Touched by Greatness

Andrew Murtagh

Description

Tom Graveney, by virtue of his peerless batsmanship, gracious manner and longevity in the game, is now a national treasure - the favourite cricketer of so many fellow players, enthusiasts and aficionados. He opened the batting for England with Len Hutton early in his career and ended it batting with Geoffrey Boycott, thus straddling two generations. After retirement, he shone as a BBC commentator and latterly served as president of his beloved Worcestershire and of the MCC. Oft misunderstood, the character behind the legendary raconteur's affable facade is now effortlessly unlocked in this first-hand account of his life by close friend and fellow former professional cricketer, Andrew Murtagh. The details of many incidents, anecdotes and controversies have never before been shared - sackings and banishments, redemption and a glorious international 'second coming' - revealing Graveney as a fount of cricketing insight and as a true entertainer, at the fireside as at the crease.

Sujets

• Críquet
• Cricket

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781909626249
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2014
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Andrew Murtagh, 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, sold or utilised in any form or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the
British Library.
ISBN 978-1-909626-24-9
eBook conversion by eBookPartnership.com
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Spiritual Home
Acknowledgements
1. Early Days 1927-45
2. Army 1945-48
3. The Young County Player 1948-51
4. Playing For England 1951-54
5. Family Life And Cricket 1950-61
6. Seasoned International - The First Incarnation 1954-59
7. The Day Job - Gloucestershire 1954-60
8. County Champions - Worcestershire 1961-70
9. Out Of The Wilderness - England 1966-69
10. Life After Cricket 1970-94
11. Mr President 1994-2006
Epilogue: Tom Graveney
Photographs
Foreword
by Sir Michael Parkinson
O ld men forget, but not everything. We have a secret hoard of memories stored like golden guineas which the passing years cannot contaminate.
If I close my eyes and think of all I have seen in a lifetime of playing and watching cricket, I see Fred Trueman bowling to Tom Graveney at New Road, Worcestershire, in 1962. Tom had just qualified for the home county and he celebrated the move by scoring 1,539 runs at an average of 48.09. At the same time, playing for England against the Pakistan tourists, he scored 401 runs at an average of 100.25. In the same season Fred Trueman was England s main wicket-taker in Tests with 22 at under 20 each and in county cricket 106 wickets at 17.82.
But statistics are not why I remember that day. It was the perfect setting for Tom Graveney. His elegance at the crease and his languid strokeplay deserved the setting of cathedral and river. And Fred, for all the fire and brimstone of his personality, had an action of such purity and grace that watching him bowling and Tom batting in that setting was a never-to-be-forgotten sight. Tom batted better than Fred bowled and his 80-odd on a seaming wicket was a masterpiece.
Twenty years later and Tom Graveney, now in his 60s and long retired, came to my local cricket club at Bray in Berkshire. His son Tim was first-team captain and we were having a fun game to raise funds. Tom sportingly agreed to turn up and venture into the middle although he had not played for a good number of years. I was umpiring as he took guard and hoped our first bowler, a tearaway from Australia, might have enough sense to give Tom a courtesy one off the mark. At it was he came charging in at full tilt and bowled a quick bouncer which Tom swayed away from and then gave the bowler what is often described as an old-fashioned look.
A further bouncer followed but this time Tom moved forward and inside the line and flicked the ball into the adjoining churchyard for six. The next ball went even further into the gravestones and when the bowler pitched up Tom unfurled (there is no other way to describe it) a cover drive of such grace and elegance he should have been wearing a powdered wig and silk knee breeches.
At the end of the over our bowler said, Jeez, the old bugger can bat. Who is he?
Tom Graveney, I said.
It meant nothing.
Who did he play for? asked the bowler.
Gloucester, Worcestershire and England, I said.
I cannot repeat the Aussie s reply.
If I analyse my most lasting memories of cricket they all feature players of graceful manner. Tom Graveney in full flow was effortless and unfeigned. There were no curlicues or flourishes. The beauty of his play was its simplicity, its lack of vanity. What you learn about style is it can t be taught. Those who try look like frauds. Those who possess such a gift simply can t help it.
Andrew Murtagh has written Tom s story with thorough research and sympathetic understanding of a man who was often misunderstood and sometimes controversial except in one regard: everyone agreed he was a batsman of unique style, and not the kind of cricketer who fades from memory.
Preface
I saw Tom Graveney bat once. I wonder how many times that observation has been made the length and breadth of the cricketing world. I have heard it often enough during the course of writing this book. And the odd thing is that it is usually accompanied by a glazing over of the eyes and a settling of the facial expression into a warm glow of nostalgia, rather like the recollection of a pleasant meal, together with a nice bottle of wine, during a particularly intense holiday romance.
