Lives in Cricket No 1 - Allan Watkins

Cardiff. He spent hours practising in the nets with Bill Hitch in the days before the match. A natural hooker, he had been learning to restrain the shot and play straight. It was a painful lesson as Hitch’s deliveries rose and rapped him in the ribs. Match day came and Allan stripped off in the dressing room. “It was Arnold Dyson, he looked and said to me, ‘Oh my God, Allan, what the hell has happened to you?’ I was black and blue all over the ribs. So of course Maurice Turnbull saw me. ‘Turn round,’ he said, ‘who the hell has done that?’ And of course I didn’t want to tell him. ‘Put your shirt on,’ he said, ‘you can’t play like that.’ So I didn’t play against Yorkshire. Bill Hitch was in trouble after that, and I always thought that Bill thought it was me that told Turnbull, but I didn’t. I didn’t say a word. I just took my clothes off.” Allan still remembers this match for giving him the chance to meet Maurice Leyland, his particular hero and the player on whom Bill Hitch had advised him to model his own game. Allan had watched the left-handed Leyland make 127 at Cardiff the year before and he now found his idol happy to pass on advice. “Maurice was like me, short legs, short arms and all that. And he told me three things. A left-hander with short legs, you don’t drive through the covers Early Days at Usk 17 The Glamorgan team in 1939. Standing (l to r): Phil Clift, Cyril Smart, Haydn Davies, Peter Judge, Closs Jones, Tom Brierley, Allan Watkins. Seated (l to r): Arnold Dyson, Dai Davies, Maurice Turnbull, Jack Mercer, Emrys Davies.