Cricket’s age of innocence

On a Saturday evening in 1980, three bowlers of English cricket county Gloucestershire were travelling in a car to Manchester. The fourth person in the car was their scorer, Bert Avery. The bowlers —Alan Wilkins, Brian Brain, and David Partridge — had been pounded all day by Ian Botham, who took Somerset from 119 for 3 at lunch to 429 for 4 at tea. Botham finished with 228, with the help of 27 fours and 10 sixes. It felt like a physical beating, recalls Wilkins, whose bowling figures changed from one for 30 from 12 overs (that one wicket was Sunil Gavaskar’s) to one for 112 from 18 overs.

The car journey to Manchester was to play a Sunday league match the next morning in the middle of the county championship match, which would resume on Monday. That is how the schedule used to be. The three bowlers were sore in the body and broken in spirit. Their small talk during the journey did not go much beyond “bloody ‘ell… how did he hit it there?”

Avery opened his scorebook and said: “They scored 536 runs in 100 overs against us today, and 350 of those runs are sitting in this car going to Manchester.”

That could have gone either way. For a moment, Wilkins thought Brain was going to hit Avery. Instead, everyone had a good laugh.

Back in the day, that was the life of an English county cricketer. Wilkins lived it till the mid-1980s, when, forced by a shoulder injury, he turned to broadcasting. But the county cricketer in him, for this reviewer, is the one who wrote this book. Nearly half the book is about Wilkins the country cricketer, though his broadcasting career spans a much longer period — 34 years, and counting — and presents a moving picture of an era long gone when cricket was far less prosperous and far more innocent.

County cricketers were on the treadmill of the game for six months every year — the cricket season — and fumbled about wondering what to do the other six months. Many taught at schools; physical education was a popular choice of subject, with a bit of coaching thrown in. Some headed out of the English winter, to Australia or South Africa, for a job that combined coaching and playing.

It was not an easy life. Wilkins does not romanticise it unnecessarily, and he presents its downsides without fuss. If anything, he writes in such an unselfconscious way and effaces himself so much that you need to read the book carefully. If you do, you will learn that the six sixes Gary Sobers hit in a single over by Malcolm Nash in

1968 — the first instance in first-class cricket of six sixes in an over — did not end Nash’s career. A left-arm swing bowler, he was bowling orthodox slow left-arm spin in that over to Sobers. And he remained a force at Glamorgan, the first county Wilkins played for.

However, the county players were so insecure that Nash hardly offered any advice to Wilkins, who was a left-arm seam bowler and joined Glamorgan as a young man. John Lever did, though he was from a different county, but would have been more secure in his international status. Nash was, however, not able to hide his shock at being declared the Man of the Match in a game against Worcestershire. Sitting in a towel with a cigarette in his mouth, he blurted out, as the cigarette fell into his towel: “What? That can’t be right. Wilkie is surely the Man of the Match.” Wilkie —Wilkins, our author — had taken five for 17 that day, a record that stood for 20 years.

It was an improbable performance. Wilkins had pulled his hamstring bowling his first delivery of the day, and then, enduring pain, soldiered on with a shorter runup. His stellar show with the ball could not placate Tom Cartwright, the Glamorgan coach. Cartwright was fuming at Wilkins’ hamstring problem because he had declared himself fit to play. Wilkins suspects some conversation had taken place between the Man of the Match adjudicator and Cartwright.

There is much more in the book that presents a vivid picture of English country cricket as it was, warts and all, but also an era of simple pleasures and outstanding commitment, dotted with smoke-filled dressing rooms. In a poignant and typically succinct paragraph, Wilkins recalls the end of his first marriage.

As he moved from Glamorgan to Gloucestershire and started living in Bristol, he decided to put more into his marriage and think less about himself and his cricket career. Dot, his wife, settled into her life in Bristol and seemed happy. “In time to come,” says Wilkins, “I came to realise that I wasn’t the reason for her new-found happiness. Someone else was.”

The chapter ends there. But the story of the county cricketer goes on.

It was not an easy life. Wilkins does not romanticise it unnecessarily, and he presents its downsides without fuss

EASIER SAID THAN DONE

Alan Wilkins Roli Books 278 pages; ~595