The Shorter Wisden 2013 (16 page)
Read The Shorter Wisden 2013 Online
Authors: John Wisden,Co
Robinson strikes me as the personification of Yorkshire cricket’s character. In approach, opinion and belief he also represents the way in which Yorkshire are seen by outsiders – and
how they relish seeing themselves: earnest, thrifty, ruthlessly efficient and hard-bitten, intolerant of failure and possessing a never-give-summat-away-for-nowt attitude that no dictionary
definition of competitiveness has ever adequately captured. Those attributes are not, and never were, exclusive to Yorkshire; but Yorkshire – through Robinson and his ilk, before and
afterwards – embodied them more than the other counties, and treated the game with the greatest profundity.
The barometer is proof. Robinson thought minutiae mattered. He’d been schooled to explore and exploit
any
advantage, however minuscule. He was reminding Bowes of his duty to do
the same, thus perpetuating the Yorkshire credo forged when Victoria was Queen, and “Spy” decorated
Vanity Fair
with caricatures of Grace and Spofforth. It hinged on two
connecting philosophies: the impossibility of being
too
eager to win, and the indisputable fact that nothing else bloody mattered. However hoary and tattered by overuse, it is obligatory
to quote that sentence synonymous with Yorkshire – “we don’t play for fun” – simply because the stony phrase is convenient shorthand to explain their approach without
the need for much elaboration. The more interesting aspect is how it became the first tenet of their faith.
The judgment of posterity constantly shifts. But Yorkshire are what they are because of Lord Hawke. When he became captain in 1883 every one of the regular XI counted as an alcoholic except
Louis Hall, who was a teetotaller. Sir Home Gordon, Hawke’s bosom buddy, described Yorkshire as “easy-going, self-indulgent”, and “far too polite to run a man out”.
Hawke turned them into the Championship’s first superpower through the imposition of his will and personality, which was benevolently patriarchal on the surface and harder than metamorphic
rock beneath. Gordon insisted he once heard a Yorkshireman triumph in a cricketing debate over a Lancastrian with the finality of this declaration: “I know more than you anyhow, for
I’ve shook ’ands with Lord ’Awke and that’s more than you ever did.”
The keystone of Hawke’s success was a move so obviously sensible that you can only suppose his predecessors must have considered it as well, but were too timid or bone idle to implement
the thought. Hawke decided to treat a pro like a pro, as opposed to some inferior subspecies. He secured winter payments for them and awarded “mark money” (dependent on his own scoring
system of achievement) and decent bonuses to those he called “my dear boys”. Just as a gentleman ought to do, he spoke about the morality of playing “in the proper spirit”
and the need for “sportsmanlike unselfishness”. But Hawke made Yorkshire slickly businesslike and gave them a corporate-style uniformity of purpose. When circumstances demanded, he also
knew how to handle the axe: the boozers and the backsliders were got rid of – Hawke just cut them down. He sacked Joe Preston, so fond of his ale that he died at 26; Hawke’s diagnosis
of the cause was the coldly euphemistic “he had too many friends”. Ted Peate went too, after gluttonous overindulgence caused him to swell to 16 stone. Also booted out was the
perpetually inebriated Bobby Peel, who – it was claimed – tried to bowl from stump to sightscreen in a beery fug after assuring Hawke: “I’m in fine fettle this morning,
m’lud.” Peel is said – surely apocryphally – to have then urinated against the same sightscreen on his slow, zigzagged slump back to whence he had drunkenly come.
The inking of the plates to produce John Wisden’s first Almanack and the official formation of Yorkshire were as near as dammit simultaneous and nicely serendipitous.
Wisden
has
always been there to record that life at Yorkshire is seldom in equilibrium, and that their politics are complicated and often acrimoniously personal. In a game of word association the instant
response to the utterance of “Yorkshire cricket” is likely to include the following: rows, rifts, rivalries, recriminations, upheavals, crises, civil wars. Even Hawke experienced these
in the arm-wrestle between Leeds and Sheffield to determine which represented the beating heart in the Yorkshire body. This wasn’t a polite kerfuffle of Victorian manners. In the 1890s, there
were calls to sack a committee that reformers condemned as “effete” and “out of touch”, which is archaeological proof – were any still needed – that trouble at
t’mill brewed well before the more recent winters of discontent.
