In May 1977 I returned home to the London suburbs after the first extended period I'd ever spent away from home without my parents - a 'lively' school trip to a small seaside town in Dorset (name witheld to protect the innocent) which is probably still recovering - and my Dad met me off the bus.
I was only eleven but I really liked my cricket. He knew that, which was probably why one of the first things he told me was that many well-known cricketers, led by the England captain Tony Greig, had signed contracts to play cricket for someone neither of us had ever heard of called Kerry Packer. The news had just broken, which was why it was on his mind, but I, after a week of visiting 'places of interest' and trekking across the rain-blasted Dorset countryside, had no idea what he was talking about.
I soon found out, though. That summer's Test series against Australia was to be the last time Tony Greig would ever represent England, although, with hindsight, it's staggering that he remained in the side after being stripped of the captaincy.
It's almost become trite to say that Tony Greig is better remembered for his intimate involvement with the development of World Series Cricket than for his deeds on the field, but it's no less true for all that. In the days when Andrew Flintoff was everyone's hero he tended to be compared to Ian Botham with barely any thought given to anyone who wore the England all-rounder's mantle before him. But before Botham came Tony Greig, and Tony Greig, I promise you, could play.
My memories of Greig are fractured by the passage of time and age. Not my age now, you understand, but the age I was then. Certain things stick in the memory - like Packer and 'grovel' (I wonder now if I'd ever heard the word before Greig used it so clumsily) and the London West Indian crowd dancing in front of the pavilion at The Oval after Holding bowls him for the second time in that match. And I remember his angular bowling action, which spawned a thousand playground imitations. And I remember his SP bats and gloves. And I remember his upright stance. And I remember the withering power of his cover drive, enhanced by his immense reach and stride and invariably played with a self-conscious flourish. But I don't remember either of his Indian tours, or his trip to the West Indies, or his debut. Those came from a long-forgotten time when I occasionally had other things on my mind apart from cricket.
My lasting memory of Greig, though, is one which has been mentioned in virtually every tribute paid to him in the days since his death. The England tour of Australia in late 1974 and early 1975 was the first overseas tour by an England team that I was ever aware of. Which meant that the first Test in Brisbane was the first overseas Test match involving England that I ever followed. I was up early to listen to Alan McGilvray on my little brown radio, and there were highlights on TV each evening. You didn't need to be very old to tell that Jeff Thomson and Dennis Lillee were fearsome bowlers. And you didn't need a very mature grasp of psychology to know that signalling the four for yourself each time you hit one of them to the boundary was likely to make them even more fearsome.
I might not have known the expression, or what it meant, but, at the time, I knew what I was seeing.
Tony Greig had balls.
Showing posts with label Tony Greig. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tony Greig. Show all posts
1.1.13
8.4.08
Parallels
After posting the piece about Giles Clarke this afternoon, I came across this on Cricinfo.
Greig is right about Clarke's use of WSC as a parallel (Botham was already in the England ODI side before Packer) but I'm less sure about his suggestion that the ECB should start its own rival to the IPL.
Sure, it could be done (and probably will be), but is it going to attract the type of investment that the IPL has in a country where cricket is barely on the radar in terms of levels of interest in comparison with India?
Unlikely, but if someone started a football league...
Wait a minute, that happened in 1992.
Greig is right about Clarke's use of WSC as a parallel (Botham was already in the England ODI side before Packer) but I'm less sure about his suggestion that the ECB should start its own rival to the IPL.
Sure, it could be done (and probably will be), but is it going to attract the type of investment that the IPL has in a country where cricket is barely on the radar in terms of levels of interest in comparison with India?
Unlikely, but if someone started a football league...
Wait a minute, that happened in 1992.
3.9.06
Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow?
Now that the dust has settled after what happened at The Oval two weeks ago - and it's probably especially thick on Malcolm Speed's desk in Dubai - it's time to consider what went on.
The focus of the 'debate' (if the rather sickly blend of unvarnished hindsight, exaggeration and self-righteousness which has dominated the media can be dignified with that title) has been the actions on the day and subsequent conduct of Darrell Hair. While, as I stated in the brief post which I produced on the fateful evening, I can see that there was fault on both sides, I think that the incessant concentration on Hair's actions and assumed motivations has been unbalanced and unfair and has contrived to move the debate away from a proper assessment of the deeds of the Pakistan team and those of Hair's fellow umpire on the day, the Dominican Billy Doctrove.
