IT’S NEVER PRETTY, BUT UGLY BOYS STILL DELIVER...
When I read that Paul Collingwood had signed a new one year contract with Durham, I wondered what a handwriting expert might have made of the signature. “Good lord. Never seen anything quite so ugly. Looks like a doctor’s prescription. Ah, but underneath the scribble I see a solid, trustworthy, hardworking type. The sort of chap you can depend on.”
And that, pretty much, sums up dear old Colly. About as easy on the eye as a baboon’s bottom, but if you wanted someone to bat for your life, he’d be pretty near the top of the list.You’d probably want your life to end if you actually had to sit and watch him trying to save your life, but no-one in an England cricket team ever made more of what talent he had.
A batsman’s strokes are a bit like a painter’s. For every Michelangelo, making majestic sweeps across the Cistene Chapel ceiling, there are half a dozen more you’ve whistled up from Yellow Pages, emerging from a white van to slap emulsion all over your kitchen wall.
There are, let’s face it, many more Collys than David Gowers, but you could argue that making the most of a lesser talent is at least as laudable as not making quite the most – as many argued was the case with Gower – of a God given gift.
I remember covering Leicestershire centuries ago, when a colleague on the evening sports desk would always ask who was batting before leaving the office, and depending on my answer, he’d either head straight for Grace Road, or push off to the pub.
“Brian Davison’s in full flow” I might say, referring to one of the most attractive county batsmen of the era. “I’m off to the Horse and Hounds then” would be the reply. But if I said “John Steele’s just taking guard” he’d say: “oh brilliant. Tell him not to get out. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
For some reason, the fact that Steele made every run look as though it was chiselled from a rock face was a source of endless fascination for my work chum. He’d sit spellbound watching Steele, from a stance a good bit lower than a 100 metre runner crouched in the blocks, nurdle yet another single down to (in the days when there was one) third man.
If the Steele bat had a sweet spot, it must have been the size of a petit pois, and on one occasion, when he got one right out of the screws to mid off, he forgot that the ball would get there three times faster than normal and was run out by half the length of the pitch.
And yet no one doubted his value as an opening batsman who played a big part in Leicestershire winning their first ever Championship in 1975, sucking the will to live out of opposing fast bowlers, and setting up a dispirited attack for the likes of Davison to ritually dismember.
Similarly Collingwood was a
Even Colly’s double ton in Adelaide was quickly airbrushed from the brain by Shane Warne bowling England out on the final day to win the match
batsman whose England statistics tell you he could play a bit. Sixty five Tests, 115 innings, 4,259 runs, average 40.56. Not many of those runs have lingered in the memory, and even when he played an innings of outstanding quality – his double hundred in Adelaide in 2006 – it was immediately airbrushed from the brain by Shane Warne bowling out England on the final day to win the match.
He played a few shots in that innings, for once renouncing the Brigadier Block monika given to him by Bumble in the Sky commentary box. Although I’m not sure which of the two our John Steele fan would have preferred to watch. Bumble was no oil painting at the crease himself, and still winces when I remind him that I had the misfortune to watch an innings of his for Lancashire at Blackpool, which would have a serious claim to be the ugliest first-class century ever made.
It didn’t stop him playing for England though, and neither did the fact that Ian Chappell could occasionally make Colly look like Tom Graveney prevent him from becoming one of Australia’s best ever Test batsmen. Chappell was sartorially challenged as well, batting in kit which appeared to have been near neither a washing machine nor an ironing board in several decades, and he spent all his time between deliveries fiddling with an ill fitting box underneath his flannels. But as a competitor, there have been very few better.
His brother Greg was the elegant one, and there was a similar contrast between the Waughs.You found it hard to believe, watching them bat, that Mark and Steve could have emerged from the same womb, let alone within a couple of minutes of each other. On the occasions they batted together it was like beauty and the beast, as it was when, say Gower and Peter Willey were sharing a partnership, or Brian Lara and Shivnarine Chanderpaul.
The game is littered with examples of horrible-to-watch batsmen who have made heaps of runs at the highest level. Graeme Smith, the former South African captain, was the master of the cover drive through midwicket, while a fellow countryman, Gary Kirsten, would treble the bar takings when he was batting. Which he once did for 14 and a half interminable hours against England, the second longest innings in Test history.
When Colly does eventually call it a day, his CV will contain the highly incongruous entry of being selected for a World XI in 2017. It was for a T20 game against Pakistan in Lahore, and you have to suspect that – with other legendary figures such as BCJ Cutting and S Badree in the line up – the selection process hadn’t gone entirely to plan. “You’d like me to play where? Lahore? Ah, yes, love to, but I’ve got something else on that day. Sorry.”
In contrast to Lord Gower, to give him his Sky nickname, Colly was at the opposite end of the aristocracy scale – England’s Bob the Builder, with his flat cap, mug of tea, and rolled up copy of The Sun. Both of them have daughters, but I bet I know which ones were easier to bring up.You can picture the scene in Colly’s house. “Okay, settle down you lot. I made a century for England today, and if you don’t behave I’ll make you sit down and watch the highlights.”