Cricket: Blowers calls it a day
“English summers will never be the same,” said Matthew Engel in the FT. After 45 years of almost uninterrupted service on the BBC’S Test Match Special (TMS), Henry “Blowers” Blofeld is retiring in September. “The time has come,” announced the broadcaster, “for the last of the old farts to hang up his microphone.” The “doyen of radio cricket commentary”, Blowers is known for his “unique observations on passing buses, pigeons and aircraft” – all delivered in the tone of a “bumbling upper-class twit”. He addresses everyone he meets as “my dear old thing”, and remains endearingly bewildered over the fast-changing nature of cricket. “Truly, there will never be another remotely like him.”
At 77, Blofeld “has played a good innings”, said Jim Holden in the Sunday Express. He often struggles to name the fielder at third man, but has a wonderful way with words: spin bowler Ashley Giles came trundling in “like a wheelie bin”; Kevin Pietersen held his bat aloft “like the Statue of Liberty”. And Blowers was always willing to laugh at himself. Having told listeners that Freddie Flintoff was coming in to bowl with “his shadow beside him”, he quickly added: “Where else would it be?”
What makes Blofeld truly great isn’t his “obsessions with buses or hilarious mispronunciations”, said Simon Hughes in The Times. It’s his “boyish wonder” and “unadulterated enthusiasm”. An exceptional schoolboy and university cricketer, Blowers was tipped to play for England, only to have his playing career cut short by a bicycle accident. It is perhaps because he never reached the “highest echelons of cricket that he so coveted” that his love for the game has remained so infectious. Like previous TMS stalwarts John Arlott and Brian Johnston, Blowers really is “irreplaceable”.