Gubby Under Pressure

though at about the same time, Fagg had contracted rheumatic fever and was being sent home immediately. The Fourth Test brought more worries for Allen: ‘I strained one of the big muscles up the back of my left leg in my third over on Friday, and I am afraid it is going to worry me all the match. It is nothing to do with my old injury and will recover in a week or 10 days if and when I can give it complete rest. Wallie Hammond is not well and going through a bout of not being able to sleep, which is worrying for him and me. Bill Voce has also got a bad back and Robbie has been hit over the heart, so we are a side of crocks at present.’ A week later, with the Test lost, Allen had prepared his excuses. ‘We were not a fit side in Adelaide. Hammond had had a touch of insomnia for a fortnight. Voce’s back was bad and he ought not have played and I broke down on the first morning. It is a big muscle up the back of my left leg and it should be quite sound for the state match just before the Test match. It is nothing to do with my old trouble, so I am not alarmed.’ He may not have been alarmed when he wrote that final medical report, but with so much depending on the result of the Fifth Test, it would not be long before Allen began to experience the effects of a physical and mental burn-out. This was something that had been slowly building up day-by-day since sailing from Southampton five months before, when he had tried to take total control of just about everything that affected the team, in an attempt to make sure nothing could go wrong. The consequences of his inability to delegate were about to reach crisis point. Apart from initially assuming the roles of both captain and vice-captain, helping the manager do his job, making speeches here, there and everywhere, and caring for the sick and wounded, there were many other demands upon Allen, which he found increasingly difficult to cope with, and in many cases resented having to do them at all. All work and no play There are two distinct themes running through all the letters which Allen wrote home during the 1936/37 tour. First, there was the continuous criticism of the players who were underperforming on the field: I will come back to all that when examining the progress of the tour match by match. Allen’s expectations were naturally high and he made no concessions for players struggling to cope with conditions alien to them. He simply put the players’ failures down to lack of what he called ‘a cricket brain’, and bemoaned the absence of Warner who he was sure would have been able to put everything right if he had been there. Allen’s second obsession was his resentment of what he saw as intrusive demands upon the limited time he had available for private and personal pleasure. But in order to understand Allen’s personal reactions to the dramatic events of the tour, it is first necessary to be aware of the pressures which he had to endure from the first day he arrived in Australia, even though some of those pressures were self-inflicted, as shown in his dealings with Rupert Howard, the tour manager. In every letter Allen wrote there is a constant and irritating stream of whingeing and whining about the demands upon him as captain and how they were gradually wearing him out. What had he expected? Everyone knew his Managing the show 22