Lives in Cricket No 1 - Allan Watkins

Chapter Ten The Strain Becomes Too Much On Allan’s return to England Molly noticed that there was still evidence of the mosquito bites all over his body. He felt under the weather, apparently nursing a cold, and retired to bed. Molly sent for the doctor, a friend of the family for whom she worked. “He said, ‘What’s the matter, Allan?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I’m perspiring. I’m a bit weak.’ He said, ‘Let’s have a look at you.’ He pulled back the sheet. ‘Oh God, Molly, he’s got malaria. Can’t you smell it?’” It had taken some weeks for the illness to develop, but for many years to come, Allan would feel the effects. He was able to take his place in the county side as usual when the 1956 season started, but it soon became clear that he was not the player he had been. “I hadn’t the same energy for a while. I think I’d had enough cricket, too.” Though Wisden still thought his efforts this season ‘untiring’, for the first time since he had established himself in the Glamorgan side, Allan failed to reach his thousand runs, and his bag of wickets fell to 58, barely half the number he had captured the previous summer. He would remain a key member of the county team for another four years and his form would recover, but his best cricketing days were over. There had been three operations on his cartilages and he was beginning to pay the price for the years of whole-hearted effort as an all-rounder. Molly’s words from when I had first called at the Watkins’ home came back: “I used to say, ‘I wish you had a job like Gilbert Parkhouse, standing there with his arms folded.’” The stylish opening batsman with a taste for Beaujolais had concerned himself only with batting. There was no bowling and, as a regular first slip, not much running around in the field. Nor had Parkhouse often wasted energy on debating the team’s tactics. But Allan was involved in every aspect of the game, and nothing was done in half measures. Passing his opinion on a Test cricketer from another county, Allan once pointed to his heart and then to his stomach. 86