Cricket On The Beach (Timeline 10/27/62 - Australia)

by James Philip

  The weather on Monday, the third day of the Test threatened to be no better than that on the rest day. Thankfully, the sky brightened ahead of the resumption of play and Ken Barrington and the England tail found themselves batting beneath clearing skies on a wicket which retained no trace of its first day spice. That day the pitch was probably at its best for batting and initially, England prospered.

  It was Alan Davidson with the new ball in his hands who made the initial breakthrough, bowling Tony Lock through the gate with a swinging yorker. Fred Trueman huffed and puffed and struck several lusty shots, and Barrington batted pugnaciously to be last out for 133. England were all out for 347 some five minutes before lunch; a lead of 85.

  Bobby Simpson failed for a second time in the match; caught at first slip by Colin Cowdrey for 7, thereafter Bill Lawry and Neil Harvey batted with increasing ease despite a renewed ‘bumper barrage’ from Fred Trueman and David Larter to reach 96 for 1 at tea.

  Harvey, to tears in the eyes of many in the fifty thousand plus crowd went to a catch behind for 41 off Tony Lock and walked off to a huge standing ovation.

  Norm O’Neill had passed the veteran, paused, patted him on the back and marched back into the fray. As he approached the middle he seemed to lean forward, as if into a strong wind, exuding defiance. Both Trueman and Larter returned for short bursts; neither finding the spark or fire of the first day, the combination of the ‘flattening out’ of the wicket and the softness of the old ball frustrating their efforts.

  Australia moved on to 186 for 2 at the close; play having been curtailed several minutes early that evening with Bill Lawry on 95 not out, and O’Neill on 39. Richie Benaud’s men were 101 ahead with eight wickets and two whole days yet to play.

  On the fourth morning Lawry and O’Neill batted on remorselessly for over an hour, seeing off spells from Trueman, Statham and Larter, leaving Lock and Illingworth to ply their wares up until luncheon.

  Relaxing for a moment O’Neill clipped a regulation off break from Illingworth back to the bowler; and nobody was more surprised to cling onto the stinging return than the Yorkshireman.

  At that point in proceedings Australia were 240 for 3 with the second new ball due in eight overs. Perhaps, mindful of this Brian Booth and Lawry, then in the 120s played with dogged caution and the scoring virtually ceased. At lunch the score had crawled to 259 for 3, a lead of 174 and with the pitch still playing placidly a draw was threatening to move from short odds against towards even money.

  For twenty minutes after the new ball was taken that afternoon nothing happened. Literally, nothing happened. The batsmen, by now in a totally defensive frame of mind blocked and the odd single, here and there apart, the scoreboard ‘stuck’.

  It was Brian Statham who made the breakthrough.

  From nowhere he induced a delivery to deviate toward the slips off a good length and Bill Lawry was unable to get his bat out of the way. Tom Graveney fumbled. Once, twice and then he clutched the red cherry to his heart.

  It was 267 for 4 and the least experienced of the specialist Australian batsmen, Western Australian Barry Shepherd walked out to face the veteran English opening duo – both with rare bones in their teeth – with David Larter fretting impatiently in the wings. The Northamptonshire man’s re-introduction into the attack was not delayed overlong.

  The wicket was beginning to dust up now, several balls that afternoon raised a puff of dirt, jumped or broke away at a contrary angle frustrating otherwise well-considered, faultless strokes. England, thinking their strength lay in their quicker men persisted, perhaps, a little too stubbornly with the Trueman-Statham-Larter axis. Initially there was no little encouragement, Larter had Shepherd fighting for survival, playing and missing at thin air before Trueman, bowling a tight, persistent line induced an edge to John Murray. Problematically, Ken Mackay came in and took root as Brian Booth began to weave his elegant spell.

  The twenty-nine year old native of Bathurst – approximately one hundred and twenty miles north-west of Sydney – had been a regular in his State side since 1957 and made his Test debut in England in 1961. A devout Christian his innate sportsmanship was respected by friend and foe alike. Doubts had been raised about his place in the team during the series; that afternoon he showed his true mettle; seeing off the resurgent quicker bowlers, frustrating the spinners on a track on which conditions were increasingly in the slow men’s favour while at the other end, the Australian innings gradually eroded, and finally as the light failed collapsed in a heap.

