Michael Parkinson: `Barking` Russell keeps his head in the madcap world of cricket (17 May 1997)

Saturday 17 May 1997

`Barking` Russell keeps his head in the madcap world of cricket

By Michael Parkinson

I AM wise to the ways of wicketkeepers. I played with one who wore a balaclava and an overcoat on cold days and looked like a bank robber behind the stumps. There was another who strapped his box - a huge corrugated metal affair - outside of his trousers and another who used to fit hair clips into the toes of his boots with which to tap the stumps and dislodge the bail. I have known for a while they are not like the rest of us, but nothing prepared me for Jack Russell. There are two Jack Russells. One is arguably the best wicketkeeper in Britain and a fine and sensitive artist to boot. The other has subtitled his biography Barking?, as in mad, and asks me, having read it, whether or not I think he is crackers.

I had breakfast with Jack, which is to say I had scrambled eggs, bacon, tomatoes and toast and he had Weetabix of such sogginess his plate looked like a farmyard puddle. It achieves this texture by being soaked in milk for precisely 12 minutes. This is how long he likes his cereals soaked and who is to argue? He will have the same for lunch and during the day eats a pack of Jaffa Cakes and one of wholemeal biscuits. If he feels like a meal in the evening it will be mashed potato mixed with plain rice with baked beans and brown sauce. During a tour of India he ate steak (cremated) and chips for 28 consecutive days and wonders if this is a record.

At his side while we ate was a holdall containing his wicketkeeping gloves and his famous white hat. They are never out of his sight. He has worn the hat in every first- class game since 1981. It looks its age. It is whiteish on the outside but if you look under the rim you can see it was once set on fire. This happened after it was placed in an oven when it was 13 years old. Don`t ask why.

During the 1996 World Cup the authorities ordered Russell to wear the official hat. He refused and threatened to walk out of the tournament. The officials relented.

He lives in fear of losing his hat. The rest of us ought to be terrified of finding it. It is the sort of object to be approached by men wearing protective clothing and carrying flame-throwers.

When he opened the boot of his car he apologised for the absence of the tumble-drier which he normally carries around with him because he washes his own kit. By now the sight of a cricketer carrying cricket gear in one hand and a box of paints in the other seemed perfectly normal. We were at the Oval - Gloucestershire playing Surrey. I met up with my old friend Dickie Bird, who was umpiring. I told him I was writing an article about Jack Russell. "Oh, he`s not playing, is he?" asked Mr Bird, becoming agitated. "He`ll start jumping up and down and getting me going like he always does. He`s a beauty that Jack Russell, a beauty. Much worse than me." It takes one to know one.

Like Dickie Bird, Jack Russell has the sublime ability to be able to laugh at himself. He doesn`t take himself seriously but he is very serious about the job he does. For all he makes fun of himself and his eccentric ways he also thinks deeply about the game of cricket. It is typical the English Cricket Board wasted time searching for reasons to censor his book* when a copy should have been sent to every committee member in every county so they might begin to understand what they have to do to produce better cricketers.

What Russell makes clear is the grinding monotony of the county season, the way the system blunts the competitive edge, numbs ambition, turns players into robots. As someone who, on recent tours, spent most of his time watching other people play, he was ideally placed to observe and comment upon the way touring parties are organised. He is not too impressed. His account of Raymond Illingworth`s handling of the South Africa tour is a sad portrait of the generation gap at work. None the less it is a picnic compared with his description of what happened in Zimbabwe. He says: "Some of the team decided they didn`t like the place from the start. They didn`t care for the country, underestimated the opposition. I couldn`t understand them. I thought it a fascinating adventure. When they complained about the hotels I told them they should have been on a tour of Pakistan when we slept in a biscuit factory and were eaten alive by mosquitoes."

After the defeat by Mashonaland, Russell stood up at a team meeting and said he felt we weren`t bowling with enough discipline and when we batted were being careless when there was a need for graft. His observations were ignored. As the tour progressed so the siege mentality increased to the point where players and management refused to go to the Christmas party thrown by the media. Jack Russell told them it was not the right decision. "You can`t blame the press if you`re playing badly," he said. Again he found himself in a minority.

He feels not enough attention is paid to preparing our cricketers psychologically for what is required on a tour. "We have to get inside their heads much more than we do," he said. Manmanagement skills are either lacking or nonexistent.

HE HAS evidence of both, including the farcical approach to touring. When he was sent for as a replacement on our last tour to Australia he didn`t have a visa. The TCCB told him there wouldn`t be a problem. When he arrived in Australia there was no one to meet him to help through the red tape. After considerable delay with immigration officers he eventually reached the hotel, where the tour manager, MJK Smith, told him there was nothing to worry about.

