Colin Bland
Brilliant South African fielder whose accuracy with a ball earned him the nickname ‘Golden Eagle’
COLIN BLAND, who has died aged 80, was a South African cricketer who became the sport’s first superstar fielder. He showcased his talents on one famous soggy morning at Canterbury during South Africa’s 1965 tour of England, when the Kent captain Colin Cowdrey persuaded him to entertain spectators deprived of play with a fielding exhibition. Picking the ball up and throwing while running at full tilt, Bland hit the target 12 times out of 15. “They spoilt me by giving me three stumps to aim at,” he said. “I always practised with one.”
Bland’s brilliance was no accident. Cricket practice in the 1950s tended to involve a spot of batting in the nets before repairing to the bar, but he stayed outside. An early Rhodesian team-mate recalled: “He would throw at one stump from all angles and distances, hour after hour.” It earned him the nickname “the Golden Eagle”, and even batsmen well aware of his abilities could be surprised.
At Lord’s in 1965, with England looking set to build a big lead, Bland ran out Ken Barrington for 91 with a pinpoint throw. “I knew Colin was great, said Barrington, “but he’s greater than I thought!” Shortly afterwards, Bland repeated the dose. Jim Parks tried to protect the stumps by running between the fielder and the throw, but Bland scudded the ball under Parks’s body and uprooted the middle stump. England’s advantage was kept to manageable proportions, and the match ended as a draw; South Africa won at Trent Bridge, then Bland helped to ensure the series win by hitting 127 in the final Test at The Oval.
Bland had given early notice of his powers in his debut Test series in 1961-62. The New Zealand captain John Reid was enjoying a prolific season, and at Johannesburg had motored to 60 when he unfurled another well-timed shot. It looked a certain four – but, wrote RS Whitington, “diving as if to clutch a low-flying trapeze, Bland held, with both hands to his right side, a cover-drive that blazed from Reid’s bat and should, in all justice, have been a boundary.” The batsman stood for a few seconds in disbelief before applauding.
In all, Bland played 21 Tests, his last being the first match of Australia’s 196667 tour, again at Johannesburg, when he badly injured his knee after crashing into the perimeter fence trying to stop a boundary. He never played international cricket again, although he continued at domestic level for a few more seasons, finishing as captain of Orange Free State in 1973-74.
Team-mates reckoned Bland’s fielding saved between 20 and 30 runs per innings, but he was also an aggressive batsman with a Test average of 49. That included three centuries, the highest an undefeated 144 against England at Johannesburg in 1964-65.
Bland made 10 more centuries in first-class cricket, but his overall average of 37.95 was lower than his Test mark. Some felt he fitted in better with other good players rather than as the star performer trying to lift an often mediocre Rhodesian side. In 1964-65 he was the first batsman to score 1,000 runs in a season in South Africa.
Of Scottish descent, Kenneth Colin Bland was born in Bulawayo in 1938, the son of Brownlee, an accountant with Rhodesian Railways, and his wife Audrey. He excelled in sport at Milton High School and made his first-class cricket debut at the age of 18 in 1956-57, when he top-scored in both innings as Rhodesia were skittled out for 57 and 152 in Salisbury by an England touring team spearheaded by the express bowlers Frank Tyson and Peter Loader. A maiden century followed a year later for the South African Universities team.
After briefly running a sports shop, Bland worked as a coach – of hockey and squash as well as cricket – in South Africa, before moving to England in the 1990s and continuing to coach. As late as 2007 he was sought out by MCC to help teach fielding.
Bland was named as one of Wisden’s Cricketers of the Year in 1966, and when Wisden marked the turn of the millennium by canvassing opinion for their five cricketers of the century, Peter van der Merwe, captain of the 1965 touring team in England, voted for Bland, saying: “He revolutionised the attitude to fielding, and set a standard not yet equalled.”
Colin Bland’s marriage, to Dorothy Cornwall, was on November 11 1965, the day Ian Smith made the Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. Some of the guests arrived hotfoot from the proclamation. She and their two sons survive him.
Colin Bland, born April 5 1938, died April 14 2018