Spin bowlers are like good claret: they need time to mature. Good luck Dom Bess
Simon Kerrigan, Zafar Ansari, Mason Crane and now Somerset’s Dominic Bess: you can’t accuse England’s selectors, whoever they may be, of not pursuing a consistent policy with young spin bowlers: toss ‘em in at the deep end and see if they sink or swim. Sinking, sadly, has been more common than swimming. Now it’s Bess’s turn, in what will be only his seventeenth first-class match. One wonders what some players now long retired think of that, Raymond Illingworth CBE, for example.
He first played for Yorkshire in 1951, a few months either way of Dom Bess’s age today. It was seven years before he was in the England side, against New Zealand in 1958. Of course, the spin-bowling cupboard was well-stocked then, not kept by Mother Hubbard as it is today. There was Illy’s fellow Tyke, Bob Appleyard, a great bowler whose career was cut short by serious illness, and there was also Jim Laker. No apprentice spinner was going to replace them. Moreover, even when Illy was picked for England his place was never secure until he was unexpectedly made captain in 1969. He was competing against Fred Titmus and David Allen, fellow off-spinners, both of whom would beat him to a hundred Test wickets.
Talk about the well-stocked cupboard reminds me that Sky commentators the other day were speculating about the best cricketers never to have played a Test for England. Someone came up with Glamorgan’s Don Shepherd, another off-spinner, a shade quicker than Illingworth, Titmus and Allen. He took some 2200 first-class wickets. That’s more, I guess, than this week’s England attack, even with Anderson and Broad leading the way, have taken between them. More than 2000 wickets, but not good enough for a single Test. Dom Bess is lucky to have been born when he was.
Mind you, there were occasions in the old days too when young and inexperienced bowlers were tossed in and then thrown away. Unless Dom Bess as a schoolboy was a student of Wisden he may never have heard of Sam Cook, slow-left-hander from across the county border in Gloucestershire. Way back in the batsman’s glorious summer of 1947 – the year when Denis Compton and Bill Edrich made more than 7000 runs between them – young Cook was picked to play South Africa at Trent Bridge. He took nought or next to nought for plenty, and that was that – no tolerance then, no “must have at least 3 Tests”, (though I think this applies only to batsmen). He was dropped. He would wheel away for another twenty years for his county, getting close to 2000 first-class wickets, but never for England, never again.
Once more however there was no shortage of bowlers of his type. He gave way to the more experienced Jack Young of Middlesex. Then there were the young Lancastrians: little Bob Berry (8 wickets in his first Test, but only two Tests in his career) and his mate Malcolm Hilton, who, at the age of eighteen, became known as “the boy who bowled Bradman.” Neither established himself and soon the slow left-hander role would be disputed by Johnny Wardle and Tony Lock. So, no second chance for Sam Cook.
It used to be accepted that spin bowlers were like a good claret, needing time to mature. In theory this makes sense; there are always tricks to be learned, guile to be added to a young bowler’s native gifts. Still sometimes the innocence of youth makes those of us who call for experience look silly, or even sillier than usual.
When the West Indies came to in England in 1950 the general expectation was that the danger men in attack would be their three fast bowlers: HH Johnson, PE Jones and Lance Pierre. They were, as it turned out, scarcely needed. The bowling stars of the tour were two nineteen-year-olds, Sonny Ramadhin and Alf Valentine, whose record on arrival was so meagre as to make Don Bess today look like a seasoned old pro. Ramadhin had played only two first-class games – the trial matches for the tour indeed.
Valentine in his NHS spectacles was an orthodox slow left-hander, slightly quicker than some, but Ramadhin, the poor boy who had no first name on his birth certificate just “boy”, was that beloved and baffling being – the “mystery spinner”, bowling both off-breaks and leg-breaks with no discernible change of grip wrist or action. “Don’t know what you’ll make of this boy, Len,” the West Indies wicket-keeper Clyde Walcott said to Len Hutton, “I’ve been keeping to him for weeks now and I’ve still no idea which way it’s turning myself”. Well, maybe.
Frank Keating, favourite sports-writer of my generation, has a story about Ram and Len. When the West Indies played Yorkshire, the boy, having taken a couple of wickets, approached Gerry Gomez, the tour vice-captain (and therefore a white man) and said, “Please, Mr Gerry, will you tell me when the great batsman, Mr L Hutton, comes in. I want to be sure.” “My dear Ram,” Gomez replied, “you’ve just got him out, caught at short-leg.”
As the Italians say: “se non e` vero, e` ben’ trovato”, like so many cricket stories.
Lord’s was where the pair came into their own, and stepped into song and legend, the match there being the West Indies’ first Test victory in England. Calypso Cricket was born as the crowd, belonging to what we have now learned to call the Windrush Generation, streamed on to the pitch, hailing “those two little friends of mine/ Ramadhin and Valentine.”
Ram would torment English batsmen for seven years. Then, at Edgbaston in 1957, after he had taken 7 for not a lot in the first innings, Peter May and Colin Cowdrey adopted different and dubiously ethical tactics in the second. They played forward to anything pitched on or outside the off-stump but used the pad rather than the bat. In those days umpires were reluctant to give an lbw decision against a batsman whose foot was well down the wicket, and even more so when Ramadhin was bowling as the umpire has no more idea than the batsmen as to which way the ball might turn.
At the time, listening glued to the wireless, I was, in partisan style, delighted by May and Cowdrey’s Grand Defiance; they put on 411, May finishing 285 not out, Cowdrey out for 154. Now the way they played seems rather shocking, even shameful, not quite in “the Spirit of Cricket”, subject of the annual Cowdrey Lecture at Lord’s.
But if May and Cowdrey, batted that day like the most hard-nosed and ruthless professionals, the West Indies captain, John Goddard (white of course, black men not yet being thought capable of captaincy), behaved like an idiot. Either he didn’t fully grasp what May and Cowdrey were up to, or he didn’t care what the effect on his star bowler might be, so he kept Ram bowling and bowling: 98 overs in the innings, 2 for 179. He was never quite the same bowler again. Of course, if there had been DRS in those days, May and Cowdrey would have had to use the bat rather than the front pad in defence and Ramadhin and the West Indies would probably have won the Test.
Well, when young Dominic Bess gets the ball in his hand he won’t have to worry about batsmen choosing to play him with the pad rather than the bat. Even an antediluvian Luddite and “laudator temporis acti” like me can see that not all technology is to be deplored and that the DRS, for lbw at least, is the best thing that has happened for spin bowlers in decades. What’s more, young Bess can be pretty sure he won’t be required to bowl 98 overs in an innings, which, come to think of it, is probably more than he has bowled in county cricket this year, thanks to the ECB’s cockeyed or cynical – take your pick – scheduling.
Meanwhile the best of luck to the young man, let’s hope he swims rather than sinks, and gets a fair run in the England team. He might however spare a thought for another off-spinning son of Somerset, Brian Langford, who took more than a thousand wickets for the county and scarcely came within a whisker of the England team.