Russell spent the next two days sitting in a visa office waiting to be called, wondering why Mr Smith and his Australian friends didn`t do something about his predicament.

As he points out, had England been in urgent need of him at that time he would have been unable to play because he didn`t have the necessary permit. No wonder the tour was a shambles and the Aussies treated us as a joke. They still do.

It is doubtful if Jack Russell will play against the Aussies this season. It could be his international career is over because we are unable to find an all-rounder. According to Russell the deeper significance of this is a tendency towards employing batsmen who can keep wicket rather than keepers who bat at seven. He sees the day arriving when the specialist keeper will be a relic.

For a purist like Russell this is almost too terrible to contemplate. Imagine a game deprived of the skills of Alan Knott or Bob Taylor. Imagine how much would be missing from the joy of watching Warne bowl if behind the stumps stood a fielder with gloves on and not Ian Healy. "I would love to have kept to Warne. The ultimate challenge," said Russell.

He reckons he has another five years or more as a top- class player, then he would like to be in charge of Gloucestershire`s cricket. He wants to be the director of cricket with complete control. "I don`t want committees. They are the dry rot of English cricket. They take up too much time, are not productive and are a platform for too many egos," he says.

Hear, hear, but I doubt he will get his way, not unless he can persuade a platoon of his beloved commandos to occupy Lord`s on behalf of those of us who believe, Lord MacLaurin notwithstanding, only armed insurrection will save the game.

Jack Russell`s obsession with the military started at an early age. When he was 12 his mother returned from work to find her son wearing an army jacket covered in military badges, a camouflaged hat and carrying a kitbag containing a sleeping bag and a tin plate. He told her he was about to embark on a secret mission. Twenty years later he sustained his heroic partnership with Michael Atherton against the South Africans by recalling Rorke`s Drift. He is obsessed by the courage of men under fire and his painting of the Cockleshell Heroes hangs in the Imperial War Museum. He haunts the museum whenever he is in London and often sits in the reconstruction of the trenches from World War One battlefields just to imagine what it must have been like.

You get the feeling he wouldn`t mind becoming a macho hunk. Instead he stands 5ft 8.25in high and weighs 9.5 stone. There is an endearing account in the book of Jack trying to look mean and hard after being told by Atherton he didn`t impose himself enough on the opposition. When Gloucestershire next played Lancashire, Russell decided to show his captain he could hang tough with the best of them. When he went out to bat he ignored their greetings with a stony stare. When Peter Martin tried to be genial, Jack threatened to deck him. It all went wrong when, during a staring match with Graham Lloyd, Jack decided to show his contempt by spitting. Being short of practice the spittle collided with the grill on his helmet and just dangled there. The Lancashire team collapsed in laughter to be joined after a moment by their hitherto aggressive protagonist.

THE fact is Jack Russell is tough without having to look the part. No one who has watched him play cricket can doubt he is made of the real stuff. After he and Atherton defied the South Africans in Johannesburg, Jack received a message from John Paul Getty. It said: "Thank you for enriching my life. That was one of the bravest and most dogged innings ever played."

He thinks he might end up a recluse like Getty or Howard Hughes. Somehow I don`t think so. There is so much to do and so little time. Apart from his ambitions in cricket, painting takes up more and more of his life. At present it is a toss-up if he is a cricketer who paints or vice versa. He wants to spend more time researching military history, he has ambition to become a jockey. Again, don`t ask.

On the one hand it is possible to look at Russell`s career as a cricketer and lament the circumstances which have made him as much a reluctant observer of the international game as a participant. On the other hand he has too much humour and talent in other fields to become a forlorn figure propping up the bar in his retirement.

He has the future taped, including his funeral. He has left instructions his hands are to be amputated, embalmed and put on display at his art gallery in Chipping Sodbury. He wants his coffin placed on top of a British tank on the journey from home to church. When the coffin is taken into church it must be to the sound of Lee Marvin singing Wanderin` Star. On his tombstone the inscription: "I used to wander through graveyards like you, hoping that one day I would be famous so that people would wonder who I was. Life is too short for you to be stood here. Thank you for your interest - off you go and do something beneficial before you end up like me".

I should tell you - if you hadn`t already guessed - Jack Russell has a twinkle in his eye. When he ran on to the field at the Oval he went straight to Dickie Bird and for a minute or two they were in animated conversation. I observed them from high in the press box and thought, not for the first time, how cricket makes children of us all.

*Unleashed, subtitled Barking?, by Jack Russell, published by Collins Willow, 15.99.

Source :: The Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/)