SPECTATOR SPORT
Tigerish to the end
Frank Keating
A DOZEN years ago, I innocently plonked myself and my clobber down on a seat which was surprisingly free in Ade- laide's crowded press box, that charming, splintery row of desks which gently rake up from the mid-wicket boundary. Aus- tralia versus the West Indies. I was a touch late and Vivian Richards, in all his swaggering grandeur, was already ripping into a fuming Dennis Lillee and Lenny Pascoe.
I bid a 'good day' to the hunched, bald and scrawny ancient beside me. The face looked not unlike that Trog portrait of old Beaverbrook as a wizened prune. He answered my greeting with a momentary glance of appalled disdain from his watery spaniel's eyes and he just growled a sneering, throat-clearing `garrumph'. I had quickly realised why the seat had been empty. Out in the middle, Richards's string of extravagant strokes continued to scatter the seagulls and pepper the pickets. The throng was awe-struck. Not my neigh- bour. He just garrumphed or sighed, totally unimpressed, as each sumptuous retort exploded off the West Indian's bat. Why should he be moved by this young foreign 'slogger'? Anyway, Lillee can't bowl for toffee. As for the Australian fielding, well, even groaning sighs failed him there, and he buried his head in his long, purply-veined, parchmenty-skinned old hands. The younger generation would get no change out of him.
He was, of course, Bill O'Reilly, of the Sydney Morning Herald and cricket's immortal hall of fame — 'the Tiger', whose death at the age of 87 was announced on Tuesday. In 27 Test matches up to the 1939 war he took 144 wickets at 22 apiece with an always aggressive, fast-spitting, leg-break mix- ture — and then became an equally fast- spitting, truculent and unmissable pam- phleteer of the back pages.
Bradman considered him the best bowler of his time — 'to hit him for four would arouse a belligerent ferocity, almost like disturbing a hive of bees'. Cardus thought he was better than Barnes as the bowler of the century because O'Reilly's repertoire included a hissing cobra-strike of a googly. (Sir Neville put this point to Barnes once: `It's quite true, I never had the googly,' admitted Barnes, then, after a pause and a twinkle in the keen steely eyes, he added, 'I never needed it.') I never saw O'Reilly bowl, of course, but have enough old sepia newsreel on video to get the message.
He approached the wicket with no nonsense, no finery — all venom and malevolence. Just like his journalism and his views on modern cricketers. Robert- son-Glasgow described his run-up as 'a sort of fierce galumph, the right forearm working like a piston, at delivery the head ducked low as if to butt the bats- man at the bowler's end onto the stumps'.
On the Tiger's two tours to England, in 1934 and 1938, he topped the bowling averages both times with over 100 wick- ets. His last Test against England was at the Oval and Hutton's 364. He was, apparently, the only Australian fielder not to shake young Hutton by the hand. `I had 364 reasons for not doing so,' he said afterwards.
The last thing I ever read of O'Reilly's was a few weeks ago in the new book Len Hutton Remembered: 'What do I remem- ber, of the 364? I remember that I did 13 /2 hours of hard yakker out there and bowled 85 overs. Nowadays they get big money for bowling ten, and if they bowl over ten they're thrown out of the union.'
Tigerish to the end. A true great has been caged at last.
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