Lives in Cricket No 22 - Jack Mercer

88 Chapter Fourteen Senior professional The departure of Frank Ryan at the end of the previous season meant that in 1932 Jack became Glamorgan’s senior professional. For the next eight seasons he acted as Maurice Turnbull’s main liaison with the county’s professional players, who in most years comprised of eight regulars turning out week after week, plus other ‘irregulars’. At the start of the 1931 season Jack was 38, with well over 200 first-class matches to his name, including an MCC tour to India. As we have seen, he had been a commissioned officer in the Great War and thus familiar with ‘leadership’. Turnbull was 25, thirteen years his junior and - as an amateur - had played in 137 first-class matches, including five Tests in South Africa, and had led teams from a young age at Downside and whilst at Cambridge. He was not domineering by nature, but he was a confident man from a well-off family, whose position was strengthened by the conventions of the time, by his appointment in due course as the county’s secretary in 1932, and by his talent as a player. There was of course then no ‘job description’ for the position of senior professional and the role of these postholders varied from county to county, according to local circumstances and the personalities of the individuals concerned. 88 The relationship between Jack and ‘Mr Turnbull’ was harmonious and one of mutual respect. By habit, Jack was a very good team man, something of a contrast to the unpredictability of his predecessor, Frank Ryan, who like many professionals often resented being what told to do by amateurs of lesser talent. 89 Jack, though, was always happy to give his views, besides acting as a friendly advisor to the aspiring bowlers, especially some of the younger professionals from the local leagues whom Turnbull was trying to encourage. Consequently there were several inferior bowlers who on occasions secured a decent clutch of wickets, having digested Jack’s erstwhile assessment of the conditions and the opposition. His sage words of advice carried considerable weight in the professionals’ changing room, and when Maurice called in, sometimes with Johnnie Clay, the pair of amateurs were happy for Jack to lead the discussions, as he was very perceptive in his analysis of batsmen’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as a possessing a bank of knowledge about the vagaries of the wicket at away grounds. 88 In the 1930s, several counties appointed senior professionals to captain sides in individual matches when no appropriate amateur was available. Surprisingly, Jack never led the Glamorgan side, but this was because Clay was usually on hand. 89 In his obituary of Mercer in the 1988 Wisden, R.L.Arrowsmith, not a writer much given to hyperbole, said of Ryan that he ‘combined a passion for beer and women with the temperament of a spoilt prima donna ’.