Sheffield Cricket Lovers' Year Book 2014

34 Sheffield Cricket Lovers’ Society Over the years fears have been raised more than once about the possible extinction of various forms of spin bowling. At one time it seemed that hardly an hour went by without somebody on Test Match Special lamenting the decline of wrist-spin, or wondering when the West Indies would stop their ghastly all-pace experiment and return to the days when Raphick Jumadeen got in the team for no good reason other than that people said you had to have a spinner in the side come what may. Strangely, while all this hullabaloo about preserving the googly-merchants was going on nobody noticed that another ancient breed of bowler was gradually dying out. I refer, of course, to the Medium-pacer, the trundler, the dobber, the man who always put it “there or thereabouts” and let nature take care of the rest. In the past decade such bowlers, once a mainstay of –in particular – English, Indian and New Zealand cricket have more or less gone completely. I for one lament their passing. Admittedly, I didn’t always feel that way. Indeed there were times when I failed fully to celebrate the endeavors of Geoff Arnold and Peter Lee , and may even have voiced the opinion that late-period Ken Higgs was boring. But I am older now, and a good trundler is something you only come to appreciate later in life – like comfort-fit slacks. With the wisdom of years, I can see now, for instance, that the attack of Viv Richards’s West Indies team was unbalanced not by the lack of a top-class spinner, but by the clear absence of an heir to Vanburn Holder, whose elegantly bowed legs and sensible insistence on line and length above pace and bounce brought a hint of the King’s Singers to calypso cricket. I can see now why some of the gentlemen who sat around me at Headingley and Scarborough would greet the sight of Vanburn replacing Andy Roberts with the contented sigh of tired gardeners sniffing the scent of evening drizzle after a hot August day. You could relax with Vanburn. “I just bowled line and length” he once summarized. Quite right too. Back in the 70s there was a profusion of books about pace bowlers – The Fast Men by David Frith was one of my favorites as a teenager – and recently a similar number of books have appeared about spinners. Nobody, though, gives the medium-pacer much shelf space. I determined to rectify the situation a year or so ago, proposing a book, Dobbers – The Untold Story of the Cricket Men Nobody Really Notices, to my agent. Sadly he didn’t share my enthusiasm. “Hmm,” he said after I’d outlined the idea, “but aren’t seamers a bit, you, know, dull?” “Indeed,” I responded cheerily, “as dull as mashed potato”, and then, in case he should get the wrong idea, added, “Back in the days when mashed potato was grey and lumpy, nobody had thought of adding olive oil and wild garlic, and even the addition of butter was considered the sort of sensual excess that would lead inexorably to married couples having sexual congress on the sitting-room carpet, on weekday afternoons. But that,” I continued with what I recognize was a hint of madness, “is what makes it so brilliant. I mean, what could be more banal than getting all excited about Michael Holding or Muralitharan? It’s like enjoying sunshine. On the other hand it takes a The Trundlers By HARRY PEARSON twitter: @scloverssociety