Famous Cricketers No 100 - Richie Benaud

bowling performances (10 for 152 for the match) for a depleted Australian attack saw the game labelled ‘Miller’s Match’. But Benaud’s innings was also a famous moment, where he “used his bat like a flail and beat all the goodness out of the attack”. Arthur Mailey praised the unselfish nature of Benaud’s dismissal, explaining how he had gone for a hook shot looking to push the score along, rather than playing with caution to ensure he reached the personal milestone. Indeed, Benaud played in an aggressive fashion throughout the series and hit the most boundaries of any player on either team, a remarkable statistic for a lower-order batsman on the losing side. His fielding continued to dazzle, with one particular highlight being the spectacular catch he took at gully to remove Colin Cowdrey. He has modestly put the fame of the catch down to the “photograph of the century”, explaining that the image gives the impression of a flying one-handed catch when he actually took the ball in two hands then flung out a hand to break his fall. One batsman Benaud particularly enjoyed bowling to was Peter May. In the words of Bill O‘Reilly, May “began to struggle like a rat in a trap” when Benaud was bowling to him in the Lord’s Test. The Surrey batsman was “beaten time and again before being bowled middle stump”. Yet Benaud’s overall figures for the series betray a lack of penetration. He took sixty wickets for the tour, a mark only bettered only by Ron Archer (sixty-one). Yet at Test level, he could only manage eight wickets at an average on the wrong side of forty, prompting some to suggest Australia needed to find a new specialist spinner. For England, Jim Laker had a vintage summer, most unforgettably at Old Trafford, where he took nineteen wickets in the match, a feat that still beggars belief. It allowed England to take an unassailable 2-1 lead and meant they would retain the Ashes. While the Australians were less than impressed by the Manchester pitch, which they felt was heavily doctored to suit Laker, the fact remained that neither Benaud (2/123) nor Ian Johnson (4/151) were able to exploit the conditions anywhere near as well as Laker. It was a familiar theme in the series, with Laker and Lock (fifty eight wickets between them) a class above their Australian counterparts, Johnson and Benaud who could manage just fourteen. Veteran observers such as C.L.R James were dismayed to see Australia even turning to fast bowlers like Davidson and Miller to bowl spin. For Benaud, Laker’s performance in this series became both a source of technical inspiration and personal motivation. Impressed by the fluidity and ease of Laker’s run-up, he worked to incorporate some of the Surrey man’s economy into his own action. Along with Neil Harvey he had a long, slow drink in the dressing room and vowed that they would get England next time. While the tour was ultimately a failure in that Australia failed to reclaim the Ashes and Benaud’s form was still not consistently strong, he did learn some valuable lessons. Benaud himself considers the tour a turning point in his career. Particularly important was his meeting with Bruce Dooland, who had represented Australia both as a leg-spinner and a baseball pitcher and was now plying his trade in county cricket with considerable success. Dooland showed Benaud how to bowl the flipper, using a similar grip to that employed by Benaud’s childhood hero, Clarrie Grimmett. The tour ended with a non first-class fixture against Scotland, where Benaud took 2-24 and 6-34. More significantly, he had a difference of opinion with captain Ian Johnson, who turned down Benaud’s request to bowl off-spinners to save his shredded fingers. Benaud sullenly routed the hapless Scots, with leg-spinners, never giving his captain so much as a sideways glance. After the match, Johnson asked Benaud if he had anything to say to him. He did not. While this incident sounds minor, Benaud’s insubordination would not have pleased the tour management and was apparently responsible for him receiving an unflattering tour report which would have harmed his future leadership chances. This was the era when outstanding players such as Keith Miller, Sid Barnes and Cec. Pepper had all fallen foul of authority in various ways for incidents which would be seen as inconsequential today. Just a couple of years earlier some had put Arthur Morris’ sacking as state captain down to a pair of suede shoes he wore to a cricket function which apparently failed to meet the standards of sartorial sobriety expected by administrators at the time. Then there was the great Fred Trueman, who recently explained how his Test career was curtailed by Test selectors who “Rather than pick the best eleven players for the job…would often choose someone because he was, in their eyes, a gentleman and a decent chap.” Decent chap or not, at this point Benaud’s chance of 32