felt before the First World War, and maximising the role the minority played in the independence movement. The Tata family was in the latter camp: not only J.N. but J.R.D., who was to start the first Indian airline and many other companies, and built up India’s steel industry until it eventually took over Britain’s. The Petits and Jeejeebhoys, Cowasjis and Camas, honoured and knighted, sided with the Parsi majority. Caesar, at any rate, would have approved.
FN39 On the same day, according to the Gazette, at the Esplanade Police Court, Mr Jardine was due to defend ‘a native Engineer’ on a charge of defamation. Informal charges were to be laid against his son Douglas during Bodyline.
FN40 Pakistan’s captain, Misbah-ul-Haq, equalled it against Australia at Abu Dhabi in November 2014.
FN41 An interview at Lord’s, September 2011, before the Lord’s Taverners dinner for the Greatest Fast Bowlers.
FN42 Of this passage of play Gooch later wrote in his autobiography: ‘At that point, for the first and, I think, only time, I began saying to myself “Graham, it might be doing yourself a favour if you got out, this boy Patterson is really firing and it could get very nasty indeed. If you don’t watch it, you could get hit very badly.” It was the only time I thought I might be hurt at the crease. Now I found that I was crouching very low, knees really bent, even before Patterson was into his delivery stride. Not a good feeling at all.’
FN43 When Australia recruited their first fielding coach, Michael Young, from American baseball, he made much of the need – in an interview he gave me in Amsterdam in August 2004 – for fielders to ‘hunt in a pack’ and keep the batsman penned in. The ultimate exhibition of in-fielding I have seen came in the Sydney Test of 2006–07 when Kevin Pietersen was in imperious driving form but could not breach the offside field of Michael Clarke, Andrew Symonds and Mike Hussey. The batsman piercing the field can, I suppose, be viewed as the enemy escaping.
FN44 I am indebted to Professor Adrian Poole of Trinity College, Cambridge, for pointing out that the white line of the cricket crease was once called the ‘scratch’. The word, more commonly used in pugilism, led to the phrase ‘coming up to scratch’ for two boxers coming up to the mark to fight.
FN45 I much regret that I saw Imran Khan bowling in a Test in Pakistan only once (he never played at home against England), when a piece of magnificent theatre in Faisalabad in 1982 made me think of a predatory animal. Australia’s number seven, Peter Sleep, came to the wicket after Pakistan had made a huge total. Imran, Pakistan’s captain, was bowling what is called reverse-swing now, but he was swinging it a far greater distance than recent norms. Sleep at the crease was as helpless as a tethered goat as Imran ran in. The ball, delivered from wide of the crease, went a few inches wider still until it was almost on the line of the return crease, before boomeranging and pinning Sleep leg-before first ball. Yes, why not? It was Imran’s own favourite image: he could have been a tiger.
FN46 The scandal of the 1890s, in England, was the relationship between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, nickname ‘Bosie’. When Bernard Bosanquet unveiled the googly in first-class cricket in 1900, the ball could therefore not be termed a ‘Bosie’ after him. A schoolmaster telling a boy ‘Show me your Bosie’ could have been misconstrued. Besides, cricket – male cricket – has always feigned that homosexuality does not exist. In Australia, however, there was no such barrier to calling the googly a ‘Bosie’ after two match-winning spells by Bosanquet, in the Ashes of 1903–04 and 1905.
FN47 The once-common phrase in which a hard-hitting batsman ‘flogs’ the bowling has gone out of fashion since corporal punishment was made illegal in British schools. I wonder if it was used in an approbatory sense, suggesting that the feeble bowlers were given their due when a batsman flogged them. Calling on their experiences of disciplining a dormitory, C.B. Fry or Douglas Jardine might have approved of flogging . . .
FN48 Of the saying ‘it’s not cricket’, Lord Harris claimed in A Few Short Runs: ‘The brightest gem ever won by any pursuit: in constant use on the platform, in the pulpit, Parliament, and the Press, to dub something as being not fair, not honourable, not noble. What a tribute for a game to have won, but what a responsibility on those who play and manage it!’ Ironically, as we have seen, the phrase seems to have been first used to describe bowling which was not under-arm: the Reverend James Pycroft in 1851 claimed that round-arm was ‘not cricket’.
FN49 Things were done differently, of course, at Eton College. According to John Murray of the publishing firm: ‘When I first went to Eton in 1863, the getting of three wickets with successive balls was called “bowling a gallon”, and the bowler was supposed to be awarded a gallon of beer.’
