The Picador Book of Cricket

by Ramachandra Guha

  I think of Sobers walking down the pavilion steps at Lord’s, captain of an international cricket team. Sixty years ago it would have been Pelham Warner, another West Indian, and thirty years before that it would have been Lord Harris, yet another cricketer of Caribbean connotation. Whoever and whatever we are, we are cricketers. Garfield Sobers I see not as a fortuitous combination of atoms which by chance have coalesced into a superb public performer. He being what he is (and I being what I am), for me his command of the rising ball in the drive, his close fielding and his hurling himself into his fast bowling are a living embodiment of centuries of a tortured history.

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  After the Second World War, England suffered painfully from the fast-bowling combination of Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller. Revenge was soon at hand, however, in the shape of Brian Statham, Frank Tyson and Fred Trueman. Only the last had a personality to match. Trueman was a man of supreme self–confidence whose penchant for outré remarks frequently found him out of favour with the Establishment. But he was also an enormously skilled fast bowler. After he retired he joined the BBC’s Test Match Special team, where one of his colleagues was John Arlott. The following pages are extracted from Arlott’s book Fred: Portrait of a Fast Bowler.

  JOHN ARLOTT

  In His Pomp (1971)

  For six splendid years Fred Trueman strode the cricket world with a not unjustified swagger. People’s eyes turned to him in a cricket match; he sensed it, and gloried in it. He slouched back to his run mark and, when he paused dramatically before moving in, he had his audience in his hand as surely as the ball; and he knew it. When he squatted on his haunches, relaxed but poised, at short leg, his cap deliberately crumpled on his head, a blade of grass between his lips, nattering at the batsman, he was relishing being what he was and where he was – an England cricketer in a Test match, or a Yorkshireman playing for his county.

  When he came to his peak, during Ronnie Burnet’s period of captaincy, he was an utterly committed Yorkshire player. Previously there had been doubts; he had been ill at ease with teammates, uncertain of himself and of them. By 1959 only Close, with whom he was on gruffly straightforward terms, and Vic Wilson, whom he then found easy – and an asset as a catcher at short leg – were his equals in seniority. The remainder of the team were his juniors, to whom he was affable. Sometimes those who felt the strain of matches and wanted to be quiet might disengage themselves from conversation; but the old hostility had gone and he was now as much at his ease as his nature was ever likely to allow.

  Apart from his natural aptitude, he became a great fast bowler for two reasons. The first was his single-minded determination to be exactly that; the second, his immensely strong body. It was not merely powerful, it was quite phenomenally solid, without observable weakness; and it proved magnificently durable. Like S. F. Barnes, Derek Shackleton and Brian Statham, he bowled himself fit. Dexter’s 1962–3 team to Australia travelled from Aden to Fremantle on the Canberra, where one of their fellow passengers was Gordon Pirie, who offered to organize physical training for the team. He suggested that Trueman, as a bowler, needed exercises to strengthen his legs. ‘My legs?’ said Fred. ‘They’ve carried me through over a thousand bloody overs this season – and they’ve never let England down yet – which is more than can be said about some.’ Then, with a cold look overboard, ‘Canst tha’ swim?’ The conversation ended. His legs were like tree trunks; and he bowled himself fit – that is to say fit for bowling, which is a peculiar and unique kind of fitness. There is no known training for a man who, wearing heavy – in this case steel-toe-capped – boots, thick socks, long flannel trousers and a shirt thick enough to guard against chill, has to walk 150 yards, run 150 yards, with six violent peaks of muscular action, in five minutes; rest for five minutes and do it again, and at the same intervals for an hour; then become semi-active and, at any moment, when the muscles have set or while they are still tired, be suddenly called upon to go through the entire routine again. All this may be demanded in the cold of an English spring or the high heat and humidity of Brisbane: and the same amount of applied strength, the same precision, is expected of him in either circumstance. It is an illogical form of activity which may account for the fact that there is no logical form of preparation for it. On the other hand, during his later years, if Trueman had three days off, he needed half an hour’s bowling before he was loose.

