Fifty years ago he left Windies in a spin, now Dougie is ready for Good times
WHEN the opening ball is delivered in Malahide this morning (Friday), weather permitting naturally, Dougie Goodwin’s sharp eyes will keenly follow the bowler’s action.
It is almost 70 years since he fetched balls from the ditches and bushes dotted around his local cricket field, yet his coltish enthusiasm for the sport remains undimmed.
He will watch the bowler step out his mark, count the paces as he runs in to bowl and then follow the flight of the ball, the first in Test cricket on Irish turf.
For Goodwin, the best ones are those of a full length, which move away on the seam and whose variation in flight cause the batsman to dither.
Any hesitation, any flinching, and their cause, and wicket, will be lost.
A part of Goodwin would love another bowl or two, a chance to recapture the days when he was feared for his mediumfast pace, swing, and supreme wicket-taking.
His strong hands still look capable of getting a ball to turn, and his lanky frame remains as lean as those long summer days. ‘When I enjoyed bowling all day,’ he says with a smile.
But he’s a great grand-father these days, the knees are giving him jip and 18 holes at The Island links is sufficient to keep him ticking over.
Rather than fill the role of the man in the arena, he will make do with a decent seat in the house for the greatest day in Irish cricket as the national team plays Pakistan.
It’s an occasion Goodwin never thought would come around, just like the time 50 years ago when he played a key role on the day Ireland’s part-timers rocked the cricket world. SION MILLS. The place is enshrined in Irish cricket lore, like Saipan in football only for the right reasons, for it was where Ireland’s amateur gents knocked the West Indies professionals for six.
It was such an unexpected result that some refused to believe it even though the BBC captured the final throes of the West Indies first innings. Aware that bizarre things were unfolding on the green-topped pitch in County Tyrone, the BBC moved their coverage forward an hour to capture some of the carnage inflicted by the Irish opening bowlers, Goodwin and Alec O’Riordan.
Goodwin had been appointed captain of Ireland for the first time and in the first innings, he took five wickets for six runs, and in the second, he withdrew from the bowling attack with a nagging Achilles tendon after a haul of two wickets for one run.
His match figures of seven wickets for seven runs off 14.5 overs are unrivalled in Irish cricket – and will almost certainly never be touched. As the Windies collapsed, there was talk of a Guinness overload the night before, which Goodwin knew to be nonsense. Instead, the tourists were guilty of taking their eye off the ball.
For starters, they only played six of their Test team from Lord’s the day before, and secondly, they hadn’t done their homework on the pitch. Goodwin, a bank official at the time, recalls the preliminar- ies. ‘When we were walking out to toss, Basil Butcher (the West Indies captain) said “I presume you’d like us to bat first.” I said “Yes, but I’d like to go out and toss as there are a few fellows around who’d like to see it.”
‘We threw up a coin but it didn’t matter as he was happy to bat first. People had come to watch them batting, not us. I presume he thought we were only farmers.’
The wicket was lush, the July 2 morning was warm. It was perfect ‘ I PRESUME THEY THOUGHT WE WERE ONLY FARMERS for Goodwin and O’Riordan to wreak havoc. ‘They had no covers at Sion Mills, there had been a little rain overnight. I knew it was damp on top and I knew it suited me. What else did I need?’ he laughs at the memory.
Goodwin didn’t miss a trick and was almost unplayable to the extent that O’Riordan, a former Irish captain, urged him to keep himself in the bowling attack, which he did.
Goodwin took out Clive Lloyd for one and the West Indies crumpled to 12 for 9 before being all out for 25. The format of the day was curious. Both teams agreed to play two innings and in the event of an unfinished game, the outcome of the first innings would be decisive, which it was.
Two days later, the teams met in a two-day match in Ormeau, Belfast which ended in a draw meaning Ireland won the series.
‘I’d one season where I got a few more wickets than other bowlers but the matches were not as high profile as that one.’
Goodwin tells a lovely post-script to the West Indies visit involving Lance Gibbs, the first spinner to take more than 300 wickets in Test cricket.
‘The first night in the Ormeau match, Lance Gibbs and I enjoyed a drink or two. He wasn’t playing, he’d a finger injury and we got on great. A little while later, I was invited by Cork County to play a match against Warwickshire. I walked into a bookies’ in Kinsale and there was Lance. “Ah, there you are,” he said. JUST turned 80, Goodwin doesn’t have far to travel to take a seat this morning. He lives across the road from the club which introduced him to cricket as a callow 12-year-old and on summer afternoons cries of ‘howzat’ float across his apartment balcony.
Few have mined a deeper seam in ‘The Village’ club than Goodwin, a first team regular for almost 30 years from his debut at 18, and club captain many times over.
He grew up about a hundred yards from the ground and larked about with brother Billy, using a lamp-post for stumps after becoming fascinated by cricket through an unlikely source, a boys’ comic.
‘There was a cricket strip in “The Hotspur” which ran for five or six weeks and this fellah, John AlaNeville. MY STRATEGY? I BOWLED TO LENGTH, I COULD BOWL FOREVER baster, a New Zealander, was doing a demo on the way he bowled. I followed that to a tee. And that was the start of my real interest.’
At 12, he was permitted to field when the Malahide XI were practising and at 18 he got to play for the team, then a senior two outfit. He still has a picture of his Malahide debut.
‘I’m pretty certain it was against Phoenix and we seemed to lose a lot of wickets apart from Paddy I went in, around number eight, and I managed to stay in while Paddy made a hundred. It was his only hundred of that season. I was 25 not out.
‘Two weeks later, we played YMCA here. This fallah, Freddie Brady hit one up in the air a country mile. I distinctly heard a woman say “he’ll never catch it.” They had completed two runs before I caught it. That was a bit of a highlight and I was on the road after that,’ he said.
‘Malahide never dropped me, although Ireland dropped me alright,’ he added ruefully.
Over 337 matches for Malahide, 43 for North Leinster and 43 for Ireland, what was the Goodwin tactic?
‘My strategy was to bowl it on a length where a batsman couldn’t be sure if he was to play back or play forward. A lot of my wickets were got by fellahs in the slips or the wicket-keeper.
‘I used to move the ball away, just slightly, it was just natural thanks to Mister Alabaster. I didn’t try to bowl it the other way.
‘I remember getting Alec out one day lbw, it pitched outside the off stump and hit the stumps. He didn’t complain but afterwards said to me ‘Where did you get that from?” I bowled to length. I could bowl forever.’
He didn’t quite but Dougie Goodwin bowled for longer, and more accurately, than most.