Lives in Cricket No 1 - Allan Watkins

over to Allan, now aged 37, for eight championship matches. He enjoyed mixed fortunes, with three solid championship victories balanced by three defeats. Two of the losses were by emphatic margins to strong Yorkshire and Surrey sides, but the third, against Kent at Dartford, was a desperately close run affair with Allan’s bold declaration enabling the home team to sneak home by one wicket in the last over of the match. “Allan, without you there wasn’t a game,” he remembers a Kent committee man saying. It had been wonderful cricket, but Allan knew he had lost, and it worried him. For a man consumed by self doubt, Allan’s next match in charge, against Warwickshire at Edgbaston, was equally disturbing. After Glamorgan’s batsmen had fought their way back into the match, Shepherd and McConnon made victory look a formality, only for Basil Bridge and Ossie Wheatley, one of the game’s undisputed rabbits, to resist all efforts to dislodge them in a partnership that lasted 45 minutes. Allan also harbours mixed memories of an early season triumph when he had captained against the Indians. He had seen his bowlers take the last six wickets cheaply to secure a win by 51 runs, so it left a sour taste to hear his team’s efforts belittled when Wilf Wooller went into the Indians’ dressing room. “Bad luck chaps,” he had said. “If you had won the toss you’d have won the game.” Unknown to Wooller, Don Shepherd had been in the dressing room collecting autographs and heard his skipper’s comments. “That was Wilf’s congratulations to me for winning the ruddy game!” says Allan. “That’s the sort of chap he was.” Had he been given the captaincy, Allan feels that he would have settled into the role, but he had uncomfortable memories of some of the occasions on which he had deputised. In 1960, his final season, Wooller missed eleven matches. Allan led against Kent in a drawn early season game at Cardiff, but thereafter he stepped down in favour of Gilbert Parkhouse, Don Shepherd taking charge for one match at Westcliff. There had been a bad mid-season trot, nine matches without a win, when Glamorgan travelled to Liverpool to play a strong Lancashire side with eyes on the Championship. Parkhouse was injured and Allan had been expected to take up the reins once more. But the demons returned as he lay in bed that night, reminding him of that narrow loss to Kent. “I woke up in the morning and I thought, ‘I can’t do it.’ Something seemed to tell me that I couldn’t be responsible. I The Strain Becomes Too Much 90