‘Who was the fastest you ever faced?’ is a standard question, and although one or two m.p.h. here or there hardly matters when you are talking in the nineties, I think Sylvester Clarke might receive my vote on the strength of several deliveries at the Oval one day. He ripped the top of my glove off, and he would also bowl you the occasional delivery you simply never saw. He also had a genuine streak of meanness that made it additionally unpleasant to face him. Everyone gets worn down by fast bowling in the end, and I was certainly less keen to face it at thirty than I was at twenty. Barry Dudleston, who was a fine player for Leicestershire, told me that when he first came into the game that if anyone bounced him he said, ‘Thanks very much.’ However, when he was starting to get on a bit, he wasn’t so much thinking of four runs as staying out of hospital.
The game is nastier now, no doubt about it – verbally as well as physically. When you’ve got the two combined, someone bowling very fast at you and also being rather unpleasant, it can be highly disconcerting. If the world sledging championships were held tomorrow, you would have to install the Australians as 1/2 favourites, and they invented the term of course. On the other hand, some of those who have complained about them have thrown their stones from exceptionally large greenhouses. The West Indies, Pakistan and India are not too far behind them I’d say. It’s a hard old game today, not always edifying, and you can even find some high-class sledging in county cricket. It might be more acceptable if it was more witty, but most of it is very basic stuff.
Another perceived problem with the modern game is over-rates, although the authorities are convinced it is one of the major evils and the only cure is to impose harsher and harsher fines. It’s one of the few jobs in the world whereby the longer you work at it the less you get paid. Personally, I think the powers-that-be have become a bit paranoid about this question, although when play was still going on at twenty to eight against the West Indies at Lord’s in 1988 I might have had a different view on the matter. I would guess that the game has become a touch more professional now (maybe more cynical as well) in that the Don would never score 300 in a day 50 years on. The fielding captain would have put his men back, and ordered his bowlers to snap a bootlace twice an over. It’s sad for the spectators if this run feast dries up, but the modern professional will see it as a legitimate tactic. I did it in Lahore in 1984, when we set Pakistan a target on the last day, and Mohsin Khan and Shoaib Mohammad smashed the thing all round the ground. I had to slow it down, and we eventually frustrated them into giving away wickets. Fines may be the answer, and the spectators may deserve more for their money, but I’m pretty sure that if I had walked into that press conference in Lahore and said, ‘Sorry, lads, I could have saved the match, but it would have cost us five hundred quid apiece,’ then anyone picking this quote out of the morning papers would not, understandably, have been very impressed.
The respect in which I count myself most fortunate was to be born a batsman. There is a lot more glamour in scoring a century than taking wickets, and from a marketing point of view, it is also more lucrative than being a bowler. Endorsing bowling boots is not the sort of sideline calculated to make you rich, and players such as myself, Gooch and Robin Smith have made more money out of spin-offs than the likes of Dilley, Foster and Willis. The one source of income open to all, provided he puts in the required amount of service, is the benefit, and I picked up £105,000 tax free from my own in 1987. People will say that the benefit system was not really devised for the likes of people like me, more for the honest-to-goodness county pro who has not really had the chance to earn bigger money, and I would have a certain amount of sympathy with that. However, the common denominator is the reward for long service, to which all players – Test or county – are entitled, and if potential benefactors do not want to give to a player because they consider he is already earning enough money, then that is his or her privilege. Benefits are much more commercialized than they used to be, and in coming ever closer to the technical limits that are imposed upon them, may well attract the interest of the taxman at some stage in the future. In my year we did something like twenty theatre shows the length and breadth of the country, which were too close to being a commercial venture not to declare it to the Revenue as such. No player wants to queer the pitch for others who are following.
There have been any number of more successful benefits than my own, including some of the county stalwarts who deserve them most. Paul Pridgeon, for example, managed to raise £150,000 at Worcester, which came about through a combination of his own popularity and having very efficient people running the benefit for him. Others have not done so well, and when Graham Roope was awarded one with Surrey, it went so badly wrong that he almost ended up losing money. One or two Test players, myself included, have raised eyebrows by staging events outside the county they have been playing for, but when you perform on a higher stage your supporters are not all confined to one county. There is a publican near Worcester – inappropriately named David Drinkwater – who has been a supporter of cricket and cricketers for a very long time, and has been a great friend to players from all parts of the country. I had three lunches there during my year, and Worcestershire queried it with him. Quite rightly, however, he told them that it was entirely his business who he chose to help in this way, whether it be Worcestershire players or not. The only other point to make is that if you compare the modern benefit in real terms to benefits of twenty or thirty years ago, you will find that there has not been a vast increase in the rewards. If you costed W.G.’s benefit out on today’s retail price index he would have to be the wealthiest man who has ever played cricket. And he was an amateur.
Overseas players have been a bone of contention over the years, but I think they are good for our game. One argument against them has been that we have helped many become better players through county cricket, and then suffered because of it when they turn round and beat us in Test matches. Border would have taken home a lot of useful information from playing with Essex, likewise Hadlee, Marshall, Waqar Younis, Wasim Akram – the list is endless. However, I still think that it works both ways. Unless our own cricketers play with the likes of these people, they will become too insular. Where our system falls down is in having so many cricketers playing for so many different clubs. In Australia, for example, with only half-a-dozen state sides, the real talent is more concentrated, and this is why they have perhaps more player movement than we do in this country. If someone can’t get into the New South Wales team, but is wanted by Queensland, he will just up and move from Sydney to Brisbane. The fact that we have more players to pick from does not necessarily give us a stronger international team, and rather than taking on new counties like Durham, we should ideally be creating a smaller pool of top players. A smaller number of stronger sides, playing less but more intense cricket, would serve us far better at Test level.
Four-day cricket is also, I feel, the right way forward. It can, of course, be a tedious game at times, but it does have the enormous advantage of giving the stronger sides a better opportunity to win. There is certainly more scope for batsmen to occupy the crease (Hick, for example, might never have had the time to make 400 in a three-day match) and it also makes bowlers work harder for their wickets. More importantly, it is so closely related to Test cricket. Whatever system is employed, they have certainly got two things right after years of brainlessness. The extra day’s preparation for Test matches is so obviously a benefit