Читать книгу The Ashes According to Bumble - David Lloyd - Страница 10

Playing in the Ashes would represent the pinnacle of any England cricketer’s career and the opportunity to scale it came bang smack in the middle of mine. Nine years after my debut; and nine years before I retired.

My journey to the very peak of what English cricket has to offer began with a County Championship match on 12 June 1965, against Middlesex at Old Trafford, and has given me reason to chuckle every time I’ve heard the Half Man Half Biscuit song ‘F***in’ ’ell It’s Fred Titmus’ since. It’s probably what I subconsciously thought at the start of every over he bowled to me in my maiden first-class innings.

Some late changes were made to the Lancashire team for that match, and an 18-year-old Lloyd, D, was one of the three call-ups, as much for a couple of impressive displays as a left-arm spinner in Second XI cricket at the start of that season as any ability I had shown with the willow in hand.

I arrived at the crease on the opening day with the scoreboard reading 140 for five, and although I failed to shift the ‘0’ displayed under the number seven slot, I spent an age trying. So much so that I took a salt tablet for cramp before I was dismissed.

My lunging forward to counter Titmus’s off-spin had taken its toll on my tense muscles, you see, because as a young player I was simply following advice from a more experienced colleague in Geoff Pullar. I was grateful for his input, too, as I sat waiting to go out to bat. Geoff’s instructions were to get well forward but to make sure my bat was out in front of the pad to minimise the chance of an inside edge ricocheting up into the air for the preying close fielders. It was a practice I carried through faithfully, but good old Fred got me in the end, and claimed a further eight wickets besides during my debut match.

As starts to professional careers go, mine was fairly barren. Titmus bowled me in the first innings, and I was caught behind off the other spinner Don Bick for another blob in the second. In between, although I claimed a couple of wickets, I dropped nightwatchman Bick, who went on to score 55 and help Middlesex to a useful 77-run lead. After a pair, a costly miss like that in the field, and a modest start to my career with the ball, things could only get better, I suppose.

But while I might not have started as I meant to go on, I certainly finished strongly. To be honest, I had a fun-filled playing career, but it would be untrue to claim I loved every minute of it. Towards the end I lost the enjoyment of turning up for work, a trait that I previously took to be inherent.

It didn’t help my batting that my eyes were no longer what they used to be, and if only I had gone to the optician’s sooner to address a natural deterioration, I might have scored a few more runs in the couple of years when my enthusiasm for cricket waned. I knew I was not seeing the ball well enough either when batting or in the field, and as soon as I got a prescription things improved markedly. So much so that my tally for the summer of 1982 touched upon the 2,000-run mark in all competitions.

But a recurrence of the neck injury that was to rule me out of the final Ashes Test in 1974–75 hastened the end for me the following season. I missed half of it recuperating from its debilitating effects and by the time I did return the club had unearthed some exciting young talents to fill the void.

Amongst them was the swashbuckling Neil Fairbrother, whose performances persuaded me that the club no longer required my services. I notified them of my intention to retire well before the end of the campaign. Somewhat surprisingly, it did not dissuade them from picking me, however, and in contrast to my spluttering start, I went out with a real bang.

My final Lancashire appearance, at Wantage Road, Northampton, saw me open the batting with another left-hander, Graeme Fowler. We were of different generations but both of us hailed from Accrington, and we both hit hundreds in a drawn match with Northamptonshire. It was the perfect time to say goodbye.

Like all good stories, this career of mine had a happy ending, and there was ultimate contentment in the middle too when I was informed that I would be representing my country abroad. Not just anywhere, either.

When I was called up for my maiden England tour, in late August 1974, it is fair to say that I had limited travel experience behind me. I had never been out of Britain for a start, and the most exotic place I had visited on any type of excursion was North Wales. My mum and dad used to favour the Welsh coastline as the destination for our summer holidays, and we would always stay in one Methodist guest house or other. Firstly, because they were cheap and we were far from flush with cash. Secondly, because it gave my dad a chance to sing; one of his passions in life was singing.