  Everybody said Booth – who gave both of England’s main spinners, and Barrington when he came on with his leg breaks ‘the charge’ to knock them off their length - deserved to get his century; in the end he was left high and dry on 89 albeit with the consolation that on a turning wicket the game was safe. In fact the consensus in the press box was that his was probably a match winning innings.

  Tony Lock had taken three wickets, Illingworth another pair but not before the Australians had posted 386 all out, setting the tourists 302 to win the match on the final day on a wearing wicket on which several balls had already gone through ‘the top’, or hardly bounced at all near the end of the day’s play.

  Ted Dexter called his men – the whole party – into a ‘closed door session’ before dinner back at the team’s hotel at Rushcutters Bay.

  It was a weary meeting; the first four days had been a long slog. The England captain was downbeat and that was to be one of the abiding memories of all those who later spoke or wrote about it. That said there was a mood of what might be rightly termed ‘grim determination’ in the room. Rather like ‘men who had been campaigning for so long that they were looking forward to getting the one, remaining battle over and done with’.

  The contretemps with Lou Rowan still rankled but nobody lingered on that and if it motivated some men, it was only a peripheral issue to most. Basically, the whole of Australia was ‘against us’. Rowan was not the only umpire in the Antipodes to believe that the LBW law did not apply to Australians; he was not so much mendacious as unable to sublimate a bias drummed into him all his life. He probably believed he was being meticulously even-handed.

  ‘We have enough on our plate without worrying about the umpires,’ Dexter declared. ‘Our problem is the Australian cricketers, Benaud, Davidson and McKenzie in that order. If the wicket starts to break up Mackay’s accuracy will be a problem and Simpson’s leg breaks will also come into play. So, forget about Mr Rowan.’

  The England captain had not called the meeting to flannel his men or to give them a pep talk, although the latter was what, in an understated, stiff upper lip sort of way, it was.

  ‘I have been proud to be your captain on this most,’ Ted Dexter had shrugged at this juncture, shaken his head, ‘extraordinary of tours. If this was a normal tour I’d advocate blocking for our lives tomorrow. But frankly, I don’t think winning or losing matters a damn. It matters more to me that we do ourselves justice. Tomorrow morning, let’s make damned sure we go out there and do our best!’

  Chapter 24 | Fifth Test – Denouement

  Sporting encounters can seem like life and death at the time and sometimes it is well to lift one’s eyes from the field of play to glimpse what else is going on elsewhere. Make no mistake the World was in ferment that Wednesday in February 1963.

  In the faraway Himalayas Indian and Chinese forces notwithstanding the devastation of much of northern China and the capital, Peking, in October, were still fighting for control of Rezang la and Tawang in the Ladakh – ‘land of high passes’ - region at altitudes of over fourteen thousand feet.

  The United Kingdom was now known to be in the grip of what later generations would call the ‘Nuclear Winter’ and the dreadful rumours of starvation and disease ravaging the survivors of the recent war filtered, and whispered down the streets of the Australian cities.

  European civilization, the cradle of Empire and now the Commonwealth from whence had sprung so much of the modern world was devastated, holl
owed out and in Australia there was a general feeling of sick unease, emptiness whenever one risked a moment of quiet reflection.

  The World had been beginning to be joined up, an increasingly noisy and smaller place, shrinking almost daily with new advances in communications connected not at the speed of a steamer across its oceans, but at the speed of jet aircraft. All the technologies developed to fight Hitler and later to deter the Soviets had been revolutionising daily life in the advanced countries of the first world, and starting to ‘trickle down’ to even the remotest corners of the globe. Television, international telephony, trade, the pace of scientific inquiry and research, and medical advances had all been galloping forward; the future had beckoned humanity with its promise of an ever better life for this and future generations. And then it had all come to a juddering halt...