Indeed, such has been the clamour to condemn Hair that most people who have made comments about the controversy (and that, my friends, is a lot of people) seem to have forgotten or deliberately ignored the fact that there were two umpires on the field on the day and the decision to replace the ball and award five penalty runs to England was taken jointly. True, Hair was the senior partner, and all visible evidence suggested that he took the initiative in the decision by first examining the ball, then discussing its condition with Doctrove, then beckoning Trevor Jesty onto the field with the replacement balls and finally signalling the penalty runs. But is it reasonable to assume that Doctrove, although an inexperienced umpire at Test level, would not have had the courage to debate the point with Hair if he did not agree that the condition of the ball was suspicious? Perhaps so, but the fact is that the decision was, at least in terms of protocol, a joint one, and while Hair has been cast into the wilderness, Doctrove was happily umpiring at Lord's yesterday (if he did look a bit cold at times).
Of course, it's also true to say that Hair, having begun to dig a small hole for himself (initially sharing the spade with Doctrove), has gone on to dig himself deeper and deeper into it, to the point where his head is surely about to disappear for good. His e-mailed offer to resign from the ICC's elite panel of umpires in return for a very substantial sum of money was crass, ill-timed and presumptuous, and has done more to seal his fate than any of his other actions in the saga. While it is likely that Hair would have continued to umpire at international level for some time and the sum concerned - we must assume - was roughly equivalent to what he would have earned over that period, how can he say that he would not have suffered a catastrophic loss of form or some other misfortune and been replaced in advance of his time anyway? If he was going to resign (and, since he clearly believed that he was in the right in changing the ball and then abandoning the match, why would he have done so?) he should simply have indicated as much and waited for his employers to suggest a suitable compensation figure.
With all this said, I think that it's a pity that Hair will be lost to international cricket, as, technically, he has always been a very good umpire (not perfect, but nobody, not even the blessed Simon Taufel, is). His main faults lie in a certain inflexibility of temperament and the fact that he has the courage to take unpopular decisions which he believes to be right, no matter what the potential consequences. Given his previous problems with Asian sides, including Pakistan, it was inevitable that trouble would follow the Oval decision, but too much of the comment which has followed has placed Hair a little too firmly in the wrong and failed to consider the fact that the actions of the Pakistan team were very far from being above reproach.
While the whole affair might have been avoided if Hair (or, even better, Doctrove) had spoken to Inzamam before replacing the ball and awarding the penalty runs, the actions of the Pakistan side in refusing to play when instructed to do so were a clear example of the type of weakness of temperament and spirit which has always prevented them, with one or two exceptions, from fulfilling their potential on the field. God knows, they were on top in the game at the time and could have salvaged a consolation victory from a series in which they had performed very poorly. That they chose to remain in their dressing room when surely they could have taken possession of even more of the moral high ground with a victory, was always guaranteed to cloud the waters of the debate in the eyes of those people (myself included) who tend towards the view that the decisions of officials in any sport are best regarded as being right even when they're transparently wrong.
Of course, the real problem lies in the framing of Law 42 (3) (d) (iii), which empowers the umpires to award five penalty runs against the fielding side in a case of adjudged ball tampering, without the fielding side having any opportunity to present a case for the defence. There can be little doubt that at The Oval the sense of injustice felt by the Pakistan side was compounded by the fact that when Hair and Doctrove took their decision they were not just being accused of ball tampering. In the eyes of the umpires, they were already guilty.
In among all the guff written by people who clearly didn't know better, two articles stood out. One by Martin Samuel in The Times, which, broadly speaking, put the case for the umpire's decision being final, and one by The Observer's veteran columnist Jon Henderson, who attempted, by reference to the Greig-Kallicharran incident in Port-of-Spain in 1974, to reassure younger readers (and that's most of us) that the Test world wasn't about to stop turning.
Not that I ever thought it would.