The correspondence I had been waiting for to inform me of my selection in the 16-man party to tour Australia and New Zealand arrived while I was playing in a County Championship match for Lancashire against Nottinghamshire. It was in the form of an official letter from the Test and County Cricket Board, penned by Donald Carr. It was a bit like receiving a letter from the Queen: ‘You have been selected to represent England on the MCC tour of Australia … blah de blah de blah …’ In cricket terms it was akin to the royal seal of approval. After I’d confirmed my intention to travel – the letter asked whether I would like to go, and so I had to reply with something enthusiastic like ‘Yeah, I’m up for that!’ – the next thing required of me was to secure a passport. This was an opportunity to take part in the greatest series of them all for an England cricketer: the Ashes.

In those days you were given all your paraphernalia in one leather cricket bag: your England tour blazer, your MCC cap and sweater, and your shirts and trousers all tucked inside. There was no coloured clothing back then, of course, as one-day cricket in its infancy was played in whites, and there was no need for the Velcro pouch on the side to store your Oakleys, either.

However, some kind of goggles would have been pretty useful as it turned out, when we boarded our jumbo jet down under. A Qantas Airlines long-haul flight was quite something in the 1970s. Now, as a novice traveller in his mid-20s I confess I was a little bit wide-eyed. Those eyes were soon narrowing, mind, thanks to the tendency for folk to indulge in their filthy habits. These days it is easy to forget what it was like back then, whenever you travelled on an aeroplane. People would be lighting up their cigarettes all around you, so that when you sat down it was reminiscent of when the lights get switched on for the first time down the front at Blackpool. They would spark up the minute they’d parked their backsides and chain-smoke for the entire journey. Yes, the full 27 hours! Once onboard you couldn’t see a bloody thing; it was like being sat in thick fog for a day.

Oh, did I forget to mention that contrary to the no-expense spared experience that our modern England Test cricketers have laid on for them – the reclining beds, personal gadgets and click-your-fingers waitress service – we were shoved at the back of the big bird to join in the economy chorus of coughing and wheezing? By the end of it we would have made Adele’s voice sound like Shane MacGowan’s.

It was comparable to being stood outside the front doors of a pub these days. Unfortunately, being up at 30,000 feet, we didn’t have a Hesketh Tavern or a Haworth Arms to dive into for some fresh air. One of my pet hates is that – smokers loitering outside boozers, gobbing between drags on their fags. Never really understood where they’re coming from, smokers. Partly due to the fact that I suffered from asthma as a kid, and therefore never felt inclined to try a cigarette, I suppose. I know some of you will be taking a drag as you’re reading this and may find me a bit of a stick in the mud, but please allow a bloke his prejudices in the privacy of his own pages. In my estimation, it’s a filthy habit and I probably couldn’t afford to indulge in it either with the price of a packet of fags these days. Actually, why not go the whole hog on this? They should charge £50 per packet, of course. Then we could all pay less tax.

Anyway, I digress. So here we were, jetting off to represent our country, an international sports team, struggling for breath before take-off. Now take-off was an experience in itself for a flight virgin. Only once previously had I entered an aircraft and that was a sightseeing flight around the Blackpool Tower as a nipper. Never having been up properly before, I sat there considering how on earth we were going to manage it when next thing, this big bird set off like the clappers, and I got my answer. Like anything when you’re trying it for the first time, it took some getting used to, and I just about had when we stopped off at Dusseldorf, Germany, to take some wood on board.

Peering through the smoke rings, and out of the window at healthier-looking clouds than hung around our beaks, I was spellbound by the whole experience, and almost delusional by the time we finally touched down. So imagine how I felt when they told me we had landed in ‘Darwen’. ‘Just down the road from me that, just beyond Blackburn,’ I thought, ‘and it’s taken me more than a day to get here.’ Fancy spending all that time to get a few miles down the road.

Rumour has it that Yorkshire used to do something similar for every pre-season tour during the 1960s – they’d set off from Leeds–Bradford Airport, get up to about 20,000 feet, U-turn just south of Sheffield, circle the region a few times to look down upon famous landmarks such as the white horse at Kilburn and arrive back in Leeds within the half-hour. ‘Because if it’s not in Yorkshire, it’s not worth bloody going,’ they used to say.

