Famous Cricketers No 99 - Bob Taylor

When he joined Derbyshire, Taylor was regarded as a “natural” but he knew he had much to learn, especially standing up. He persisted in standing up to medium pacers like Derek Morgan and Ian Buxton, even though the odd nick would go astray and they, like many bowlers, regularly badgered him to stand back and catch them. He became increasingly proficient keeping to spin, too, even though in those days it was a luxury for Derbyshire. Bob Taylor will always discuss wicket-keeping only in terms of standing up. “Any decent slip catcher could do it standing back,” he says, while conceding that widespread one-day fields have complicated that job. Indeed, for a long time Derbyshire’s bowlers could not recall Taylor dropping other than a diving half chance while standing back. One day, he did drop a comfortable one off Alan Ward and the bowler refused to believe it until he checked with both batsman and wicket-keeper later! Standing up, Taylor got as close to the stumps as possible, even though this gave him even less margin for error. Like all cricketers, he had bad patches but was quick to analyse why. “If I am keeping badly, it is usually because of one of three things - lack of concentration, standing up too soon or snatching at the ball,” he says. “You must stay down that thousandth of a second longer because it means the difference between the ball hitting the middle of your glove or your finger tips”. He did not find concentration easy in front of small crowds, “But I am a professional and others rely on me and it is a crime to let them down. I once dropped Roy Fredericks three times in one innings, standing up. Possibly not many spectators realised it but I knew I was at fault and I knew my concentration was not right because it was a Sunday game in the middle of a match I was playing for MCC and I allowed myself to become too casual about it”. Such was Taylor’s honest approach to the game, on and off the field. He believed that too many players in the game wanted the glamour without the hard work. By the same token, he tried to be philosophical about the fact that his skill and determination only brought him one Test appearance in his early years, and that on an uneven pitch in New Zealand. Bob Taylor was not a flamboyant keeper and never appealed for the sake of appealing and there were those who thought he should have asked the Umpire more frequently. His work stood out for its quiet, but superb efficiency. Many keepers dive all over the place but Bob Taylor always seemed to have so much time to spare that he moved across to get right behind the ball, except for the widest deflections. Then, his dives and tumbles were quite spectacular, and usually successful. He was remarkably agile, especially on the leg side, and his successes there, both in catching and stumping, marking him as a keeper of the highest class. More than one respected Umpire considered him to be a better keeper than Knott, and when asked why, each has said “Because he is better than Knott when standing up to the stumps”. His thoughts in a book that he wrote in 1979 are of great interest “The furthest I have stood back is about twenty-five yards, to my former Derbyshire colleague Alan Ward, to Bob Willis both home and abroad, and to John Snow when he really slipped himself in Australia under Ray Illingworth. For Dennis Lillee it was about twenty-two yards back, but in my career the two fastest have been Willis and Ward. For several seasons Mike Hendrick had been perfecting an occasional slow off-cutter to get the batsmen playing early. It worked well with Derbyshire and we tried it for the first time in a Test against New Zealand at Trent Bridge. I could see how the ball was wrapped in Mike’s hand as he ran in, and proceeded to walk five yards towards the batsman. Mike Brearley and the other slips couldn’t believe their eyes, but my reasons were simple. If the 5