Lives in Cricket No 1 - Allan Watkins

another string to his bow: from the first match he was regarded as a regular member of the attack. Allan recalls the part that Arnold Dyson played in his re-establishment as a bowler. At the pre-season nets, before moving north to take up a new appointment as coach at Oundle School, Dyson had observed Allan bowling spinners. “He said, ‘You didn’t bowl like that before the war. Why are you doing it now?’ I said, ‘Because that’s what everybody said I had to do.’ He said, ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid. Where’s the ball? Now bowl!’ He made Wilf come over and he said, ‘Have you seen this boy?’ Because he still called me ‘boy’ though I was a man and married. ‘Right, Allan,’ he said, ‘now bowl.’ So Wilf looked. ‘Bloody hell!’ he said, and before long I was bowling.” The 1948 season opened in traditional fashion at Worcester, where the Australians met the county in the first match of their tour. No other first-class cricket was scheduled on that late April day and in the crowd was Allan Watkins, sent up from Usk by Wilfred Wooller. “He told me to go and watch Ernie Toshack.” Toshack was the unsung workhorse of the Australian attack, mixing his left-arm swingers and cutters and varying his pace while maintaining an unrelenting leg-stump line. His role was to keep things tight while Lindwall and Miller recharged their batteries. Wooller saw Allan as a bowler capable of bringing this same control and variety to the Glamorgan attack. Soon labelling him ‘Tosh’, his team-mates did not let Allan forget whose bowling he was striving to emulate. Allan looks back to the times they had with Wooller as captain, the arguments and the tensions, but he is quick to pay tribute to his skipper’s shrewd cricketing brain and the help he offered. “He made me as a bowler. I wouldn’t have been anything like the bowler I became, if it hadn’t been for Wilf Wooller. He always set the field, though there’d be variation if the bowler thought there should be variation – he’d stop and listen. I bowled in-duckers and I had three short legs, a fine leg and two more back on the leg side, one slip, cover point and mid off. If the ball was swinging more, the one from square would go back to make two behind, but he was mostly square. And if I strayed and bowled one down the off side Wilf would be at forward short leg and he’d give me a look. ‘What do you think you’re bloody well doing? Why have I set your field over here when you’re bowling over there?’ If he did it once he did it a dozen times.” 36 Called Up For England