Never in Fred's day

“Fred was rarely injured and missed Test matches usually only because, in his profoundly English bloody-mindedness, he had been caustically rude to someone in officialdom. His successors, none of whom has yet reached his league, spend more time recuperating from strains and stress fractures than they do engaging the enemy.”

“Trueman berated some Yorkshire batsmen for finding Wes Hall, the equally terrifying West Indian, so hard to play. When he, too, was knocked over by Hall, one of his team-mates had the nerve to point out that it wasn't so easy as it looked. ‘Ah'd 'ave been all right,’ retorted Fred, ‘if I 'adn't slipped on that pile of s--- tha'd dropped out there’.”

“In his way, he had his cult of celebrity, but this was not a man who would be worshipped for the sunglasses he wore or the women he stepped out with; all he wanted to be judged by, and would be judged by, was what he could do on the field of play. He died on a day when hideously overpaid grown men wept over having lost a game of football, and one of them assisted his side by engaging in the simian action of stamping on the private parts of a rival, and being sent off. They never did that in Fred's day.”