The Summer Field

136 * Just as weary pros’ have always opened the curtains in the morning and wished for rain and a workless day – and why not, because they were paid anyway – so fast bowlers have always sought to intimidate. Speaking at the silver jubilee dinner of East Riding Umpires Association at Hull in March 1978, Colin Cowdrey warned of slowing over rates, and ‘over-use of bouncers’ as ‘the ugly side of cricket’. As he added: ‘But there are captains who watch and do nothing.’ Cowdrey spoke also of more swearing on the field, a change – for the worse – in bowler and fielder behaviour. While Cowdrey did not claim a link between more violent fast bowlers and worse manners, it is significant that while fast bowlers had always hit batsmen – Cowdrey had his arm broken in 1963 – what Cowdrey termed ‘hard competitiveness’ had turned into ‘bad language’: I have played against some rough, tough Australians such as Lindwall, Miller and Johnson, but they never once used bad language at me. They might use it about their own bad luck or to their fielders if they dropped a catch, but there would never be an earful of bad language to me or the players around me. Cricketers, then, like playwrights, did not learn swear-words in the 1970s. The difference lay in norms, what was acceptable. Another example is helmets for batsmen; significantly, established players such as Dennis Amiss and Mike Brearley wore them first, as only they were strong enough to resist jeers (including swearing?) that they were protecting their heads because of some moral (and practical batting) shortcoming. Or, old batsmen (or their admirers) boasted they had managed without helmets. The game mirrored society; meanwhile helmets came in for motorcyclists, and the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 to protect workers generally. In retirement Cowdrey kept returning to where to draw the line on what was acceptable on the field. On seeing a fielder wearing a helmet at Lord’s in May 1979 he scoffed that on a cold day it ‘may have served to keep his head warm’. Cowdrey wondered in Country Life what George Duckworth would have said, had Cowdrey, aged 21,taken a helmet on his first tour of Australia. This great Lancashire and England wicket-keeper was ostensibly scorer and baggage master but he was much more than that. Having toured Australia on numerous occasions and won friends in every cricket country around the globe he was something of a PPS to the captain, a permanent eminence grise. To the young players like myself he wore a stern forbidding mask but underneath the heart was warm and I regarded him as father and friend. Cowdrey added that Duckworth would have looked at the helmet, and Cowdrey would have felt uncomfortable and thrown it off the ship. As a realistic conservative, Cowdrey had to admit helmets were necessary, ‘a sign of the times’. By 1983 he feared cricket was turning into a ‘game of brute strength dominated by bouncer and the helmet’. Cowdrey sought to defend the ideal manners of sporting competition while the professional Batting and Bowling