  TV and radio stations in Sydney broadcast twice daily State bulletins on radiation levels and the ‘prevalence of War Plague’ – New South Wales was largely unaffected at this time, the main epidemics being centred around Brisbane, the Gold Coast and in the Northern Territories where whole communities had been paralysed by sickness – and yet, bizarrely nothing warranted so many column inches or minutes, or hours, in the newspapers or on the radio or the TV as the events which had been mesmerising and infuriating the huge crowds at the Sydney Cricket Ground that week.

  To cricketers living almost exclusively inside the bubble of their little travelling circus moving from hotel to hotel, reception to reception, match to match, playing, eating, drinking, sleeping always seemingly in motion much that was going on in the outside world might as well have been happening on Mars. It was only in quiet interludes, away from the hurly burly of movement, the camaraderie of the dressing room and the heat of the battle, that reality intervened.

  In those days everybody was secretly terrified that there would be a second, even more terrible nuclear war. In Australia it was the year of ‘living On the Beach’ and it was not until the first anniversary of the world catastrophe approached that people began to get used to the idea that, just as their governments had reassured them, they were not all going to die of radiation poisoning.

  Well, not soon, anyway...

  In a World stripped of each and every one of its former certainties in Australia on that third Wednesday in February 1963 cricket was king. There were over forty thousand inside the Sydney Cricket ground and ABC was broadcasting television pictures and radio commentary across the great southern continent as the teams took to the field.

  One bookmaker was offering odds of 25 to 1 against England scoring the 302 runs needed to win. Those odds were actually a little mean-spirited given that in the whole history of Test cricket – this was the 539th Test Match – 300 or more runs had only been scored in the fourth innings of a contest to win a match on five previous occasions. It was very rare – not quite vanishingly rare, but rare indeed, the sort of thing that only happened once every few years - for a side to score over 250 in a run chase to win a match. Moreover, other than England’s famous win at Melbourne in January 1929 no team had ever scored as many as 302 runs to win a Test in Australia.

  Richie Benaud set an attacking field; three slips on the off side, a man in the gully, and to leg another slip with all the other fielders in positions to cut off singles. The absence of men in the outer, at either third man or long leg raised eyebrows even among the Australian faithful who like their captains to attack whatever the circumstances of a given match.

  ‘Play!’ Lou Rowan called from his position at the Paddington End, and Alan Davidson cruised in to bowl to the Reverend David Sheppard in what was to be his last innings in first-class cricket. There was God’s work aplenty to be done in the broken world and although he denied it, this had been much on his mind and upon his conscience throughout the tour and inevitably, his form had suffered.

  As if in anticipation from his release from the game he played, from the outset with unaccustomed freedom, while at the other end Ray Illingworth was demonstrating indefatigable Yorkshire grit and limiting himself to pushes and deflections in between long sequences of presenting the straightest of defensive dead bats to the bowlers.

  A ball from Garth McKenzie which kept low accounted for Illingworth, sending him back to the stands for 12 of the 41 on the board just short of the hour mark. Shortly afterwards Sheppard was caught on the back foot by a ball from Ken Mackay which kept just as low; Lou Rowan had thought long and hard before he shook his head.

  At the other end every ball seemed drawn to the middle of Ken Barrington’s bat as if by some powerful cricketing magnet. Time and again during the series it was as if the Surrey man was playing with a willow wand twice the width of any other man and that morning, if anything, his bat seemed even broader.

  David Sheppard had stepped away and cut Richie Benaud’s first ball to the fence in raising his personal fifty and the score to 75 and then disaster struck. Attempting to repeat the medicine later in the over, Benaud’s googly turned into him, kept low and knocked back his off and middle stumps.

  Ted Dexter joined Barrington at 12:44 according to the scorer’s notes.

  By 12:52 the England innings was faltering.

  Barrington, playing forward to a Ken Mackay off cutter – a ball that a seamer rolls out of his hand at the point of delivery hoping it will mimic a fast off break – edged the ball onto his back pad. Mackay appealed for an LBW before he realised the batsman had hit the ball; the close fielders, unaware that the appeal was false, went up as one man.