  His approach, though long and menacing, was controlled, its length and rhythm changed at different periods of his career as he sensed the changing nature of his demands from it. Its cohesive quality was to be seen, even at his fastest, in the monumental steadiness of his head and shoulders, which remained as firm during his run-up as if he were standing still. If these rocked it meant that he was weary, about to lose rhythm, length and line; but, despite the weight of the demands put upon him, that rarely happened.

  He, Statham and Tyson were a remarkable set of contemporaries: the finest fast bowlers of more than a quarter-century, they were born within eight months – and less than sixty miles – of one another: Tyson at Bolton on 6 June 1930, Statham at Gorton, Manchester, eleven days later; Trueman at Stainton in the West Riding of Yorkshire on 6 February 1931. The only comparable incidence of time, place and quality in cricket history is the birth of Frank Worrell, Everton Weekes and Clyde Walcott within an even smaller area of Barbados in the seventeen months between August 1924 and January 1926.

  Statham – ‘the Whippet’ – the most finely drawn of the three, was also the most accurate – probably more consistently so than any other bowler of his pace in cricket history. Tyson, who entered first-class cricket later and left it earlier than the other two, was, for his brief peak period, beyond all question the fastest bowler in the world. He planned his career, acquired a university degree and went consciously into being a fast bowler, content that he could spend himself in one splendid bonfire of effort and, when the flame died, turn to the security of teaching. Fred Trueman came into county cricket before either of the others and left it after them; he had a career of twenty years as a fast bowler and he expressed himself – or his different selves – in every moment of it. He was the most resourceful, violent and unpredictable of the three: Statham was accurate; Tyson was fast: Fred was everything.

  Oddly enough, though Statham formed with Trueman England’s longest-lasting fast-bowling pairing; and shared Tyson’s great series in Australia in 1954–5 and his destruction of South Africa at Trent Bridge in 1955; the three played only once in the same Test, at Adelaide in 1959, when Tyson had declined from his high peak and, though the other two had better figures, Australia still made 476 and 36 for no wicket and won by 10 wickets. Trueman and Tyson played together in only four Tests – all in Australia and New Zealand in 1958–9 – and in all but one Trueman had the better figures.

  Trueman needed a strong body for, lacking Statham’s capacity for relaxation or Tyson’s cool objectivity, he suffered from the stresses of cricket. Fortunately he was a long sleeper.

  Fred Trueman was not a level bowler. He could always be a good one; at times he was lit by the fire of greatness: and the most stirring memories of him recall days when, in face of completely discouraging opposition, conditions and state of the game, over-bowled and ill-supported, he tried harder than any captain could fairly ask, and sometimes succeeded beyond the bounds of reasonable possibility. On the other hand, there were occasions – rare, but undeniable – when he turned it in. A dead pitch could depress him, as it did in the Old Trafford Test against Australia in 1961, when he had figures of 1 for 55 in 14 overs and 0 for 92 in 32 overs. Taking his sweater from the umpire he said to Peter May, ‘Let Closey bowl.’ May, never strong about Trueman, did put Close on. More often Trueman was moved to the heights: though no one could tell what might provide the impetus . . .

  The kindling could be sudden and unexpected. All that anyone knew was that suddenly he was going eagerly back to his mark; there was a belligerent spring in his run, he came over like a storm wav
e breaking on a beach, and followed through with so mighty a heave that the knuckles of his right hand swept the ground. Where previously the ball had curved off the pitch calf high, it now spat to the hips or ribs: wicketkeeper and slips moved deeper; the batsman, who had seemed established, was late on his stroke; and the whole match was transformed.

  This was the essence of fast bowling. Yet it is a mistake to think of Fred Trueman as simply a bowler of speed. It is known that he commanded outswing, inswing, that he had greater control with the yorker than any other bowler of comparable pace in modern times except, perhaps, Lindwall; that he had the knack of hammering the ball into the ground – as Keith Miller and Ray Lindwall in 1953 encouraged him to do – so that he gained not only lift, but also movement off the seam. Indeed, he shared with Lindwall the rare ability to ‘do’ as much as a fast-medium bowler at fast bowler’s speed. On ‘green’ wickets he shrewdly kept the seam straight and let it do its own unpredictable work. So ball after ball would, by his natural tendency, whip away from the bat and then, suddenly, beyond his control – ‘I don’t know, so how can the batsman?’ – one would cut savagely back into the stumps. Although he could not command that ball it was always possible because of his method.

