The Summer Field

57 Catton told a story of Richard Daft batting when Lord Harris was standing at point; Daft ‘declined to proceed with his innings until the famous Kent nobleman ceased to talk and thus distract his attention from the bowling’. Perhaps to excuse Daft’s rudeness towards the lord, disgraceful anywhere else, Catton added that ‘like many another cricketer … Daft had a good conceit of himself’. We can tell apart good-natured banter, that the Victorians called ‘chaff’, from off-putting remarks. Ray Illingworth in his 1969 memoir Spinner’s Wicket admitted that Yorkshire wicketkeeper Jimmy Binks ‘can give you a real working over with his nattering’. According to Illingworth, Binks and the extraordinarily close fielder Brian Close ‘kidded’ batsmen into a rash stroke. That verged on unfair. Even Illingworth described the chattering as a ‘dodge’, and the 1960s laws said an umpire could intervene if any fielder should ‘incommode the striker by any noise or movement’. Right could be on either side, at least as Illingworth told it. When Kent played Yorkshire at Canterbury, Colin Cowdrey complained that Close was moving at silly mid off just before Illingworth bowled. The umpire, Paul Gibb, said: ‘Are you ready, Mr Cowdrey? Is everybody still?’ Gibb, a former Yorkshire player, was outwardly respectful to Cowdrey, while mocking him for being thin- skinned. At least these fielders and batsmen were having a conversation, even if the fielders were glad to upset the batsman. Different again was the experience of A.R.(Ron) Turner, the Lincolnshire captain from 1947 to 1949: ‘I remember playing against Yorkshire II at Scunthorpe when Fred Trueman was playing his first season,’ Turner wrote in the 1962 Lincolnshire yearbook. ‘He really was fast at times, very wild and generally finished his run within a yard or so of the batsman telling him what he would do with him with the next ball.’ That was intimidating, as Trueman meant it to be. A bowler could go even closer to breaking the taboo of never touching the batsman. Cowdrey in retirement reminisced in Country Life in May 1979 about ‘the sharp point of a bowler’s elbow in the ribs accompanied by a little word in the ear for good measure’, if the batsman was running two and the bowler stood in his path. Thinking perhaps of Brian Close, Cowdrey admitted that when a fielder stood very close on the off side he was tempted to let go of his bat at the end of his stroke and hit the fielder; but never did. The taboos of cricket were one-sided: the bowler could aim the ball at speed towards the batsman; if the batsman aimed his bat at anyone, that was assault. The swearing by Australian captain Michael Clarke and his threat to England batsman Jimmy Anderson during the first Adelaide Test of November 2013 – surely unnecessary as England were already doing so badly – was a most significant, because inadvertent, window into quite how rude Test fielders had become. What if you or I acted like that, if two competitive workplaces met, such as sales staff at a conference? What do players have to do, for an umpire to report them and the authorities to punish them? Malicious remarks – sledging, to use the slang word – have long gone on; Clarke (and other captains) have merely made it the norm by leading it. Tom Austin, who played air force command cricket and then for Hertfordshire, singled out as 1950s and 1960s ‘sledgers’, Trueman and Private Life