Lives in Cricket No 52 - Schooled in Cricket (2nd edition)

60 Chapter Ten Lawrence’s playing art and his love of being competitive Let us leave the sequential narrative for the moment and talk a little about Johnny Lawrence as a person. Johnny was a small man. When it was said that he was ‘barely higher than the stumps’, this was of course a colourful exaggeration – his height is given as five feet five inches. By appearance, he probably looked almost as little like an archetypal athlete as his most famous prodigy the young bespectacled Geoffrey Boycott did. From his small but muscular frame Johnny bowled slow looping right- handed leg-spinners. One spectator, Patrick Hopton from the Somerset period, remembers a jerky bowling action with his arm almost coming from behind his back and not crossing his shoulder. Stephen Lawrence who remembers the 1971 to 1973 period at Honley best of all says that actually his father had a methodical, concise and fairly straightforward action and that it was only for certain balls that he might appear jerky when he would put more body into the ball and his arm would follow afterwards. All accurate quality bowling is a thrifty art and craft, even leg spin. Just as the painter cannot waste his brush-strokes so the bowler cannot waste his talents with defective line or length or with bowling deliveries that are too easy to read the flight of. Johnny Lawrence was throughout his long career a consummate professional who achieved a high level of consistency in his game especially in bowling. He loved to tease the batsman, to lure him with the sheer slowness of his bowling at times into impatient self-destruction. However Johnny was also a big spinner of the ball, as his opponent the then young Ray Illingworth told me. A sizable number of his victims were stumped and he