Cricket On The Beach (Timeline 10/27/62 - Australia) Read online

  Batting got a little easier after the break.

  A cricket wicket is a living thing, its moods prone to variation at the whim of the weather, particularly humidity, its surface influenced by a brisk breeze or sunshine. No matter how hard-baked a wicket might seem beneath the Antipodean sun it was still just earth, packed down, rolled and yet alive.

  So, for that session at least the balance swung part of the way back towards the batsmen; the pitch became flat, resistant to indentation and wear, placid and the two men in possession filled their boots.

  Colin Cowdrey went to his hundred with a single nudged towards third man; Ken Barrington – playing ‘ugly’ – fought past fifty by the end of the day’s play.

  England got to the close at 210 for 3; Cowdrey 122 and Barrington 53 not out. On the face of it the tourists went into the morrow and the New Year holding the better hand and a realistic prospect of achieving a significant first innings lead.

  The first day of 1963 dawned brilliantly beneath clear blue skies. Several men took taxis down to the front to take in the view across Port Philip Bay, the vast, mostly shallow lagoon around whose northern and eastern rim Melbourne had gradually spread over the decades. The air was so clear that one could see for miles. Anchored in the deep water channel there were three vessels of the British Pacific Fleet, long lean frigates and destroyers with strings of flags flying from their halyards and their decks covered with pure white canvas awnings against the heat of the coming day. Other ships, a miscellany of merchantmen had gathered in recent weeks, for tales of piracy and outright larceny on the high seas north of the continent were now things which had gained wide public currency.

  Thirty-six year old John Woodcock, formerly of The London Times, now contributing pieces to several Australian papers encountered Jim Swanton gazing wistfully towards the silhouettes of the warships in the bay.

  ‘Down here we can almost pretend that the worst has not happened,’ the eminence grise of the press pack observed thoughtfully to his younger friend.

  ‘Going home will be the thing,’ Woodcock returned, his mood mirroring Swanton’s brief introspection. ‘Nobody said there were any bombs in Hampshire, for all I know Longparish is still there...’

  ‘That’s where you were born, I recollect?’

  ‘Yes...’ Woodcock remembered the older man’s home in Sandwich no longer existed and his voice trailed away as often, a man’s voice was wont when his soul was pricked by another’s loss, half-forgotten until that moment.

  ‘I don’t know what I shall do,’ Swanton declared without a tincture of self-pity. ‘Just get on with things, I suppose. It is too early to think about going home. My feelings will be with Cowdrey and Barrington when they resume their innings; perhaps they can forget their troubles while they are in the middle, but in the dark of the night...’

  Overnight the pitch confounded the pundits.

  It had begun to assume a burnt wheat colour from a distance and far from having deteriorated it was at its most benign; not quite a classic featherbed but forgiving with hardly a vice once the sun had been on it for the first hour of the morning’s play.

  This was no solace for Colin Cowdrey nonchalantly ‘airing’ a cover drive into Ken Mackay’s hands and departing the scene with 144 to his name, or to Tom Graveney who batted serenely for an hour before – out of the blue – dragging a ball from Davidson onto his stumps with England only three runs ahead. Thus exposed England’s long ‘tail’ spectacularly failed to wag!

  It was all over not long after luncheon: England out for 291 with Ken Barrington left high and dry undefeated on 79. The wicket was blameless, the ambition of the batsmen – other than Barrington – vaguely absurd.

  Suffice to say that Australia had learned that if they batted with good sense and respected the wicket that there were runs to be had; and Lawry and Simpson wasted no time cashing in.

  Fred Trueman bowled with good pace and no little guile, winkling out both openers, one in each of his first two four over spells either side of the interregnum of the tea break. Brian Statham was steady, miserly and David Larter was so profligate that he only bowled six overs that day.

  Australia had moved onto 171 for 2 at the close; with Neil Harvey 65 and Norm O’Neill 18 not out. The lead stood at exactly 150 runs. The first day of 1963 had proved somewhat sanguinary to the Englishmen. If the opening day of the Test had been drawn, the second England’s, the third had seen the pendulum swing – possibly decisively - back in the favour of the Australians.