The focus of the 'debate' (if the rather sickly blend of unvarnished hindsight, exaggeration and self-righteousness which has dominated the media can be dignified with that title) has been the actions on the day and subsequent conduct of Darrell Hair. While, as I stated in the brief post which I produced on the fateful evening, I can see that there was fault on both sides, I think that the incessant concentration on Hair's actions and assumed motivations has been unbalanced and unfair and has contrived to move the debate away from a proper assessment of the deeds of the Pakistan team and those of Hair's fellow umpire on the day, the Dominican Billy Doctrove.
Indeed, such has been the clamour to condemn Hair that most people who have made comments about the controversy (and that, my friends, is a lot of people) seem to have forgotten or deliberately ignored the fact that there were two umpires on the field on the day and the decision to replace the ball and award five penalty runs to England was taken jointly. True, Hair was the senior partner, and all visible evidence suggested that he took the initiative in the decision by first examining the ball, then discussing its condition with Doctrove, then beckoning Trevor Jesty onto the field with the replacement balls and finally signalling the penalty runs. But is it reasonable to assume that Doctrove, although an inexperienced umpire at Test level, would not have had the courage to debate the point with Hair if he did not agree that the condition of the ball was suspicious? Perhaps so, but the fact is that the decision was, at least in terms of protocol, a joint one, and while Hair has been cast into the wilderness, Doctrove was happily umpiring at Lord's yesterday (if he did look a bit cold at times).
Of course, it's also true to say that Hair, having begun to dig a small hole for himself (initially sharing the spade with Doctrove), has gone on to dig himself deeper and deeper into it, to the point where his head is surely about to disappear for good. His e-mailed offer to resign from the ICC's elite panel of umpires in return for a very substantial sum of money was crass, ill-timed and presumptuous, and has done more to seal his fate than any of his other actions in the saga. While it is likely that Hair would have continued to umpire at international level for some time and the sum concerned - we must assume - was roughly equivalent to what he would have earned over that period, how can he say that he would not have suffered a catastrophic loss of form or some other misfortune and been replaced in advance of his time anyway? If he was going to resign (and, since he clearly believed that he was in the right in changing the ball and then abandoning the match, why would he have done so?) he should simply have indicated as much and waited for his employers to suggest a suitable compensation figure.
With all this said, I think that it's a pity that Hair will be lost to international cricket, as, technically, he has always been a very good umpire (not perfect, but nobody, not even the blessed Simon Taufel, is). His main faults lie in a certain inflexibility of temperament and the fact that he has the courage to take unpopular decisions which he believes to be right, no matter what the potential consequences. Given his previous problems with Asian sides, including Pakistan, it was inevitable that trouble would follow the Oval decision, but too much of the comment which has followed has placed Hair a little too firmly in the wrong and failed to consider the fact that the actions of the Pakistan team were very far from being above reproach.
While the whole affair might have been avoided if Hair (or, even better, Doctrove) had spoken to Inzamam before replacing the ball and awarding the penalty runs, the actions of the Pakistan side in refusing to play when instructed to do so were a clear example of the type of weakness of temperament and spirit which has always prevented them, with one or two exceptions, from fulfilling their potential on the field. God knows, they were on top in the game at the time and could have salvaged a consolation victory from a series in which they had performed very poorly. That they chose to remain in their dressing room when surely they could have taken possession of even more of the moral high ground with a victory, was always guaranteed to cloud the waters of the debate in the eyes of those people (myself included) who tend towards the view that the decisions of officials in any sport are best regarded as being right even when they're transparently wrong.
Of course, the real problem lies in the framing of Law 42 (3) (d) (iii), which empowers the umpires to award five penalty runs against the fielding side in a case of adjudged ball tampering, without the fielding side having any opportunity to present a case for the defence. There can be little doubt that at The Oval the sense of injustice felt by the Pakistan side was compounded by the fact that when Hair and Doctrove took their decision they were not just being accused of ball tampering. In the eyes of the umpires, they were already guilty.
In among all the guff written by people who clearly didn't know better, two articles stood out. One by Martin Samuel in The Times, which, broadly speaking, put the case for the umpire's decision being final, and one by The Observer's veteran columnist Jon Henderson, who attempted, by reference to the Greig-Kallicharran incident in Port-of-Spain in 1974, to reassure younger readers (and that's most of us) that the Test world wasn't about to stop turning.
Not that I ever thought it would.
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