  He was proud when he first took wickets with his slower ball. Batsmen, though, remembered his faster ball: he would seem to be bowling at full speed when suddenly one would come through an unaccountable and undetectable foot quicker, and defeat the stroke. He had, too, something of a dossier system of the batsmen of his experience. He knew their weaknesses and their strengths; those who would push forward and those who would go back to his first ball at them; those who felt outside the off stump; those vulnerable on the leg; the shrinkers and the hookers; all were filed in his memory. He was more subtle than those who did not know him ever realized. He was, in the words of S. J. Perelman about an altogether different person, ‘crazy like a fox’. In yet another strength, he believed implicitly that he was too good for any batsman; and sometimes he convinced the best of them that he was right.

  Only a few great batsmen could play Trueman when he was ‘in his pomp’ with consistent confidence and certainty: he would admit May, Cowdrey, Sobers, Walcott – on West Indian wickets – Weekes, Sobers, the two Simpsons – Bobby and Reg – Insole, Washbrook and one man who never appeared in a Test, the resolute Brian Reynolds of Northants. Only the two Simpsons were opening batsmen of Trueman’s maturity (Washbrook had by then dropped down the order), for when he was fresh and the ball was new, he probed technique, temperament, courage and speed of reaction with so sharp a point that few regularly passed the examination.

  A tendency to bowl too many bouncers remained his weakness. Although he could push a man on to the back foot in anticipation of it and then fool him with a yorker, he did not do it frequently enough. The bouncer was his exclamation mark, and he exclaimed to the end of his career, even when its bounce was as predictable as its incidence.

  The temptation to use him was irresistible; he was shock bowler and stock bowler in one; capable of containing a strong batting side in conditions to its liking, always with the possibility that he might bowl them out at the same time.

  Even in this period he was not a regular choice for England. He was dropped from the team for the last Australian Test of 1961 – when he admitted the selectors’ justification – and did not make the tours of Australia 1954–5, South Africa 1956–7 and 1964–5, India–Pakistan in 1961–2 or India in 1963–4. From the beginning to the end of his career as an international cricketer England played 118 Tests and he appeared in only 67 of them. Thus his record number of Test wickets – 30, an average of over 4.5 a match spread over thirteen years – becomes even more remarkable.

  It is striking, too, that Statham played his first Test in the series before Trueman and his last in the one after Trueman finished: and that he played in 70 out of 123 – a slightly smaller proportion than Trueman’s. Again the coincidence of their careers is striking: no other English fast bowler endured as these two did: while from other countries, only Lindwall – who also had thirteen years of Test cricket – compared with them.

  By 1959, Tyson’s ankle injury had slowed him and Fred Trueman was without doubt the fastest bowler in England. So far as the world was concerned the Australians Rorke and Meckiff – whose actions were, at mildest, doubtful – Davidson, Wesley Hall of West Indies and, now that Heine had gone, Neil Adcock from South Africa disputed the title. In England his closest challengers were Brian Statham, Peter Loader – of the dubious bouncer – Harold Rhodes and David White: only Brian Statham for completeness of technique and David White, on his day for sheer pace, cast the slightest doubt on his national title.

  So he assumed the mantle of authority with a rare blend of violence, humour, tolerance, experience and brilliance; authority, however, never included conformity; he was not the Establishment’s man; he could still four-letter-word himself into trouble, still slash the Establishment with the sharpest edge of his tongue. Sometimes, too, in his impatience, he had to resort to the beamer, dispatched straight at the point between the batsman’s eyes; and once, when he was offered even greater violence in return, he not only desisted but doled out a couple of drivable half-volleys by way of compensation. Such generosity was unusual. He normally had bouncers, yorkers and boxers ready for those – generally southerners and fancy caps – who were on his grudge list; and Yorkshire can attribute their run of four championships in the five years of Fred’s ‘pomp’ largely to the fact that, at the pinch, he could usually summon the knowledge, resource and application – and, above all, the pace – to remove any batsman.

