to have been the programme’s golden age. After John Arlott retired in 1980, Johnners was indisputably the leading character, but I rather lost contact with the programme when I left Uppingham School and joined Leicestershire County Cricket Club as a young fast bowler. From the age of sixteen I had been playing second-XI cricket at Surrey CCC, and my dream of becoming a professional cricketer was finally realised when Leicestershire offered me a contract while I was still at school. For an eighteen-year-old bowler I was unusually fast, and enjoyed terrorising our opponents, be they schoolboys (8 wickets for 2 runs and 7 for 11 stick in the memory) or, better still, the teachers in the annual staff match. This, I gather, used to be a friendly affair until I turned up, and I relished the chance to settle a few scores on behalf of my friends – for whom I was the equivalent of a hired assassin – as well as for myself.
Within only a few weeks of leaving school, a sudden injury crisis at Leicestershire propelled me into the first team for a county championship match against Lancashire at Grace Road – something for which I was not very well prepared. For a start, I had been a dedicated Lancashire fanatic ever since Dad had taken me to Lord’s for that Gillette Cup final when I was eleven, and suddenly I found myself playing against my heroes. Merely watching them walk out to practise in the nets before play began felt quite bewildering. I remember Ray Illingworth, who I had met only once, briefly, when I was signed by the club, and who was now my captain, laughing as I produced my plastic-soled bowling boots from my bag in the dressing room. Illy had played with, and led, some of the best fast bowlers England has ever produced, and clearly he did not rate the equipment which up to now had served me perfectly well at school. He was right, of course. We had to field for 130 overs in that match, and I could barely walk at the end.
Another problem was the serious lack of protective equipment I possessed, and this was brought sharply into focus when I saw Lancashire’s giant West Indian fast bowler Colin Croft mark out his run-up and proceed to bowl at a speed and hostility I had never imagined to be humanly possible. I noticed that even my experienced colleagues were rather subdued by the prospect of facing him, but they produced thigh guards and carefully moulded foam padding which they meticulously strapped all over their bodies. I had none of these, and very few batsmen wore helmets in 1978. While my pads had provided sufficient protection against schoolboy bowling at Uppingham, they were hopelessly inadequate for the missiles Croft was now hurling down, increasingly angrily, it seemed, at our batsmen. Thankfully, in that year the rule in county cricket was that all first innings had to close after a hundred overs, and although things looked very ugly indeed for us at 126 for 5, a fighting innings by Jack Birkenshaw, for which I will always be grateful, spared me from my date with Croft. ‘Crofty’ has since reinvented himself as a surprisingly genial, entertaining and hospitable colleague on the radio, but he was anything but friendly that day.
So, with plastic boots firmly strapped on, I walked out into the late-afternoon sunshine to bowl my first over in first-class cricket. Illy set the field for Lancashire’s opening batsmen, David Lloyd and Andy Kennedy, both wearing the slightly faded blue caps bearing the red rose of Lancashire that I had so coveted as a child; at one point I had written cheekily to Lancashire CCC while I was at Taverham Hall to ask if they could post me one. I was sent a sheet of the players’ autographs instead.
Nervously I paced out my run-up, and down the hill I rushed, with my head swimming. Because of the massive adrenalin surge, the first delivery was a huge no-ball, called by a startled umpire David Constant, who I know wanted to be kind to an eighteen-year-old lad in his first match, but simply could not ignore the fact that I had overstepped by at least two feet. It was not the most auspicious of starts, but the fourth ball swung sharply from a full length and shattered Lloyd’s stumps. I remember leaping about all over the place in sheer delight, and Illy trotting up with his hand outstretched to offer his congratu -lations while Bumble turned and plodded forlornly towards the pavilion.
Since that initial, brief encounter when he was such a senior cricketing figure and I was a complete novice, Bumble has become a very good friend. Exactly twenty-five years later to the day, on 19 August 2003, my telephone rang at home. I picked up the receiver:
‘Hello?’
‘What were you doing twenty-five years ago?’
‘Er, I’m not sure. Is that you, Bumble?’
‘Yes, and twenty-five years ago today you got me out, you bastard.’ Bang: the telephone went dead.
By then Bumble and I had enjoyed several summers together on Test Match Special, and he was my partner in crime in many a wind-up of Johnners. Henry Blofeld also suffered cruelly before Bumble left us to become England coach, and finally moved to Sky television.
I quickly learned that Illy was right about most things. There were some amusing stories doing the rounds about him never accepting that he was out when he was batting. Like the time he was facing the Glamorgan fast bowler Alan Jones, who always released an explosive grunt to rival Maria Sharapova’s when he let the ball go. On one occasion Jones beat Illingworth all ends up and demolished his stumps, only for Illy to claim, when he returned in high dudgeon to the dressing room, that he had mistaken Jones’s grunt for the umpire calling ‘No-ball,’ and naturally changed his shot.
It was a great shame that he and Mike Atherton never hit it off when Illy was the England manager in 1994. Illy’s tough and uncompromising style of management was hopelessly out of date by then, but he remains the best reader of a cricket match I have ever met. I remember one match against Lancashire when he brought himself on to bowl to the towering and massively destructive figure of Clive Lloyd. Illy was concerned about the position of Chris Balderstone at deep square leg. ‘Come on, Baldy!’ he scolded. ‘I’m bowling uphill and into t’wind on a slow pitch. You should be ten yards squarer.’ Balderstone duly moved ten yards to his right as directed, Lloyd played the sweep shot and the ball went absolutely straight to him: he took the catch without moving a muscle. A fluke? I do not know, but boy, was I mighty impressed.
Illingworth was a blunt character, brought up in the old-fashioned way and as canny in his regular bridge school whenever rain stopped play as he was on the field. Thanks to him, I was sent to Australia that first winter on what was called a Whitbread Scholarship. My dad and I went down to London to be given the good news by one of his great heroes, Colin Cowdrey, and before I knew it I was on my way to Melbourne. I was picked up by the legendary fast bowler Frank ‘Typhoon’ Tyson.
Like his predecessor Harold Larwood, Frank had been welcomed to Australia when he moved there after his playing days were over, despite having blown away the Aussie batsmen in a spell of fast bowling at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1954–55 that is still talked about in reverential terms. Frank took 7 for 27 in a furious spell to skittle Australia, and now he was the coach of Victoria. He was also, as I discovered when I moved into his house, still very competitive, especially after a surprisingly small amount of beer. ‘Reckon you’re fast, then?’ he would suddenly announce, putting down his can and grabbing a tennis ball, which he would then proceed to hurl quickly and comically all around his back garden until it vanished into the hedge.
Frank was great. He despatched me all over Victoria to coach in small towns and rural communities. I was only eighteen, and this was a whole new world to me. On the weekends I played for Essendon, a top-grade club in north Melbourne, and experienced at first hand the strength and competitiveness of club cricket in Australia. Three years later I played in Sydney for Cumberland Cricket Club, where John Benaud, Richie’s brother, was captain. If Richie is quiet, measured and immaculately turned out, then John – fourteen years Richie’s junior – is a veritable party animal. He was a highly successful journalist in his own right, becoming editor-in-chief of the now defunct Sydney Sun, and his colourful nature is best illustrated by the ban from cricket that he received in 1970, when he was captain of New South Wales, for insisting on wearing a certain type of ripple-soled cricket shoe that had been outlawed by the authorities. He played the first of his three Tests two years later,
