SPECTATOR SPORT
Sticky wicket
Frank Keating
WITH THE cricket writers' annual bun- fight at Lord's last Friday night followed, next day, by Nat West's end-of-term cheques, the grapevine prised out every selectorial secret, and Monday's formal announcement of England's winter touring teams came as very cold news indeed. Long before Nancy's pudding was dished up on Friday evening, the buzz was that David Gower and his new bride (they marry in Winchester Cathedral next week) had been cruelly granted an extended winter's honey- moon. The groom had set his heart on see- ing in the New Year in Bombay. . We may never know if the injudicious Lifting by Fleet Street — pre-publication and pre-selectors' meeting — of a couple of paras in David's autobiography (officially out this week) in which he criticises the England management had any bearing on the decision. At any rate, we hacks at least got something right on Friday night by way of atonement when we presented a new annual award (to the memory of the late and loved colleague, Peter Smith) for gen- eral good-eggery in the game. Only one inaugural winner was possible — David Gower. Almost as sad — personally anyway `,-; as Gower's omission is Jack Russell's. He was Stroud's only Test player in history. As a boy, I played on that same field where Jack was later to learn his sublime acrobat- ics and fly-paper handling. Whenever I pass on the train still, just west of the old hill town, I always crane out of the corridor window to see if anyone's playing up there on the elevated paddock near Stratford Park. There usually is — and, as ever when you pass a cricket pitch on a train, the bowler is always walking back to his mark.
A winter off — on full pay, too, for Jack was contracted by Lord's back in June for the tour — might do him some good. Away from his Test match concentration, he might indulge himself a bit more in his painting. He is really good, and I have just had framed for the sitting-room his lovely, evocative study of a country farrier at work with his bellows and anvil. Like that fellow, Jack the gloveman could yet be the last of his singular line. Alas, David Gower, too.
The rumours hardened that Russell
would be missing out on India once Tony Lewis suggested in the Telegraph that the selectors were looking to choose curry- lovers for the subcontinent — 'Foodwise, Russell is a risk .. . he is known to be a bit choosy, even eccentric, about his daily menu.' So what? Kenny Barrington, I remember, came back from an Indian tour one spring with sackfuls of runs and cen- turies in his suitcase. 'All done on egg-and- chips,' he boasted, that marvellously know- ing grin on full beam. 'For five months and eleven days, that was my total diet. Morn- ing, noon and night, day in, day out, egg- and-chips. Well, put it like this — they can't muck about with eggs, can they, and they can't muck about with chips?'
Things have changed in that respect. Best curry of my life was a dozen or so years ago under a star-strewn sky up at Kanpur in Kipling country — with 'Tiger' Pataudi, the 'Noob' no less. He had lost an eye in a car crash but could still put English bowlers to the sword. 'Tell me, Tiger,' I asked the one- eyed monarch, 'how long after the accident did you know you would still be able to bat?' His good eye out-twinkled the stars up there. 'As soon as,' he said, 'I saw the state of English bowling.'
And that, to be sure, is something that still does not change.
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