Читать книгу Cricket: A Modern Anthology - Jonathan Agnew, Jonathan Agnew - Страница 17

The tipping point of the Bodyline series – the ball that felled Bert Oldfield – wasn’t bowled to a Bodyline field either. But it didn’t matter. The climate was so fevered that Bill Woodfull, the Australian Board of Control and even those who paid to watch were blind to, and unable to discriminate between, genuine fast bowling and Bodyline – even when Jardine, the auteur of it, didn’t deploy a leg-side field. It became impossible for them to distinguish legitimate aggression from the tactic itself. Whatever the strength of the evidence – and however clear that evidence might be – the accused was always going to be Harold Larwood, exposed to a spillage of hate, and the verdict against him was always going to be guilty.

Larwood noticed on his first trip to Australia that one of every three or four balls skimmed off the surface of pitches and that the bounce was unpredictable. ‘There was no real need to dig it in,’ he said. ‘The bounce occurred naturally – especially with the new ball. You never really knew how high it might be.’

Oldfield was on strike when Jardine took the new ball, which he lobbed to Larwood. Oldfield had made 41 impressive runs, frequently pulling Larwood through mid-wicket. The delivery that struck him was short and dropped a foot outside off stump. He decided to step across to hook or pull again, lost sight of it because of the low sightscreen and mistimed his shot. He played blindly and too soon, and got an edge that flew into the right side of his forehead – just below the hairline. The ground began to slide away from him. Oldfield knew immediately that if the ball had struck him on the temple ‘it would have been the end for me’. He moved in rapid, short jerky steps from the crease. His legs collapsed beneath him, everything spun – the picket fence, the ground, the faces in the far distance. In confusion and pain, he tried to take his cap off, and then he put it on again. After he had hit Woodfull, Larwood did nothing more than kick the turf at the bowler’s end, bringing up a small divot, and then turned his back on the scene, as if he didn’t care. This time he dashed up the pitch, his face as white as alabaster. A clammy terror went through him; he feared Oldfield was dead. If the peak of his cap hadn’t broken the trajectory of the ball, he might have been. Oldfield was lucky. He suffered a linear fracture of the right frontal bone. ‘I’m sorry, Bertie,’ said Larwood in blind terror. Oldfield’s eyes were flat and blank, like dark windows. ‘It’s not your fault, Harold,’ said Oldfield eventually in a low moan. ‘I was trying to hook you for four.’ If only Oldfield’s reply could have been broadcast at the moment; or if only the crowd could have heard his view that ‘criticism of Larwood is unjustified’.

As Oldfield went down under the force of the blow, the Oval swelled with anger, and that anger rolled down and across the pitch as a visceral, shrieking roar that ‘frightened’ Larwood. The atmosphere turned sulphurous. Crimson faces, with eyes on stalks like cartoon characters, came to the fence and seemed to press against Larwood’s own face – even though he was more than 30 yards away from most of them. He could feel the crowd’s loathing prickling his skin. There was screaming, and he could see fists clenched into tight balls of hate. ‘I felt,’ he said, ‘as if one false move would bring the crowd down on me.’ If one ‘idiot’ lunged over the fence, he was convinced that thousands would follow and he’d be buried beneath them. He turned to Les Ames, who was equally distressed: ‘If they come,’ he said, his voice breaking, ‘you can take the leg stump for protection. I’ll take the middle.’

The police deployed mounted troopers to ensure order. Contemporary reports talked about the threat of riot and physical violence, and all his life Larwood was convinced that view was valid. On the field, he prayed quietly to himself that it wouldn’t happen. A jug of water and a towel were brought to bathe Oldfield’s bloody, broken head. Woodfull emerged from the picket pavilion gate in a dark suit – his face grim, his stride long, purposeful and bristling, his legs and arms working furiously to get him to his stricken colleague. There’s no question that Woodfull’s sole concern was the welfare of his wicket keeper. He was a loyal, principled man, and he would have seen it as his duty as captain to be alongside the wounded Oldfield. But the sight of him in such sensitive circumstances – solid and slightly aggressive, like a marching soldier heading for the front line – was inflammatory. Here was Woodfull, who everyone now knew abhorred Bodyline and was sickened by it, emerging as the gallant focus of the opposition to the tourists’ tactics; white knight to Jardine’s black.

Larwood lay on his side near his bowling mark, tossing the ball up in the air with his right hand, as if casually flicking a coin on a street corner. Waiting for his panicky heart to slow, he began picking at dry stalks of grass and tried to give the impression that the noise – so extreme he could barely think – and the stream of insults didn’t worry him. But his stomach was churning, and there was a rough, dry taste in his mouth as he watched Woodfull slowly guide Oldfield off the field.

Larwood got to his feet gradually, as if any sudden movement might provoke the crowd, and the England fieldsmen returned to the same positions for the new batsman, Bill O’Reilly. ‘I reckon it took me ten minutes to get in and to shape to the first ball,’ remembered O’Reilly. ‘I wouldn’t have minded if it had taken me twenty minutes.’

