SPECTATOR SPORT
Final innings
Frank Keating
SURELY we cannot have another heat- wave summer. So how will the beguiling, burnished batting of the Indian, Azharud- din, begin to look at the bleak racecourse ground in Derby when those Pennine zephyrs zap into his very bones for day after day? Ditto Salim Malik at Essex when the wintry winds whip off the choppy, grey eastern sea? Will Waquar's spearing in- dippers still spread havoc under the gaso- meters when the wickets are dead and damp? Whatever the weather, time your trips to Worcester to relish the clean hitting of Hick and Moody in upright and resplen- dent tandem with Botham to follow. What joys in store there.
From the homegrown nursery, I'll be studying the small print at breakfast-time, particularly for the early form of such tenderfoot tyros as the three Marks — Ilott, of Essex; Crawley, of Nottingham- shire; and, of course, Ramprakash, of Middlesex. Mark the name in every sense.
How span-spick clean and green-green- grassed begins each new season of cricket; how expectant, fresh-faced and daisy- chaining is the anticipation of these new boys of summer like the Ilotts and Craw- leys. I wonder how many of these flannel- led, sun-browned, gay young men will, at the end of it all, commit suicide? No jest. Probably cricket's most respected histo- rian, archivist, and hoarder of trivia is David Frith. He has just published a remarkable book, By His Own Hand (Stanley Paul, f15.99), a study of some 80 cricketers' suicides.
The game, it seems, attracts the affec- tion of men who are prone to declare their own innings closed. Frith tells not only of the celebrated self-toppers like Stoddart and Trott, Leary and Gimblett and Robertson-Glasgow (each of whose play, with wretched irony, suggested a bonny love of life), but also of shrinking Minor Counties' violets who, seemingly happy, daydreamed the innings away under the high suns of summer down at fine leg or at squarish third man. In his (it is to be hoped not too prescient) striking foreword to Frith's masterpiece of melancholy, Somer- set's heir to Gimblett's place in the batting order, Peter Roebuck, admits: County cricket, iri particular, is a private
world and to leave it is to leave a community of monastic self-absorption. Nor is there any second, third, or fourth division to enter, no subsidiary world in daily contact with the county scene. An English county cricketer lives an all-or-nothing life, which is why so many turn to umpiring, coaching or writing when their skills begin to fade. Everything else is darkness.
Darkness, eh? Take it easy in there, Pete, take it easy, kid. Not that batsmen have been more likely to pull down their own blinds. Only a handful of stumpers though. And not all English by any means. I'd forgotten, or never knew, that three chip- per Aussies of my boyhood had done the deed: Jack Iverson, the spinner with the mystery grip who bamboozled Freddie Brown's lot in 1950-51; chirpy, brave Jim- my Burke; and a predecessor as opener, swaggeringly carefree Sid Barnes. Jack blew his brains out; Jimmy went for the heart, careful to miss the note he'd pinned to the lapel of his best suit; Sid lay on his sofa and swallowed pills — or, as it was put to Keith Miller, a former business partner, by a cop next day, 'Hey, Nugget, your mate's just knocked himself off!'
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