Famous Cricketers No 100 - Richie Benaud

that had caught him flush on the face. The injury was both a symbolic and painfully literal reminder of how the rigours of Test cricket intruded on the relationship. Just a month after his second son Jeffrey was born in 1955, Richie was off to the West Indies with the Australian team. It is generally thought that these long absences, in an era when player’s wives were forbidden to accompany their husbands on tour, contributed to the breakdown of their marriage. After touring England with their sons Jeffrey and Gregory, Richie and Marcia were divorced in 1967. He later married Daphne Surfleet, a keen cricket follower who had worked alongside noted cricket scribe E.W Swanton. Together they formed a highly successful sports consultancy company. ‘He earned this success in sweat’ – Benaud the player Benaud was often described as ‘lucky’ throughout his career. A quote attributed to a number of different cricketers has it that Benaud could put his hand into a bucket of pig slops and pull out a diamond. Historically speaking, Benaud did have the good fortune to come into first-class cricket when Australia’s spin bowling stocks were at a relative low. In 1948, spinners of the calibre of Bruce Dooland and George Tribe couldn’t force their way into Bradman’s ‘Invincibles’ team, which already contained Colin McCool, Doug Ring and off-spinner Ian Johnson. By the early 1950s, Dooland, Tribe, McCool and the talented but fiery Cec Pepper had all relocated to England, where they all enjoyed great success. Meanwhile, most of Australia’s spinners were either ageing (Johnson, Ring), prematurely retired (Jack Iverson) or not quite up to Test level. Benaud’s appointment to the Australian captaincy was also fortuitous, made possible because the incumbent Ian Craig was ill with hepatitis. Craig’s deputy, Neil Harvey, a close friend of Benaud’s, was the logical successor with his vast experience and highly-rated ‘cricket brain’. He was also two years older than Benaud and significantly more experienced – he had returned from the 1948 Invincibles tour before Benaud had even appeared in first-class cricket. But when the captaincy decision was being made, Harvey was apparently out of favour with some selectors because he had left Victoria to work and play cricket in New South Wales. Harvey had also led an Australian XI to a disastrous loss to the touring Englishmen, leading the selectors to overlook him and gamble on Benaud, who had only led his state in two matches at the time. Yet for all his luck, few cricketers in any period worked as hard at their game as Benaud. Wally Grout, reflecting on Benaud’s tremendous improvement, wrote that “he earned this success in sweat”. His commitment to training was legendary and often bordered on the obsessive. Team-mates remember a player who led the way in enthusiasm and attention to detail, one who arrived at practice first, trained with great verve and intensity, and then was last to leave. In the words of Ian Meckiff, he was “a professional…in an amateur world”. He was also known for leaving no stone unturned in preparing for a match. Before his team’s 1959 tour of Pakistan, he organised for them to practise on an improvised matting surface in case the Pakistani officials hadn’t got the turf wickets ready on time. When the team got to Pakistan, the matting wickets were still in place and those practice sessions proved a key to Australia’s success. Before this tour, he also wrote to Sir Robert Menzies, that most cricket-besotted of Australian prime ministers, to ask for a briefing from the foreign affairs department on any difficulties they might encounter. In modern parlance, Benaud also possessed a mental toughness that was a tremendous asset as a bowler. Many a player with a less steely temperament would have been disheartened by his early failures and faded from the scene. But Benaud never seemed to lose confidence or resolve. He was also a keen thinker of the game, able to pinpoint the strengths of his game and the weaknesses of his opponents. John Benaud remembers him bowling an outswinger to Bob Simpson in a grade match (he bowled medium pace in his last years in club cricket). It was perfectly pitched and drew the edge of Simpson’s bat. The catch was put down, though it stuck in John’s mind as a perfect example of Richie’s ability to plan his bowling attack to concentrate on any slight weakness an opposing batsman may have had. 6