Jardine displayed what Larwood called ‘cold courage’. He looked unflappable, as if just waiting for a lightning storm to pass. ‘I don’t know what was going through his mind,’ said Larwood, ‘but he seemed so calm.’ Jardine gestured with a nod of his head to check whether Larwood was composed enough to bowl. As he began his run, the crowd started to count him out in a ghastly shout of ‘one, two, three’ which ended after ten with the cry ‘out, you bastard!’ Their words couldn’t hurt him. England bowled out the shaken Australians for 222.

On the field, Larwood was so commanding that he created an illusion. His wide shoulders and stocky build gave the impression of height. Off the field, he could wander into an Australian bar in his suit and tie rather than his whites and no one recognized him. ‘I’d go in for a quiet drink and hear them say all sorts of things about me. People who’d just seen me play had no idea that I was standing next to them eavesdropping on their conversation. Most Australians thought I was six foot six.’ It explains why at the end of that day’s play the flustered policeman who came into the dressing room to escort him out of the ground had to ask: ‘Which one is Larwood?’ Bill Voce pointed out his friend. ‘What have I done wrong?’ asked Larwood innocently.

Larwood had been called a ‘bastard’ so many times that the word had lost its meaning to him. He came out into the jostling knot of swearing, spitting men in suits, who looked ready to string him from a gibbet. The policeman stood close to his shoulder; Voce followed behind to ward off anyone who might lurch at Larwood from behind. ‘Bastard … bastard … bastard’ was all he could hear. Larwood went back to the hotel and stayed in his room.

As the crow flies, just three miles separate the terraced house where Larwood was born and grew up from Lord Byron’s ancestral home, Newstead Abbey. Setting aside the geography of Nottinghamshire, the poet and the fast bowler have nothing else in common – except for this: Byron awoke one morning to find that his poetry had made him famous. Larwood awoke, the day after striking Oldfield, to find that his bowling had made him infamous. He sat in the lobby and hid behind his newspaper.

Soon the cables began. The Australian Board of Control was thoughtlessly knee-jerk in its approach and intemperate in its language. It didn’t possess sufficient guile to frame an appropriate and subtle policy against Bodyline. It also lacked the cleverness to condemn Jardine strongly without insulting the MCC and the farsightedness to draft a diplomatic plan that might have curtailed the tactics. Rather than resolve the problem, its accusations made it worse. Its first cable to the MCC – sent on 18 January, the penultimate day of the Adelaide Test – fell into the easy trap of relying on the term Bodyline, a word created in the world of journalism rather than cricket, and then of adopting a mildly threatening tone:

Body-line bowling has assumed such proportions as to menace the best interests of the game, making protection of the body by the batsmen the main consideration. This is causing intensely bitter feeling between the players as well as injury. In our opinion it is unsportsmanlike. Unless stopped at once it is likely to upset the friendly relations existing between Australia and England.

The Board of Control made another crass mistake in releasing the telegram as a curt statement to the newspapers at the same time as dispatching it in a huff to Lord’s. It appeared in the Stop Press columns in London before arriving at Lord’s. The subsequent headlines raised the stakes still higher, and pricked the egos of the MCC committee. In its rush simultaneously to reclaim its dignity, communicate its anger and lash out, the Board of Control failed to grasp two fundamentally important things: from half a world away, the MCC’s view of Bodyline was based on accounts in English newspapers, which had been generally positive. If Bodyline was used today, the Test would be live on satellite television. The wickets and major incidents would be seen on an endless loop on news programmes, and played and re-played in slow motion in front of pundits – grizzled ex-pros gathered around a microphone pontificating about it. The newspapers would provide sophisticated graphics of field-placings. The TV cameras would be waiting outside the hospital where Oldfield was taken and the hotel where England were staying. The average-man-in-the-street – in England and Australia – would be canvassed for his views. And Larwood would be pursued for an interview even before leaving the field. He and Bodyline would be in the swirl of ‘instant news’.

In 1932–33, newsreel footage could take up to six weeks to arrive from Australia. Bodyline for the MCC was read about rather than viewed. Also, the phrases in the Board’s cable, such as ‘menace the best interests of the game’ – and certainly the use of the word ‘unsportsmanlike’ – were provocative. At that stage, the MCC saw its duty as supporting its captain and manager. It wasn’t fully aware of the sensitivities Bodyline had pricked, the growing resentment among the Australian public, or the passion that had spurred the Board to write the cable in the first place. The MCC slapped the Australians straight across both cheeks. The opening two lines of its cable, which followed after five days of thinking carefully about what to say, were deliberately wounding:

We, the Marylebone Cricket Club, deplore your cable. We deprecate your opinion that there has been unsportsmanlike play.

The last, very long, line was an exercise in gauntlet-throwing:

We hope the situation is not now as serious as your cable would seem to indicate, but if it is such as to jeopardize the good relations between England and Australian cricketers and you consider it desirable to cancel remainder of programme we would consent, but with great reluctance.

