Reg Simpson: Put fast bowlers to the sword
1920-2013
REG Simpson, a Nottinghamshire and England cricketer who has died at the age of 93, gained the reputation after 1945 of being the finest player of fast bowling in England.
Tall and slim with curly black hair, Simpson looked down the pitch from a neat, upright and perfectly balanced stance, which gave promise of the range of stroke play at his command. In defiance of orthodox coaching theory of his period, he remained very much a back-foot player and seemed to have all the time in the world to play his shots.
In 1956, when Simpson was 36, he encountered Frank Tyson, then the fastest bowler in the world — some would say the fastest ever — on a green wicket at Northampton, and treated himself to 150 before tea. The rest of the side managed only 128 between them. Ken Biddulph, who played for Somerset in the late 1950s, thought of himself as pretty quick; he remembered, though, that Simpson “made me feel like an offspinner”.
When Don Bradman saw Simpson bat on the Australians’ tour of 1948, he immediately put him down as an outstanding England prospect.
Yet Simpson’s achievements never quite matched his promise. He played in 27 test matches, scoring 1 401 runs in 45 innings, with an average of 33.35. This was a fair record, but hardly one to put him among the greats of the game. Part of the trouble was that he was not such a good player against spin as against pace.
Simpson made his international debut in the Marylebone Cricket Club’s tour of South Africa in 1948-49, in the first test in Durban, but lost his place after managing only a total of five in two innings.
In Australia with the MCC in 1950-51, Simpson at first disappointed before finding his form with an innings of 259 (his highest in first-class cricket). And then came his 156 not out at Melbourne, his greatest innings and one that set up England’s first victory over Australia since 1938.
Returning from Australia in triumph, Simpson began the series against South Africa in 1951 with an innings of 137 at Trent Bridge, the first test century ever scored by a Nottinghamshire player on the county’s home ground.
Troubled by fibrositis, however, he lost his place in the side for the fourth and fifth tests that summer. Thereafter Simpson would be only an occasional England player, rather than an automatic choice.
Simpson was three times married and three times divorced, and is survived by two daughters from his first marriage. — ©