FN50 Number one had an inhibiting effect on England when they reached the top of the ICC Test Rankings in 2011. They focussed on retaining that position, instead of keeping their eye on the ball and winning.
FN51 The County Championship started ‘officially’ in 1890, but it was real enough for cricket followers well before then.
FN52 On behalf of Tom Emmett, I would like to claim that he was the father of reverse-swing. For a start, he was quick enough to bowl it. W.G. Grace’s innings of 66 against Yorkshire at Lord’s in 1870 was called the best innings ever seen because it was made against Emmett and George Freeman on a fiery pitch. ‘Every third or fourth ball kicked badly, and we were hit all over the body, and had to dodge an occasional one with our heads,’ as Grace remembered.
Secondly, Emmett had the slingy action required: he bowled ‘fast round-arm left hand’, according to Grace in his book Cricket. Emmett’s particular delivery which sounds like reverse-swing had its own name, too, suggesting it was rare or unique: ‘the sostenutor’. No such word exists; it may have been derived from sostenuto, a musical term, from the Italian word ‘to sustain’; most likely, the sound was the attraction. As Grace described it: ‘His best ball was one pitching between the legs and the wicket, with sufficient break and rise to hit the off bail.’ In other words it moved away from the right-handed batsman by an abnormal distance. ‘More than once he bowled me with that ball when I was well set and had scored heavily, and I left the wicket believing a similar ball would always beat me or anyone.’
After retiring, Emmett was the coach at Rugby, where any descendants of Tom Brown and Arthur would have been told, when playing forward, to ‘smell her’. He ended his days in Marlborough, like George Smith, with Grace’s tribute as an epitaph: ‘No finer professional cricketer has ever appeared.’
FN53 My chief memory of England’s match in Bahawalpur on their 1977–78 tour of Pakistan does not, however, concern the pitch but the captain, Mike Brearley, coming round to the press tent with a list his players had been compiling – a list of the fifty greatest batsmen to have represented England. We weighed in, though probably only John Woodcock of The Times, and the nicest judgement, had valid points. It is hard to believe the England players of today would have such an interest in their predecessors.
FN54 It is a myth that MCC, as an antidote to Bodyline, limited the number of fielders on the legside to five, with only two behind square-leg. This was done, initially in England, as an Experimental Law, in 1957. The intention was to curb defensive inswing bowling – and off-spin to a lesser extent – to a packed legside field, which was reducing scoring rates and killing the county game as a spectacle.
FN55 If there has been an exception to this rule about throwing generating the most heated indignation, it was when Trevor Chappell, on the instructions of his captain and older brother Greg, bowled an under-arm delivery for the last ball of the one-day international between Australia and New Zealand at Melbourne in 1981 when New Zealand needed six to win. New Zealand’s prime minister Robert Muldoon weighed in by saying, ‘It was the most disgusting incident I can recall in the history of cricket,’ and he now understood why the Australian team’s uniform was yellow. The loophole allowing under-arm was swiftly closed.
FN56 Private conversation during the third Test between England and India in Kolkata, December 2012.
FN57 Reverse-swing produced by soaking one side with sweat was common in Barbadian club cricket from the 1950s, or even before, so I was told on England’s tour of the West Indies in 1989–90 by Richard (‘Prof’) Edwards, who represented West Indies in the 1960s in five Tests.
FN58 McDonald, Brian Statham, James Anderson: one adopted and two native Lancastrian bowlers renowned for being double-jointed.
FN59 My observation is that one who plays cricket for a living, male or female, is a restive person, more likely to chew fingernails than sit still with a book. It may be an extreme case, but C.B. Fry spoke for many when he wrote of K.S. Ranjitsinhji: ‘He is very lithe, full of spirits and animation. He could no more think of standing still than could a young kitten.’
FN60 I remember this Test fondly, even though it was a bore-draw. England had nobody to bowl wrist-spin in the nets before the game – except me!
FN61 Touchingly, when his first child was about to be born shortly after his retirement, he and his partner had to tie each other’s shoelaces as neither could bend down.
FN62 About the time Trescothick flew home at the start of England’s 2006-07 tour of Australia, the Professional Cricketers Association expanded its welfare services with a helpline for members feeling suicidal. Thanks to this initiative and the PCA’s pastoral care in general, there has been no reported case of a member committing suicide – with the exception of Peter Roebuck in still unexplained circumstances in Cape Town – since Mark Saxelby took his life in 2000 in a tragically gruesome case. Before this millennium the suicide rate among English professional cricketers was higher than that among the British population at large, according to David Frith in Silence of the Heart. The rate among cricketers in countries with substantial populations of Anglo-Saxon origin, like Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, was also remarkably high. The reporting of suicide in south Asia has been too limited for any comparison to be drawn there.