  Each of the first three days had seen approximately eighty thousand people in the MCG; astonishingly, given that the fourth day was a normal working day there were over thirty thousand in the ground before play and nearer fifty thousand by the afternoon.

  The masses were rewarded with what was to turn out to be Neil Harvey’s final hundred beneath the floppy green hat. By the time he was finally removed, for 181, caught off a leading edge after smiting the previous two balls of Tony Lock’s over to the fence, the Australians had a stranglehold on the match. Wickets had fallen at intervals around Harvey but by then the lead was 340 with four wickets still in hand.

  No side had ever scored that many runs to win a Test Match in Australia, and only once – coincidentally, in the corresponding match of the 1928-29 series at Melbourne – had England even got close, scoring 332 for 7 to win what was to all intents a ‘timeless’ game played out to a conclusion.

  Richie Benaud declared half-an-hour before the tea interval at 382 for 9, setting England 404 runs to win, or more realistically challenging Ted Dexter’s men to bat out the remaining eight hours and twenty minutes of the game on a wearing wicket.

  In the England dressing room as the openers hurriedly donned their pads and tried to ‘switch on’ after baking all day beneath the enervating Victorian sun Ted Dexter asked that the door be closed.

  ‘The wicket is playing flatter with every minute,’ he declared making eye contacts around the room. ‘We can’t possibly let Ken and Colin down as badly as we did in the first innings. We shall go for this!’

  Fred Trueman is reported to have snorted, loudly.

  The openers, Peter Parfitt and David Sheppard reputedly blinked ‘quite a lot’, and Ken Barrington who had been on the field for all but three balls of the match thus far had wiped a weary hand across his brow and taken a long, deep breath before determining to keep his opinion to himself.

  David Sheppard stole a single off the first delivery of the innings leaving Peter Parfitt to deal with Alan Davidson with a shiny new ball in his hand. He survived the remaining seven balls of the over without ever threatening to put the middle of his bat to the ball. Sheppard was almost caught down the leg side the next over but Wally Grout’s finger tips only diverted the ball to the boundary. Garth McKenzie proceeded to pepper Sheppard with a barrage of short balls. Davidson then had Parfitt groping at thing air for a second over before McKenzie, reprimanded by his captain for ‘wasting the new ball’ gave Sheppard a searching examination witnesses were astonished he ‘got through in one piece’. McKenzie having foresworn the ‘short stuff’ had concentrated on bowling in the batsman’s ‘half’, generating bounce and movement that sent the ball rearing past the outside edge and ripping back into his body.

  Nevertheless England went into tea with 13 on the board for no loss; with only the small matter of another 391 runs needed to win the match. Bradman’s Australians had once scored 404 to win a Test, at Headingley in 1948 but quite apart from the Don (who scored an unbeaten 173 that day) the Australians had had Arthur Morris, Lindsey Hassett, Keith Miller and the young Neil Harvey and other all time greats of the game. And that was in England, this was Australia and basically, that 332 that dear old Percy Chapman’s team had scored in 1929 was a complete one-off, a bizarre statistical outrider. Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay standing at the foot of Everest had faced no greater mountain to climb...and they had had oxygen cylinders!

  But then in retrospect perhaps Ted Dexter understood t
he strengths and weaknesses of his eleven better than anybody. Barrington and David Sheppard apart, his England team was hardly blessed with a slew of notable ‘blockers’. And just ‘blocking’ on a fifth day wicket hardly ever worked...

  And besides, it all began so well.

  Peter Parfitt began like a man preoccupied with cementing his place in the side – which was faintly ridiculous given that in his nine-Test career before he was included in the Australian party he had scored four centuries and averaged 65 - and gradually, as the overs went by he relaxed and began to remind everybody why he had been picked in the first place, driving and cutting powerfully while David Sheppard did what he did best, he blocked and he accumulated without particular fanfare. The fifty came up in the sixteenth over; Parfitt went to his personal half-century in the twentieth and at the close the openers were still together.