Everyone is entitled to be stupid on occasions; but Yorkshire, it must be said, have been guilty of abusing the privilege because of their tendency to always have breath to spare for a good
argument. Think of the early to mid-1950s, when dressing-room disharmony – as much as the Surrey of Lock and Laker – left the county barren of titles. Think of the end of that decade,
when Johnny Wardle dabbled with high explosives by disputing the decisions of his captain, Ronnie Burnet, and inevitably blew himself up. “Doesta think tha’s been a fool, Johnny?”
asked a pitman bluntly when Wardle spoke at a South Yorkshire Miners Institute in the aftermath of his sacking. “Aye, I have,” he confessed. And think of some of the unedifying
spectacles of the late 1960s, the 1970s and the early to mid-1980s, which led to the club looking like a ramshackle vehicle bearing an illustrious name. A lot of grown men, who ought to have known
better, behaved like the stereotypical I’ve-had-it-tougher-than-thee Yorkshireman satirised by
Monty Python
.
Headingley became the cricketing equivalent of the House of Medici. Divisive scheming obstructed the business of winning the Championship. The web of macho, ideological power struggles and
score-settling became so convoluted that the club strangled themselves with it. The bickering sounded puerile and self-serving then, and most of the decisions taken seem to defy every principle of
common sense when analysed now.
Close was abruptly given the option of resignation or the sack after leading them to four Championships and two Gillette Cups. “How long have I got to decide?” he asked. “Ten
minutes,” came the reply. The committee had already prepared different statements to accommodate whichever answer he gave. In shock, Close later vomited. Illingworth was regarded as a rebel
for wanting the security of a contract, and despatched with the curt, cruel instruction that he could “take any other bugger” with him when he left. John Hampshire found the sour
atmosphere intolerable, and announced he was off to discover “if it was possible once more to find joy… in cricket”. Trueman felt so isolated from Yorkshire – a jobsworth
attendant even denied him access to the car park – that he wouldn’t walk through the gate on principle.
In the matter of Boycott, the county seemed never to tire of hearing their own voice; nor did Boycott himself. His admirers worshipped him from the prayer mat. His detractors regarded him as the
Tudors regarded Richard III. This provided splendid entertainment for the sort of voyeur who instinctively rubbernecks at a motorway pile-up. My favourite quote from the interminable period when
the pro- and anti-Boycott factions were trying to reduce one another to pulp didn’t come from a player or an official. Illingworth, back at Headingley as team manager, was told by Mrs
Illingworth, sick of the strife and animosity her husband had to endure: “The day you come home from Yorkshire and tell me you’re finished will be the happiest of my life.”
Yorkshire struggled to cope with their loss of supremacy and had what was tantamount to a full breakdown. If there’s a plea of mitigation to be made for those torturous seasons, it is
this. No county feel the weight of their past as Yorkshire do, or the obligation to maintain their reputation. No county have such a regal sense of entitlement. And no county so strongly believe
that identity, ego, independence and self-worth are at stake in their cricket. As a polymath, John Arlott could express this sentiment and mean it: “I’ve enjoyed cricket more and served
it better for realising it was never the be-all and end-all of everything.” No one ever said that in Pudsey.
The fact that Yorkshire have won only one Championship in 44 years makes winning another urgent. The current president, Mr G. Boycott of Fitzwilliam, is adamant about that. On assuming office he
declared: “I know what the members value and that is Championship cricket.” He was repeating only what Hutton and Sutcliffe and Rhodes had said before him; and what Hawke said before
any of them. But I can hear someone – who long ago toted a barometer across God’s Own Country purely for the sake of his beloved club – saying a loud “Amen” in
agreement.
Duncan Hamilton is the award-winning author of
Harold Larwood: The Authorized Biography of the World’s Fastest Bowler.
STRONG YORKSHIRE, STRONG ENGLAND?
C
HRIS
W
ATERS
When eyebrows were raised over the make-up of the England squad for his first Test as chairman of selectors, Raymond Illingworth of Pudsey was unequivocal: “Just tell
them that a strong Yorkshire is a strong England.” Among his choices were the Yorkshire pair of Craig White and Richard Stemp, along with Worcestershire’s Bradford-born wicketkeeper
Steve Rhodes.