Goodness knows why Darwin in the Northern Territory was our first port of call but this was my first disembarkation down under. ‘Cor blimey, these engines don’t half get hot, do they?’ I said as we clambered down onto the tarmac. It took seasoned traveller John Edrich to put me right: ‘That heat you can feel’s not the engines, you pillock, it’s this bloody place!’ You see, I was a bit wet behind the ears as a tourist and unaccustomed to anything other than cloud and mizzle for the first 18 years of my life, so the temperature was severe enough to really take me aback.

The previous England team that had travelled to Australia in 1970–71, under the captaincy of Ray Illingworth, had returned victorious, of course, one of the great (and rare) wins for an England team down under. John Snow was a key figure in that victory, as we know, but subsequently came under something of a cloud, and was not in our party. Another figure missing was Geoff Boycott, and it was his absence to which I owed my chance at international level.

Boycs had not been selected the previous summer, and although there were rumours surrounding his omission I never knew the official reason why. There were all kinds of suggestions made, conjecture in the newspapers that he had been dropped, other reports that he was preoccupied with the organisation of his benefit, but I never knew the truth, and why would I want to know? There was even persistent talk of him falling out with the then captain Mike Denness but I was not in a position to dwell on such matters. What interested me was doing well for England, having been selected as his direct replacement as opening batsman.

As far as I was concerned, he was just out of the reckoning, I had been picked, given the chance to fulfil a dream and play for my country, and everything else went over my head. I was concentrating on the business of scoring runs to better myself, focusing on that red, spherical leather object being hurled down at me from 22 yards – not analysing the personality clashes, or the torment he surprisingly suffered at the hands of the innocuous-looking swing bowler Solkar at the start of that series against India, that may have played some part in providing the initial opportunity.

I had made my maiden Test hundred against India during this initial spell of Boycs’s absence, and followed that up with another in a limited-overs international match at the end of a troubled tour of England by Pakistan. Relations had become quite strained between the teams after the Pakistanis levelled accusations of skullduggery during the Lord’s Test when Derek Underwood bowled them out. If there was any damp around, Deadly was well, deadly, and water had got under the covers. Persistent showers left a wet patch on the pitch, he kept hitting it and they simply couldn’t cope. I was stood at short leg and it was like picking cherries.

Accusations that we were complicit in the state of the pitch were complete and utter nonsense. Pakistan had been ripped apart by Underwood in the first innings on a drying surface after a lengthy downpour on the opening day, and then after we batted to secure a 140-run lead, rain struck again when Pakistan came out to bat for a second time.

It was actually during the rest day of the match, the Sunday, that London was the subject of some major downpours and these continued into the Monday, which meant that when the temporary tent-like covering was removed, the pitch was discovered to be sodden. The rain had seeped through and in these conditions it was a different game altogether.

Deadly bagged a bundle of wickets with his idiosyncratic left-arm-round stuff – six to be precise – when the match finally resumed at around 5pm on the fourth evening. In plunging Pakistan from 192 for three half an hour into play to 226 all out, he took his innings haul to eight and provided match figures of 13 for 71, in addition to setting up a victory target of just 87 runs.

Dennis Amiss and I wiped 27 from that target before the close of play. But our efforts in 10 overs against the new ball were not the focus of attention that night, due to Pakistan manager Omar Kureishi’s utter indignation. Kureishi put in an official complaint in which he accused MCC of ‘negligence’ and ‘incompetence’ in their attempts to cover the wicket. In those days, if it rained once the Test match was underway then the run-ups and edges of the square were protected but the pitch itself was exposed to the elements. On rest days, however, every effort was made to protect it from the elements, and Pakistan argued that they were entitled to be able to bat on a pitch in the same condition it had been in when stumps were drawn on the Saturday evening.

As it happened, we didn’t get on again. Despite re-marking of the pitch during the final session on day five, the rain returned, and the contest, which had become more political than sporting, was abandoned as a draw and a three-Test series was on its way to a 0–0 stalemate. It was a series which bore few runs for me personally but the news I wanted to hear was delivered during a six-wicket win over Sir Garfield Sobers’s Notts. That match concluded on 30 August, and I celebrated with 116 not out in the one-dayer against Pakistan in Nottingham the very next day.