  England 83 for 0 wickets; twenty-six year old Peter Parfitt – a makeshift opener on this tour – not out on 58, and thirty-three year old David Sheppard, recently returned to the game from missionary work, on 21 stolidly made runs. To score the remaining 321 runs required to win and to level the series in a day’s play was still a tall order; but suddenly not impossible.

  There were over thirty thousand in the ground on Thursday morning when the English openers resumed the innings. Parfitt exuded a sureness of stroke from the outset; Sheppard looked unspectacularly solid, clearly attempting to play the ‘sheet anchor’ role. Ironically, it was Sheppard who departed first after forty-five minutes, leg before wicket to the penultimate ball – which had kept low - of what was probably going to be Garth McKenzie’s last over of his spell.

  Variable bounce is a thing to be expected on a five-day old wicket, likewise bowlers’ foot holes deepening and spreading and the ball spinning more sharply. Batting on a wearing wicket is never straightforward, although occasionally the best wielders of the willow wand might make it seem otherwise.

  Peter Parfitt, for example, was now in such prime form that while Ken Barrington looked all at sea he carried on as if he was seeing the ball as big as a football.

  Richie Benaud had begun to weave his subtle wiles.

  Barrington was stroke-less; suddenly Parfitt as he moved into the nineties put his cover drive in a locker and began to deal exclusively in ones and twos. The pace of scoring slowed and inevitably, a wicket fell.

  Parfitt pushed forward to a Benaud leg break that pitched outside the line of his leg stump that he could have kicked away and feathered a nick into Wally Grout’s gloves.

  127 without loss had become 136 for 2; Sheppard 31 and Parfitt 97 dismissed inside half-an hour and suddenly the fielders were hemming in the England captain as he took guard with forty minutes to go before luncheon. Dexter looked around at the close catchers and at the boundless acres of empty landscape in the outer and crashed his second and third balls from the leg spinner into the distant fences at cover and mid-on. By the time he had driven a perfectly respectable Ken Mackay length ball – the last of the session - straight back down the ground for his ninth four Dexter had score 43 in more or less even time and England were 202 for 2, exactly half-way to an improbable victory!

  Richie Benaud maintains that he always believed that at some point the natural variations to be expected from a fifth day wicket and the penetration of the attack under his command would cause a collapse of some description, or alternatively gradually undermine the batting side. However, he would not have been human if he had not had moments of profound doubt at lunch or during that afternoon.

  Ted Dexter went to his hundred in as many minutes an hour into the afternoon session. At the other end Ken Barrington had played himself in and looked impregnable in carrying his score to 41. As Lord Ted raised his bat to acknowledge the cheers and the barracking of the tens of thousands in the great arena England required only another 114 runs with eight wickets standing and just under three hours still to play.

  And then it happened...

  Garth McKenzie was called back into the attack for one – if not final then desperate - all-out burst. By then Benaud would have given almost anything for a wicket. The young fast bowler rolled in, clearly a little stiff, his arm came over and Ted Dexter appeared to lose the delivery in the background.

  The ball had slipped out of the bowler’s hand and looped, at nowhere near full pace towards the batsman. Dexter had thought it was going to take his head off for a split second and by the time he realised the ball was dipping towards waist height he was hopelessly out of position.

  The delivery literally landed on the top of Dexter’s off stump and the match turned in an instant; although, at the time it felt like a hiccup in the – more or less – irresistible surge to victory. Barrington was in occupation at one end and Colin Cowdrey played his first few balls as if he was merely continuing where he had left off in the first innings.

  However, one injudicious drive at McKenzie and the England vice captain departed, Tom Graveney was bowled by another shin-high ‘grubber’ from the same bowler and suddenly England were 302 for 5, rocked onto the back foot.

  John Murray, batting at seven in the order was one of, if not the most elegant wicket keepers in the English game; several good judges speculated that his footwork was down to his having played youth team football for Brentford before making his Middlesex debut aged seventeen in 1952. Notwithstanding he customarily batted at seven or eight for his county and the fact that he had scored first-class hundreds in his career, the Australians knew that the England ‘tail’ began with Murray. After him Lock and Trueman could bat – possibly dangerously on their day – but basically, the door was if not open, then ajar.

