Lives in Cricket No 1 - Allan Watkins

couldn’t get my mind together to concentrate on running things, taking the boys out. I just couldn’t do it.” Don Shepherd took over and Glamorgan won a famous victory in the dying moments of the game as storm clouds encircled the ground waiting only for Glamorgan to take the final wicket before swamping the whole area. “I lived on my nerves all my life.” Allan so often repeats these words. For some years he had been afflicted by asthma, and the tightness of his chest made it harder to get fit, but it had not stopped him competing. Now the debilitating effects of asthma were compounded by tension. It all came to a head at Swansea. “I was batting and I had these horrible pains in my chest. I gave my wicket away and I remember Wilf coming down the steps. He opened the door and was going to give me a rollicking. I was sat in the corner and he said, ‘My God, what’s wrong with you?’ I said, ‘I’ve got pains in my chest. I feel terrible.’ He said, ‘Right, straight to Morriston Hospital.’” Allan’s doctor later had a private word with Molly. “You know what your doctor has been saying,” she said. “If you don’t ease up, he won’t be responsible for your health.” Allan thought about his family. He knew Molly was right, but he did not retire immediately, and he was still the senior professional when the 1961 season opened with a new captain. Ossie Wheatley, a former Cambridge Blue, had been lured from Warwickshire as an opening bowler and skipper. Wheatley speaks of inheriting a team in transition where Allan’s experience as senior professional would have been invaluable. “He was a super guy, but he wasn’t very well. He had asthma and he was very nervous.” Allan played eight matches, but his captain found that, with his nerves, he always needed to work himself up to play. He had managed a couple of fifties, but injury forced him to drop out of the side at the beginning of June. A month later Glamorgan were at Lord’s when his new captain tried to persuade Allan to play again. “I said, ‘Come on, Allan, it would be nice to have you on the field, just as a batsman.’ He said, ‘I need a bit of time to think about that.’ I said, ‘Come on you’ve been playing for 20 years.’ He said, ‘No, no I really do need time.’” The worrying had finally got the better of Allan. In an era when many careers extended well into the forties, he was only 39, but he had played his last game for Glamorgan. “He was a great loss,” Ossie Wheatley says with obvious sadness. The Strain Becomes Too Much 91