Lives in Cricket No 1 - Allan Watkins

the answers to the players’ boredom, and the practice of administering a fuller dousing found a ready target in the form of George Duckworth. “George was working for the British Council or something,” Donald Carr recalls, “and he had to receive the water treatment. It was in the room of one of the players and Idris, with a friend of his, walked past the door of that room. I chased after him. I thought he can make trouble out of our pouring water over George Duckworth. But he was laughing about it, so I said, ‘It’s all right, we’ll get you before the end of the tour.’ He chuckled away and said, ‘Oh no, you’ll never catch me.’ And we did catch him at Peshawar!” After the disappointment of Dacca, there were innings victories against a Combined XI and Punjab as the party moved on towards the Khyber Pass and the ancient city of Peshawar. Allan was omitted from the side for this third representative match, which once again saw two wretched batting displays from the tourists and a second victory for Pakistan, this time by seven wickets. Off the field MCC had greater ‘success’, managing to capture Idris Begh for his ritual ducking. “It would have been perfectly all right,” Donald Carr maintains, “except that, after he’d had the water treatment, two of the Pakistani players walked into our room – they were staying in a different hotel, but they’d come up – and, when they saw Idris in a rather bedraggled state, they roared with laughter. This was too much for Idris, to be laughed at by his own folk. He suddenly disappeared out of the room and had taken himself off to Hafeez Kardar in their hotel, where it is rumoured he was sharing a room with Hafeez – I’m not sure if he was. And that was real trouble time, which was sad.” Seven or eight of the team had been involved in administering the ducking, but Allan was not one of them. “I came back and I heard a hell of a noise, and I said, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ They said, ‘We’ve had the water treatment for the umpire.’ He’d taken it in good part until the members of the Pakistani team had come in and laughed. That put the kibosh on it.” The diplomacy of manager Geoffrey Howard averted an even greater fuss as MCC sent cables from London offering to terminate the tour. At a subsequent enquiry back in England, Donald Carr would accept responsibility for what had been a misplaced prank bereft of malice. Problems in Pakistan 83