Lives in Cricket No 1 - Allan Watkins

man who never wanted to surrender the ball, Shepherd became the bowler to whom successive captains would turn for more than a decade to maintain control. Meanwhile Peter Walker was gradually taking over Allan’s role as the left-armer in the attack. By 1959 he was sending down more than twice the overs of Allan. The late 1950s were not easy times for Glamorgan, and problems came to a head in 1958. With his 46th birthday approaching, Wilf Wooller expressed a wish to retire. As captain-cum-secretary many felt he enjoyed too much power, and a wrangle over whether he should be allowed to retain his position as secretary without a cut in salary split the county’s complex governing body. A powerful faction wanted him out of the club altogether, and there were mass resignations before a referendum ended in Wooller’s favour. The question of who should succeed the man who had captained the county since 1947 soon set the conspirators to work. Though Haydn Davies was still senior professional, he had been dropped as wicket-keeper in favour of David Evans. Now 46, he was ready to retire, and Allan believes that he harboured no ambitions to lead. The idea of bringing in an outsider had support, and Allan remembers that there had been thoughts that Billy Sutcliffe, his old pal from the Pakistan tour, might be lured from Yorkshire, where he had been superseded as captain. “He was coming, but his dad wouldn’t hear of it.” To muddy the waters there was a comical interlude when a corpulent 34-year-old science master from Eton College, Tolly Burnett, was drafted in to play in the last eight matches of the season. Burnett was the not wholly innocent pawn of some of the anti-Wooller plotters, and he was sprung with minimal formality on the Glamorgan dressing room. Here, it seemed, was the heir apparent, someone who might take a year or two on sabbatical to lead the county. To seasoned professional cricketers it was a baffling, even insulting, move. “I don’t know where they found him,” Allan says. “How they could ever have thought of him taking over from Wilf! He had no idea of cricket. He batted like a 14-year-old. He stood right away from the bat. Where he’d played his cricket I don’t know.” It came as a surprise to Allan to be told that A.C.Burnett had won a Cambridge Blue in 1949. “Good God, well he didn’t look a cricketer!” With Wooller away for the last two matches, Burnett’s talent for leadership was cruelly exposed. The sidelining of Haydn The Strain Becomes Too Much 88