FN63 By this reckoning, the unluckiest batsman I have seen in international cricket was Clayton Lambert. He was brought into the West Indies team for the fifth Test against England in 1991, when their supply of great batsmen was running out. He scored 39 in his first innings, before a tremendous heave at Phil Tufnell. He had started all right in his second innings, too, when he missed a pull at a short ball from Ian Botham which, on a hard Oval pitch, was destined to go over the stumps. The umpire seemed to give Lambert out, for 14, on the strength of Botham’s appeal – as was the case with a few of his latter-day England wickets. Lambert, 29 then, was dropped for the next six and a half years. By the time he was recalled, against England in 1998, he was 36, and still good enough to hit a Test hundred, but not young enough to smooth out the imperfections in his game. What could have been a substantial career was limited to five Tests.
FN64 For proof, one has only to declare while fielding that one never drops a catch or has not dropped a catch all season. In being proudly complacent, one takes an eye off the ball.
FN65 The analysis of ten years of Major League Baseball data has illustrated a decline in performance following travel across multiple time zones. According to W.E. Leatherwood and J.L. Dragoo in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2013, ‘teams competing in their home environment enjoy a home court/field advantage and travelling teams are met with a considerable task of overcoming such an advantage. This advantage is often hard to separate from detriments in performance related to travel.’ But the evidence identifies sleep loss as a main consequence of flying between time zones, as England teams do, not only on arrival in Australia but in the course of their tour, especially when flying to or from Perth. ‘Sleep loss is associated with sizeable effects on alertness, negative disturbances in mood, cognition and motivation and may have an affect on performance via these mechanisms. Additionally, each individual uniquely experiences vulnerabilities in their cognitive functioning as a result of sleep loss and may be more susceptible to the effects of sleep deprivation when performing one cognitive task over another.’ Bob Willis told me during England’s 1982–83 tour, which he captained, that he woke up at about 2.30 a.m. and never went back to sleep – and he did not normally go to bed straight after the close of play.
FN66 Here is empirical evidence to substantiate the thesis put forward in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport (2012): that mental toughness is more significant in Test match batting than other branches of international sport. ‘Contrary to the research hypothesis, it was found that the highly skilled batsmen were only distinguishable from batsmen of lesser skill by their higher degree of global mental toughness. The skilled batsmen scored significantly higher on mental toughness dimensions relating to motivation (Personal Bests, Task Value and Commitment), coping skill (Perseverance) and self-belief (Potential).’
FN67 In another ancient narrative, we are told God created the world in six days, followed by a rest day.
FN68 As with everything to do with life and death, Tolstoy summed it up: ‘He had that feeling of concentrated excitement that every sportsman experiences as he approaches the scene of action.’ (Of Levin, when he goes shooting, in Anna Karenina.)
FN69 This match, a Sunday friendly in 1991, ended prematurely because the life of one of the Imperial players nearly did. I was at the non-striker’s end when my partner, surrounded by close fielders without helmets, swung a ball to leg and hit a fielder, who swallowed his tongue. He had about two minutes left to live – except that the sister of one of our players had just qualified as a doctor and happened to be on the ground. She extricated his tongue and got him breathing again, long before the ambulance arrived. For some years afterwards, when Warne visited Bristol, he either met or checked up on his former and so nearly departed team mate.
FN70 Another press box witicism: ‘Jon Lewis, never knowingly under-bowled’ – Mike Walters, Daily Mirror
FN71 Even at this level, cricket does not lose its capacity to be a great leveller. On returning from England’s victorious tour of Australia in 2010–11, I went to the school for our Thursday afternoon session – and the rain was lashing down, absolutely pelting. The coach put it to the kids: ‘Do you want to go outside and play in the rain, or do you want to listen to Mr Berry telling you about the Ashes?’ Nineteen out of twenty squealed: ‘Play outside!’ One girl, about eight, bless her, tentatively suggested we could do both – listen, for a bit, then go outside.
FN72 Amateur cricket, that is. The takeover of the International Cricket Council in 2014, by the chairmen of Australia, England and India, was obscenely similar to the way in which modern capitalism operates.