  It is true of all bowlers, but more so in the case of Fred Trueman than most, that when he was taking wickets he was never tired; once he mounted the kill he could not be pulled off. When, in 1960, he was – for the only time in his career – the first bowler in England to take 100 wickets, he came to Yorkshire’s match with Warwickshire at Bradford nine short and closely pressed by Jackson for the distinction. On the first morning he went, as usual, into the visiting dressing room and chatted up his opponents with his latest stories, opinions and humour, which they accepted with the enjoyment of most teams who did not live with him six days a week. At about eleven o’clock he eased himself off the table to go and change with the words ‘Oh, yes, and I only want nine wickets to be first to a hundred – so you buggers can start drawing short straws to see which one I don’t bloody well have.’

  The Warwickshire batsmen were duly impressed; but Yorkshire won the toss and, after a first day shortened by rain, batted until the middle of Monday before they declared at 304 for 9. Trueman emphasized the validity of his boast by having both Billy Ibadulla and Arnold Townsend taken in the gully from lifters in his first over. The spinners, Jack Birkenshaw and Don Wilson, worked their way through the middle of the innings and he had a couple of catches dropped before he took his next wicket – Jack Bannister, edging to the wicketkeeper – and, when Warwickshire followed on, he still wanted six more wickets and he was tiring. Nevertheless, once Cowan had put out their fellow Yorkshireman, Norman Horner, Trueman swept away Arnold Townsend, Mike Smith, Billy Ibadulla and Ray Hitchcock and Yorkshire claimed the extra half-hour. Trueman now was clearly spent and Vic Wilson told him to take his sweater. He protested, was allowed another over, which proved little more than fast-medium – and had another catch dropped – before he came off in high dudgeon and Birkenshaw took his place. ‘I’ll never bowl for Yorkshire again – and don’t send me back to leg slip because if you do I shall drop anything that comes near me – like these bastards have been doing off me all day’. Five minutes later he picked up a glorious swooping catch off Barry Fletcher from Jack Birkenshaw’s bowling – at leg slip.

  As he threw it up he said, ‘I’ll have another over for that’ and promptly bowled John Kennedy. So three wickets were left for the next day and he wanted two of them. When play started late, after rain, Bannister and Geoffrey Hill proceeded with steady competence
to bat until lunch and double the score. They even batted on into the afternoon before Cowan bowled Hill and Fred, who had refused to be relieved, launched himself at John Fox. He was flagging now and it was a wide, and not very fast ball – the last of an over – that Fox chased and edged to Jimmy Binks to let in Ossie Wheatley, one of the world’s natural No. 11s. Bannister took a single off Illingworth and so – less wittingly – did Wheatley, before Trueman began his twelfth consecutive over of the day. He was weary but Wilson would not have dared to take him off: he was not to be baulked of this easy victim – though it was by no means certain that he could muster the fast, straight ball that was invariably enough for Ossie Wheatley. He gathered himself, rushed in and bowled: the ball pitched short and at no great speed, wide of the off stump; Wheatley went to ‘shoulder arms’ and let it pass, but he did not do so quickly enough: the ball hit his bat on the backlift and flew between slips and gully for four. While the field shook with laughter Trueman stood, hands on hips, scowling at the batsman. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s the first time I’ve been left alone for four.’ Wheatley was not the most gifted or intrepid of batsmen and, while he observed Trueman’s exhaustion, he was not certain that he would not now be given a bouncer of greater pace than his batting ability warranted. So, as Trueman moved up, Wheatley began to inch away. The ball proved to be a straight full toss but, in the moment before it would have hit the bails, Wheatley’s bat, coming from the opposite direction, demolished the wicket completely and, by a fraction of a second, the dismissal became ‘Wheatley hit wicket bowled Trueman 5’ instead of ‘Wheatley bowled Trueman 5’ (his batting average for the season was 4.94). F. S. T. was first to the 100 wickets and the afternoon dissolved in talk and celebration.