A week later the rattled and disunited Board of Control sent its reply. The truth came to them belatedly, rather like the descending apple that struck Newton. The Board realized that the MCC’s opinion was prejudiced by the fact that it hadn’t seen ‘the actual play’. It could easily shelter behind the irrefutable point that Bodyline did not contravene cricket’s sacred laws; any tawny-coloured copy of Wisden proved that too.

The Board finally understood that it needed to act positively rather than negatively. The Australians appointed a committee to report on how Bodyline bowling could be scrubbed cleanly out of the game and added, rather sheepishly, that ‘we do not consider it necessary to cancel the remainder of the programme’. For one thing, it would have been financial insanity to have done so. As Larwood made clear: ‘Bodyline drew back the crowds.’ The Australians did reiterate that Bodyline was ‘opposed to the spirit of cricket’ – another euphemistic dig at England’s supposed lack of sportsmanship – and said that it had become ‘unnecessarily dangerous to the players’. The Board missed a trick. It ought to have withdrawn the allegation of ‘unsportsmanlike’ behaviour, instead of sharpening it. On 2 February, the MCC was able to bite them again – albeit very politely – when it asked: ‘May we accept … that the good sportsmanship of our team is not in question?’ Unless it was prepared for the sight of the England players packing their bags and walking up the gangplank on the next boat home, the Board had no option but to concede that Bodyline hadn’t been unsporting after all. ‘We do not regard the sportsmanship of your team to be in question,’ its next cable assured the MCC. It had just performed a Tour de France of back-pedalling.

The accusation of unsportsmanlike play – the worst possible insult because it implied cheating – couldn’t be allowed to stand. To have been boneheaded enough to level it in the first place was one thing. To repeat it was more than a slur; it was like the white glove across the face that summoned the recipient to a duel to protect his honour and reputation. The MCC committee was cricket’s high society: titled, ennobled through birthright or distinction, mostly educated at Eton or Harrow and Oxbridge, and politically Conservative. If the MCC committee had been a building, then Gaudi would have built it and given it a modernist twist. It was a grand, elaborate, complex-looking construction which included three Viscounts, one Duke, two Earls, four Lords and three Knights. The President was Viscount Lewisham, a former Tory MP and previously Lord Great Chamberlain of England. His father and grandfather were both past Presidents of the MCC; Lord Hawke dominated English and particularly Yorkshire cricket for half a century and served as President during the First World War; Viscount Bridgeman had been Home Secretary and First Lord of the Admiralty during the 1920s; Sir Stanley Jackson was, like Hawke, a distinguished former Yorkshire cricketer – more than 10,000 runs and 500 wickets – as well as an MP, Chairman of the Conservative Party and Governor of Bengal. And so it went on …

This aristocracy, the Debrett’s of cricket, saw itself as the infallible arbiter of what was and was not cricket. It upheld the values of sporting prowess taught on the lush playing fields of the public schools and had its own clear-eyed view of the proper and correct way to ‘play up and play the game’. Even if it hadn’t, the players, seething against the term ‘unsportsmanlike’, would have rebelled unless the Board withdrew its charge against them. As Larwood recalled: ‘We felt we were in a false position in having to take the field with the stigma of the Board’s term still on us.’ Larwood remembered Jardine’s anxiety both before and after the cables began. The Australian press whipped up several stories about dissent and squabbling among the England camp, dramatically described as ‘being at war with itself’. Maurice Tate was said to have flung beer over Jardine, which Larwood said was untrue. There was supposed to be open hostility towards Jardine’s disciplinarian approach, which was only partly true. As Larwood made clear, any ‘grievances … were not nearly as serious as was made out’ and stemmed not from Bodyline but from the frustration of players unable to force a way into the team. ‘There were players who were unhappy,’ he said, ‘but it was because they couldn’t get into the Tests. Australia’s an awfully long way to go if you don’t get a game.’

At the end of the fifth day of the Adelaide Test, Jardine called a meeting in a private room of the team hotel. There were only two points on the agenda. Should Bodyline/leg theory be abandoned? Should Jardine continue as captain? When Warner was the first to speak, [bowler] Tommy Mitchell told him to sit down and shut up: ‘It’s got nowt to do with you,’ he said. Everyone, however, finally had a say. The players liked the direction and purpose Jardine brought to the series, and the thought of winning the Ashes too. Jardine won his vote of confidence unanimously: ‘a vote for England’ is how Larwood put it. Bodyline would stay. For him, the ends justified the means. His captain’s stiff-upper-lip, win-at-any-cost, grind-the-bastards-down attitude convinced Larwood and others that the Ashes could only be won with Jardine. He was as different as it is possible to be in approach and temperament from the circumspect Woodfull. ‘Jardine might have been unpopular with a few of the players,’ said Larwood, ‘but everybody respected and admired him and many of us liked him.’ Asked to define his qualities, Larwood replied simply: ‘He was ruthless.’

England made 412 in their second innings and smartly removed the Australians – with Oldfield ‘absent hurt’ on the scorecard – for 193. In a win by 338 runs, Larwood finished with match figures of seven for 126. ‘I was quick there,’ he said. ‘People just forget it because of what else happened.’

From Harold Larwood, 2009