Clearly, to the transfixed onlookers, a Graveney innings was much more than the sum of its parts. It transcended the number of runs that he had scored, even the context of the match in which it had been played. Frequently the teller of the anecdote was hazy about the exact details of the game itself - It was against the Australians in 1956 or was it the West Indies in 1957? Anyway, he was batting at Lord s oh, hang on a minute, was it the Oval? Never mind - what I remember is the cover drive for four
Sport can do this to you. A moment of supreme skill, matchless artistry, breathtaking athleticism and surpassing grace can make you blink in disbelief and the memory of it stays with you forever.
Can it therefore be taken as read that a thing of transient beauty can be more important than the result of the game? Can a delicate chip over the goalkeeper, an outrageous dummy by a wing three-quarter, a cross-court bullet of a backhand take on any the more or less significance if the match is lost?
The long-suffering fan, ardent for success, would say no. But the two elements - the artistic and the prosaic - do not have to be mutually exclusive. Kelly Holmes, when she won Olympic gold in the 1,500 metres in Beijing in 2008, seemed to be floating effortlessly over the track while her competitors huffed and puffed and went backwards. The Spanish football team won the World Cup by simply passing the ball to each other, weaving intricate patterns all over the pitch, while their opponents chased shadows. Roger Federer is like liquid as he moves around the court, producing elegant winners, barely breaking sweat.
It is said that Tom Graveney never played an ugly stroke. A rash one perhaps, or a false one, or even not one at all, but never one that offended the eye. The trouble is that when a stylish batsman gets out playing a languid shot, he is accused of being loose and failing to concentrate. Whereas, if the stroke results in the ball being caressed to the boundary, a collective sigh of appreciation goes up from the spectators, who turn to each other and say, Did you see that ?
A batsman of more recent vintage but of similar gracefulness to Tom Graveney was David Gower. He suffered from the same sort of criticism in his career, that he was too nonchalant at times, but he always had his answer ready. I scored 8,231 Test runs, he would retort. So I must have been doing something right. Tom s response to the charge that he was too carefree for the rigours of Test cricket is not so pointed but equally pertinent. I scored a few, he grinned. And I didn t bat too badly, did I?
I should say so. By a few , he meant 47,793 first-class runs, with 122 centuries. Of course, bald statistics do not tell the whole story. In Tom Graveney s case, it is not just the runs on the board, nor the numbers in the record books, which cricket lovers prefer to remember, but the manner in which he made them.
Nevertheless, it is illuminating to keep his career figures in mind when we try to assess his impact on the history of post-war English cricket. He was a serious player in a golden age of English bats-man ship, who started his England career batting with Len Hut ton and ended it with another Yorkshireman, Geoff Boycott. The runs he scored were beautifully crafted but, my goodness, they were as invaluable as anyone s to the cause of Gloucestershire, Wor ces ter shire and England. He was as worthy of his place at the top table of English batsmen in the 1950s and 60s as Hutton, Compton, May, Cowdrey, Dexter and Barrington and anyone else you care to mention.
But was he a great batsman, as opposed to a very, very good Test player? Greatness as a sobriquet is much bandied about - too much, one might say - and we need to be quite clear what we are talking about here. Many English kings were given epithets - Ethelred the Unready, Edward the Confessor, William the Conqueror - but only one, Alfred, was termed the Great, for rather more, one imagines, than his expertise in the kitchen.
In most people s estimation, Shakespeare was a great dramatist but could the same be said of his contemporaries - Marlowe, Jonson, Kyd - who arguably wrote great plays too? Beethoven was a great composer but Elgar could bang out a tune to knock your socks off and Haydn wrote nearly as many symphonies as Graveney scored hundreds. Were they great too? All of a sudden, defining greatness throws up all sorts of caveats and complications.
There are a certain handful of cricketers in the history of the game who, without argument, are placed in the pantheon, the elite, the premier league: Grace, Bradman, Hammond, Sobers, Warne and then it starts to get tricky. Barnes? Headley? Hobbs? Hutton? Pollock? Tendulkar? Richards (Viv or Barry)? Lara? Muralitharan? Already, I hear you taking issue with me and arguing the case for other, equally worthy candidates. In the end, of course, it is no more than a pleasant, but pointless, exercise. Does it really matter? And how can you compare one player to another from different eras? Or a bowler to a batsman?
Was Tom Graveney a great batsman? Some say he was. Others baulk at the ultimate accolade. But just to satisfy an inward