The Summer Field

179 Pro’ players, and the journalists that followed them, have grumbled for generation after generation about their workload. C.B.Fry in the London Evening Standard in July 1934 wrote of ‘the treadmill of the county championship’. In Leicestershire’s 1964 yearbook, the batsman Clive Inman spoke for many: ‘I found cricket six days a week was hard going. By the end of the season I was tired out physically and mentally and I think my game showed it.’ The need to concentrate, according to Inman, was wearying; in other words, the more you played, the worse you did. Most of the reformers of the 1950s and 1960s proposed to change what the anonymous former first-class amateur in the Southern Daily Echo in November 1951 termed the ‘staleness’ of the six-day-a-week season. He proposed a two-day county match over the weekend — which would not mean much less income, he claimed - and in the week ‘a small professional staff’ could coach around their counties. In reply, like so many reformers, Hampshire captain Desmond Eagar showed it was easier to agree what was wrong than how to right it. He pointed out Sunday play would cause an outcry, even if it ran from 1.50pm to 7pm to allow church-going (as the John Player League did from 1969). Weekend rain might leave you playing even less often. Despite a full calendar, the weather usually gave players some time off; you simply never knew when. Most shrewdly, Eagar wrote: ‘What has been so tiring are the various outside one-day games played normally in aid of a professional’s benefit, more often than not on a Sunday afternoon when the cricketer should be relaxing with his wife and family and forgetting his job of work.’ Benefit matches meant hours of car driving on English roads before motorways. Ken Barrington in his 1968 autobiography Playing it Straight gave his diary for July 1964 – including on the field his 256 against Australia at Manchester – which saw him drive 1700 miles, including 370 to and from benefit matches. Between July 2, the start of the third Test, and July 30, two days after the fourth, he was playing, or driving, or both, every day. Benefit matches, while far from a large chunk of a pro’s summer, cut greatly into his leisure. They were cricket’s equivalent of a housewife letting a neighbour borrow a cup of sugar; you knew you had to do a good turn, in case you ever wanted one in return, or simply to avoid having a bad name on your street. John Mason, the Bristol Evening Post ’s Somerset reporter, wrote in the county’s 1964/65 yearbook of an ‘unofficial roster’ among players; trips to the seaside were popular because they could double as a family day out. Like any worker, freelance or contract, a cricketer will seldom say no to paid work, for fear it will dry up. The West Indian all-rounder Norbert Phillip finished the fourth Test against Australia in Trinidad on Tuesday, April 18, 1978; won £1000 with Larry Gomes (plus £400 appearance money) in an indoor double-wicket event in London on Sunday, April 23; started the fifth Test in Jamaica on Friday, April 28, which ended on May 3; and made his debut for Essex at Chelmsford ten days later. Give a player free time, and he only fills it with cricket! * It has long been conventionally thought that English cricket boomed after Renewal