Surprise, luck and Croft are England's best bets

The sun never sets on cricket, as Plum Warner first remarked many years ago, an aphorism even more literally true today than ever. The top players are caught up in a continuous circus which surely calls for some regulation by the International Cricket Council.

Yet the high hopes in an English spring are perennial, and this year there is that special expectation which heralds the coming of Australia and the prospect of yet another fight for the Ashes.

It is 10 years since Mike Gatting, in Australia, retained the Ashes won here two years before by David Gower, and results since have been too depressing to mention. On the evidence of the respective bowling resources it would be foolish to deny that once again the odds over a six-Test series strongly favour Australia.

It might be different but for Shane Warne, and if any England bowler other than the admirable Robert Croft could aspire to the steadfast quality of an Angus Fraser, let alone a Botham or a Bedser. Yet surprise is the essence of cricket, and luck a permanent element. The better side, thank heaven, do not always win.

The crowds who will fill every Test seat and the untold mass of followers everywhere would surely be satisfied if England played with courage to the utmost of their capacity and if they showed a cheerful and generous spirit.

One of the hopes for the new season with the Australians in our midst must be for a general condemnation and action against sledging. The Australians were not the originators of this foul habit of verbal abuse but it has been for many years endemic in their cricket. I hope too that England show a more acceptable demeanour than was apparent at times during the winter, especially in the matter of appealing.

Cricketers, especially young ones, take their cue from what they see on the box. The eyes of the cricket world will be on this Ashes series, which will be genuinely acceptable only if the captains, the umpires and the referees all play their parts in making it so.

TALKING of behaviour, it is 20 years this week since news broke of what turned out to be the most serious assault on the game`s accepted values in its history. My recollection of the events of May 1977 is specially clear because after a Thursday`s play at Canterbury, Len Maddocks, the Australia manager, with two of his side, came to dine with us at Sandwich.

It was the last happy evening poor Maddocks spent on the tour, for two days later at Hove he learnt that all but four of his team had signed secret contracts binding allegiance to the brash, over-bearing media tycoon, Kerry Packer. There followed the sorry chapter of fractured loyalties, friendships broken, Test cricket played by skeleton sides while the rebels competed in so-called `Super Tests` against one another.

After two years, a commercial compromise between the Australian board and Packer allowed him television rights on condition that his World Series Cricket ceased to compete with the established game. There is an inclination now in some quarters to say that Packerism was perhaps not such a bad thing as players became better paid. In fact, in England and Australia, improved salary scales were in train anyway.

I have been looking up contemporary comments on WSC in 1977-79. Tony Lewis told Sunday Telegraph readers that more bouncers than he had ever seen were destroying the best batsmen. Henry Blofeld wrote of "despicable" fast bowling. Tony Greig, of the Packer camp, with implicit approval said bowlers were dishing out an unprecedented amount of bouncers at the "rabbits".

When the Packer circus ventured to the West Indies, riots occurred in three of the countries visited. At Georgetown, the pavilion was looted and records destroyed. The modern evil of intimidation had its roots in the brutalising of cricket under Packer. I once, by the way, won a 10 cricket wager from his father, Sir Frank, owner of several newspapers in Sydney, who was a genial fellow in comparison.

WHAT memories spring to mind at the news of Denis Compton`s passing. For all his 17 Test hundreds, my clearest picture is of his 76 not out in the Lord`s Test of 1938 when, on a pitch made difficult by rain and sun, and with Hutton, Barnett, Edrich, Hammond and Verity out, and only 76 runs on the board, he stood, a cool, debonair youth of 20, between Australia and victory, confronting with consummate artistry the spin and lift of O`Reilly and the high speed of McCormick. He used to say it was his best innings - when he remembered.

As a relief from much pain and general ill-health in his last years he could still relish the company of such great friends as Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie and John Warr; but he who had given so much to so many could no longer find pleasure in life. To those old enough to recall the late 1940s there was never such a sporting hero.

WILFRED Wooller was another glamorous figure in the world of games for whom I had much admiration. By an ill-fated chance a letter he dictated to his wife congratulating me on my birthday a few days before he died did not reach me until afterwards.

He recalled a friendship going back 60-odd years to his freshman days at Cambridge when he and Cliff Jones led the university in a glorious era on the rugby field. Wooller and Tony O`Reilly were the greatest three-quarters I ever saw, and the break by Wilf which in 1935-36 brought about that most thrilling victory over the All Blacks at Cardiff was the most exciting memory of all of us who were there on that famous day.

As a cricketer he must be accounted one of the two makers of Glamorgan, building on, after the war, the foundation made before it by Maurice Turnbull. He was a belligerent captain - a shade too much so at times - and in particular a pioneer in the aggressive use of catchers round the bat. His winning of the championship in 1948 was a nine-day wonder.

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