It was hard to be entirely sure whether Illingworth’s remark was tongue-in-cheek, but it served to cement a cliché. For the idea that a strong Yorkshire does indeed mean a strong
England is so deeply embedded in the game’s culture that, in some parts of the country – especially north of Derbyshire and south of Durham – it practically passes as
established fact.
Perhaps it would have been churlish to point out that, by the time Illingworth trotted out the mantra ahead of the Trent Bridge Test against New Zealand in 1994, Yorkshire and England had
provided a grim twist. Yorkshire finished 13th that summer, and no higher than eighth between 1981 and 1995 – a period when first West Indies, then Australia, were the strapping Blutos of
international competition and England more like Popeye shorn of his spinach. But has the national side really done better in those eras when Yorkshire have prospered, and vice versa? Or is it a
myth to rival the Cottingley Fairies?
As with many a cliché, no one seems to know where it actually comes from. Enquiries to eminent cricket historians elicit blank responses and tentative replies. “Didn’t
someone like Lord Hawke say it?” Possibly. But if Ashes supremacy is the yardstick of English strength, the cliché is manifestly more fiction than fact, even dating back to
Hawke’s day. When Yorkshire achieved their best run under his captaincy, with four titles in five years around the turn of the century, England lost four successive Ashes series, despite
fielding Yorkshire’s George Hirst, Wilfred Rhodes, Jack Brown, Stanley Jackson and Ted Wainwright.
And when Yorkshire won four consecutive titles in the roaring ’20s, England began the decade with three botched Ashes campaigns, even though their side included Yorkshiremen Herbert
Sutcliffe, Percy Holmes, Abe Waddington and Arthur Dolphin. In the not-so-roaring ’30s, when the county secured seven Championships, Australia relinquished the Ashes only once, during
Bodyline. In those years, Yorkshire supplied Len Hutton, Maurice Leyland, Bill Bowes, Hedley Verity and Arthur Wood, all of whom played when Hutton made 364 at The Oval in 1938.
A more apposite theme continues to emerge: “When one team is strong, the other is not.” When England regained the Ashes in 1953 after a 20-year gap, it was the first of three
successive wins against Australia, which along the way featured Hutton, Willie Watson, Bob Appleyard, Johnny Wardle and – when he was not in the disciplinary doghouse – Fred Trueman.
Yet the Championship decade was dominated by Surrey, who claimed seven straight titles.
Australia regained the urn in 1958-59, before grimly holding on to it for another five series, yet in 1959 Yorkshire chose the moment to embark on a run of seven titles in ten seasons, a
period in which Trueman, Illingworth, Brian Close and Geoffrey Boycott all represented their country. That sequence ended in 1968, when Australia kept the urn with a 1–1 draw in England.
Sure enough, by the time England next seized the Ashes, under Illingworth in 1970-71 – they went on to relinquish them only three times until 1989 – Yorkshire’s fortunes were
already on the wane.
Even as England achieved the most celebrated Ashes series victory of all, in 2005, Yorkshire were competing in the Championship’s lower flight. Four years earlier, the club had won their
only title since 1968 at a time when – guess what? – England had not long fallen to the foot of the unofficial world rankings. And when England climbed to No. 1 in 2011, Yorkshire
were relegated. The Test side two summers ago contained only one Yorkie – Tim Bresnan, the personification of a strong Yorkshireman, if not a strong Yorkshire.
Debatable at best, delusional at worst, the famous old saying grows increasingly inapt. Nowadays, how can any county – not just Yorkshire – be strong if England spirit away their
best players and systematically erode the significance of the Championship? To judge by the composition of contemporary England teams, perhaps it is time to modernise the maxim. How about:
“A strong South Africa is a strong England”?
Chris Waters is cricket correspondent of the
Yorkshire Post.
His book
, Fred Trueman: The Authorised Biography,
was
Wisden’s
Book of the
Year in 2012
.
THE LEADING CRICKETER IN THE WORLD, 2012
G
REG
B
AUM
At Bangalore in 2004, after the 23-year-old Michael Clarke had made a fizzing century on debut for Australia, team-mate Darren Lehmann declared he should play every Test for
the next ten years, even if it meant forfeiting his own place. At Brisbane six years later, when Clarke stood in as one-day skipper against England, he became the first Australian captain in living
memory to be booed by a home crowd. In 2012, he passed 200 four times in Tests, a feat not achieved even by Don Bradman – and the hallelujahs rang out.