SPECTATOR SPORT
Not quite Yugoslav cricket
Frank Keating
ALAS for Yugoslavia that was. If only they had played cricket . . . But, by golly, they did. When Richard West was researching his Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia (long-awaited and published last Monday), he came across this in the files of the Manchester Guardian in the spring of 1877: In the Croat villages just across the Bosnian border (and doubtless the same may be seen in Bosnia itself), I found the lads gathered on the village green playing a game called Lopta or Crivat, which is nothing else but a rudi- mentary form of cricket, with primitive bats, stumps, bowlers, wicket-keepers, fielders, all complete. May one perhaps look forward to the day when Bashi-Bazouk and Rayah shall join their teams in less warlike contest, or even with prophetic eye decipher a challenge from the 'All-Bosnian Eleven' to the Maryle- bone Cricket Club.
That was a paragraph in a dispatch sent back to Manchester by a brilliant young Welshman, Arthur Evans (later the archae- ologist excavator of Knossos), who had been hired by the Guardian's new editor, C. P. Scott, on the strength of his book on the Balkans, published the year before. In fact, Yugoslavia can lay claim to a Test match player, and a good one too—Leonid Durtanovitch, who was born on 13 Febru- ary 1950 at Bitola in Macedonia. He arrived in Australia with his parents as a babe in arms, and by the time he was open- ing the Australian bowling with Dennis Lillee he had become Lennie Pascoe, all- Aussie's favourite Okker.
Lennie played in only 14 Tests (he was a particular hit in Mr Packer's two-year cir- cus), but in every one there was no disguis- ing his volatile and passionate national antecedents. He looked like a warrior down from defending his but in the hills, and he bowled like one, with a devilish ferocity. He disconcerted Boycott more than once the first over he bowled to Sir Geoffrey had him being warned by umpire Bird for five bouncers in the over. Ted Dexter called him a 'a chucker' and Lennie responded by asking Lord Ted if he'd care to examine his action at closer quarters in the nets.
In an early joust he also had Vivian Richards hopping. In the next match at Adelaide (early in 1980), Viv knew he had to seize the initiative. When he walked to the wicket, Lennie sneered, 'Richards, I'm going to have you for breakfast.' The first three balls would have decapitated any other bat. Richards smote each of the grenades off the very hairs of his nose, clean over the midwicket pressbox and out of the ground. After the first, Viv said qui- etly to the infuriated dervish following through, 'Thanks, Lennie, my cornflakes.' The second was 'My toast, Lennie', the third 'My marmalade'.
Undaunted, Durtanovitch-Pascoe contin- ued to be, as Allan Border remarked many years later, 'the worst sledger the game can ever have seen'. David Gower recalls with a grin, 'Lennie was fast all right, but also off his rocker, he really did flip at times.' Mike Brearley: 'He was very fast and often very good, with a slightly fanatical air, aggressive glare and wild Trueman-black hair; early in the tour (1977) we nicknamed him "the Yugoslav Separatist".' His Oz mates called him, simply, `Loosehead'. In Simon Wilde's brisk and sharp new book on modern pace bowling for Willerby Letting Rip, he nicely recalls our Leonid as 'subtle as an oversized man with oversized hands walking down the street with a violin case under his arm'.
On second thoughts, it's a mercy Crivat never did catch on.
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