Ken Higgs
Bowler whose short curving approach produced a deceptively effective ‘heavy ball’
KEN HIGGS, who has died aged 79, was a broadbeamed seam bowler who played 15 Test matches for England in the 1960s. It should have been more, as he collected 71 wickets at the miserly average of 20.74 runs apiece; only two men since the First World War – Frank Tyson and Johnny Wardle – took more wickets more cheaply for England. The selectors seemingly felt Higgs was not quick enough, perhaps taken in by his fairly short curving approach to the wicket – but batsmen aplenty testified to a “heavy ball” which spat up and crunched their knuckles. Or it might have been his unfashionably pear-shaped figure, powered by what one wag termed “an a--- which crossed two postcodes”.
Higgs was also a somewhat ponderous fieldsman, who “caught the ball totally the wrong way, like a crocodile,” according to his Leicestershire team-mate Paul Haywood. “But,” he added, “he always caught it.”
His left-handed batting, with the sweep to the fore, had its moments – most memorably in the final Test of 1966 against the strong West Indian side led by Garry Sobers, when Higgs and John Snow both made halfcenturies in a last-wicket stand of 128 at the Oval, which helped England to their only win of a series lost 3-1. It remains the highest partnership in Tests by Numbers 10 and 11.
Another remarkable rearguard came years later, in 1977, when last man Higgs joined Ray Illingworth with Leicestershire reeling at 45 for nine against Northamptonshire. They put on 228, still a county record. Illingworth made a century, but Higgs was run out for a career-best 98.
That 1966 series saw Higgs at his best for England. Apart from his fighting 50, he took 24 wickets – 16 of them batsmen in the top six, including Rohan Kanhai and the dangerous opener Conrad Hunte four times each – and was the only home player to appear in all five Tests.
His international career had begun the year before, against South Africa, when he took the new ball at the Oval with his long-time Lancashire teammate Brian Statham, whose final Test appearance it was. After taking four wickets in each innings there, Higgs toured Australia that winter – but fell ill after a stopover in Colombo and regained form only when the team reached New Zealand, where he took 17 Test wickets at less than 10 apiece. But after 17 more in three matches against Pakistan in 1967, he was dropped for good after Australia won the opening Ashes Test the following summer.
Born at Kidsgrove, Staffordshire, on January 14 1937, Kenneth Higgs attended High Street Secondary Modern, Tunstall. Both his parents worked in a pottery factory. Young Ken was initially more of a footballer, representing England schoolboys and on the books at Port Vale.
After National Service in the Royal Army Medical Corps, his first club cricket came after he went to watch his older brother Roy’s side, Meakin’s, but Ken was soon playing for Staffordshire’s Minor Counties team. He joined Lancashire in 1958, claiming seven for 36 against Hampshire in his first County Championship match, and the following season took 113 wickets, forming an effective new-ball pairing with the stalwart Statham.
That swelled to 132 in 1960, at under 20 apiece, but then Higgs’s returns tailed off. It was a time of upheaval at Old Trafford: five captains were tried in seven years (one of them, Bob Barber, defied a committee instruction to drop Higgs). He returned to form in 1965, with 122 wickets at 20, and started that brief England career.
Only four years later, aged 32 and disillusioned, he retired. Only eight men have bettered his 1,033 wickets for Lancashire (Statham is top with 1,816). But after two seasons of league cricket – and a spell running a guesthouse in Blackpool – Higgs was persuaded by Illingworth to join several other well-travelled players at Leicester.
They won the inaugural 55-over Benson & Hedges Cup final at Lord’s in 1972, Higgs’s first year back, and added a maiden Championship title three years later.
He played for Leicestershire throughout the 1970s, captaining them in 1979, before eventually moving into coaching. Phillip DeFreitas, a future England all-rounder snapped up by Higgs on the first afternoon of what was supposed to be a fortnight’s trial, called him a fine teacher, “a black and white coach, there were no grey areas – you knew where you stood with him. He was good on the tactical and mental sides.”
Higgs was persuaded back into Championship action during an injury crisis in August 1986, when he was pushing 50. He lived across the road from Leicester’s ground, and DeFreitas remembers him arriving in his whites, and strolling past the youngsters doing their new-fangled warm-ups on the outfield. Nipping the ball around as of old, Higgs shook Yorkshire up with five for 22, the 50th five-wicket haul of his long career. “I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” he told an expectant press afterwards. “I’m still getting 2,000 wickets a week in the nets.”
Higgs finished with 1,536 first-class wickets at 23.61, with three hat-tricks, plus another in vain in the 1974 Benson & Hedges Cup final against Surrey. He continued as Leicestershire’s coach until 1990, then did some freelance coaching and PR work.
He married his wife Mary in 1957; she died in 2005. They are survived by two sons, Paul (who played for Leicestershire’s second team) and Terry. Ken Higgs, born January 14 1937, died September 7 2016