  Lou Rowan’s finger went up.

  Stunned, Ken Barrington held up his bat in dismay.

  In those days unless there was a big deflection umpires had to depend on what they had heard as much as what they had seen. Rowan had heard two noises and believed that they were from the ball hitting the front and then back pads, not bat then pad. He was wrong but it was an honest error and at the end of the day an umpire has to call it ‘how he sees it’.

  It was all academic; Ken Barrington, the rock upon which English batting had been founded all series-long was out.

  It was 75 for 3.

  Dexter took a leisurely single early in Benaud’s next over.

  Colin Cowdrey looked around, smiling insouciantly as always.

  And nonchalantly clipped his third ball into the square leg fielder – Ken Mackay’s – hands; he stared in astonishment, not quite believing what he had done as the Australians rushed to congratulate their man.

  It was a close run thing but Tom Graveney’s walk to the middle was probably, by a fraction of a second, slower than Cowdrey’s head-bowed disconsolate trudge off the ground.

  ‘Well, this is a thing, Ted,’ he observed as he passed his skipper in mid-pitch.

  ‘Benaud’s spinning it slowly and the odd one’s keeping a bit low. Otherwise, we ought to be able to make a good fist of this,’ the England captain assured the new batsman as if there was no problem; no problem at all!

  Graveney was the older, greatly more seasoned campaigner and he had had a lot more hard knocks in his long career than the England captain. He took Dexter’s remark with a pinch of salt.

  He almost played his first ball onto his stumps, stealing a single as the ball skittered away past Barry Jarman’s left hand and evaded the grasp of Norm O’Neill stationed at leg slip. The Worcestershire batsman breathed an almighty sigh of relief to escape to the non-striker’s end.

  There were still four balls to go before lunch.

  Dexter lay back and slashed the first to the third man boundary over the heads of the slip fielders – who, to a man dived for cover – and then went up the wicket to inspect the mark the ball had made as it had exploded through the top.

  Richie Benaud was thinking the match would be over in an hour or so. Sooner, most likely, if Lord Ted went on playing like this when the next ball was half-slogged, half-swept to the long leg pickets.

  The penultimate ball of the session was meekly patted back to him. Just to increase the pressure and add to t
he drama Benaud brought everybody into close catching positions, ringing the England captain for the last ball before lunch.

  Dexter simply gave him ‘the charge’.

  The ball rocketed over the bowler’s head and bouncing once clipped the boundary fence and looped into the crowd.

  England had reached 89 for 4 at the interval.

  Tom Graveney had watched the pre-luncheon pyrotechnics with amazement.

  ‘I’ll just give you the strike then?’ He suggested as he and the England captain walked out after a light lunch of salad and potatoes. The luncheon spread was often sumptuous but both men had partaken cautiously, rehydrating with cups of lukewarm tea.

  ‘Yes, that’s the ticket.’

  Ted Dexter had been politely untalkative throughout the break. It was as if he was having some inner conversation that demanded his whole attention; his small talk had been pleasantly incidental and his gaze kept straying out towards the middle.

  ‘He was a man on a mission,’ Graveney would smile whenever he regaled guests at dinners on ‘the speaking circuit’ or at benefit events or whenever the ‘war tour’ of Australasia was mentioned.

  Imperious hardly did justice to Ted Dexter in full flow.

  There was a minimum of foot movement unless the ball was very full or very short; yet his was not merely a stand and deliver method. If his hitting was angry, there was no angriness in the man, simply a cool, calculating, savage purpose to his assault on the bowling. He was one of those rare creatures to whom Test Match cricket, the game played at its highest level against the fastest, most accurate and wiliest bowlers actually ideally suited his natural game. The ball came onto his bat at speed, he could rely on the metronome length and accuracy of the bowlers and he loved nothing better than to play mind games with the finest spin bowlers in the World. He got bored in the humdrum of county cricket back in England, the up country, and some of the State games did not get his ‘juices flowing’, batting was too easy in the second and third tiers of the sport. He loved golf because a man’s score never lied; he loved Test cricket because it brought the best out of him.