  Despite Barrington and Murray blocking until the tea interval Benaud told his men that if they took one wicket, just one wicket, England’s innings might ‘collapse’.

  Enlisting Bobby Simpson’s more than respectable part-time leg spin, Benaud surrounded the Englishmen with catchers. Ken Barrington clipped twos and threes, Murray tried to play the two spinners with his pads. There was stalemate for twenty minutes after tea.

  A Simpson leg break, pitching in a bowlers’ foot hole bowled John Murray behind his legs, and two balls later attempting to pad aside a similar delivery the ball flicked Tony Lock’s glove and Bill Lawry took a sprawling catch.

  That was 318 for 7.

  Enter Fiery Fred with a mile-wide scowl on his face.

  At times in Fred Trueman’s illustrious career he might have been right in claiming he was the best bowler in the game; however, his pretensions to batsmanship were less convincing. Thus far in his fifty-one match test career he averaged 15 with a top score of 39. Away from Test cricket he had played numerous violently spectacular innings in county and other matches against less accomplished attacks in less fraught circumstances, but although he was capable of playing ‘properly’ in defence it was not really in his nature.

  ‘The wicket was doing too much by then,’ he would expound in later life, ‘no point propping and copping when you know it’s only a matter of time before you get a ball with your name on it!’

  He got away with ‘swinging and hoping’, albeit with a good deal of playing and missing, for twenty minutes.

  Trueman caught McKenzie bowled Benaud for 21.

  England 342 for 8 with over an hour left in the day.

  Understandably, Brian Statham’s walk to the middle was hardly brisk; after him there was only David Larter to come and he was an archetypal number eleven, the sort of ‘rabbit’ likely to take a lot more wickets than he scored runs in international cricket.

  The batsmen had crossed while the ball was in the air above the circling fieldsman, so Barrington was on strike. For several overs he contrived to take most of the bowling, defending five, six or seven balls of each over before attempting to steal a single, and repeating the exercise the next.

  The minutes began to tick down.

  The England 350 came up, only 64 more runs needed for a historic victory’ except nobody believed that was re
motely possible.

  Still the minutes ticked by with Ken Barrington’s bat seemingly broader by the second as the Australians began to get anxious, rushing between overs to speed up the game.

  Ten minutes before the close.

  Statham was left to face the last ball of Benaud’s over.

  There were no more than two, perhaps three overs remained after this one.

  The Australian captain’s ‘flipper’ – a delivery that hardly spins, or bounces, skidding straight on – knocked back Brian Statham's off stump.

  Suddenly the partisan crowd, which had swelled to some thirty-five thousand as the word got around the city that famous things were happening at the MCG and spectators were allowed in free of charge after the tea interval, was urging David Larter to pick up his feet and to rush to his inevitable slaughter in the middle. There was a barrage of jeers as Barrington intercepted the hugely taller man when at last he dragged out to the wicket.

  At such time seconds seem like minutes.

  ‘Be ready to run when I call you after the seventh or last ball of this next over,’ the Surrey man ordered. ‘Until then don’t move an inch.’

  This suited David Larter just fine.

  Alan Davidson had been about to bowl the next over but Bobby Simpson had been summoned so as to ensure that two, not one more over would be possible.

  England’s last pair had sixteen deliveries to survive.

  Barrington was playing Simpson like a father plays his eight year old son’s underarm lobs. After the fifth ball of the over Benaud put all his fielders in a ragged circle on the square to stop Barrington taking a single. Simpson fired the ball into the bowlers’ footmarks behind the batsman’s legs, wider and wider, agonisingly Barrington attempted to sweep the deliveries away and run...

  But the Australian’s let two under-edged hits run all the way to the boundary and then, horror of horrors, the Surrey maestro completely missed the last ball of the over and with less than three minutes on the scoreboard clock, David Larter was left to face the final eight-ball over of the match to be bowled by possibly the most lethal, and certainly the wiliest leg spin bowler in Christendom.