Test Match Special's Frindall dies at 69
George Binoy
25-Feb-2013
Clive Mason/Getty Images
Bill Frindall's death after a brief illness comes as a shock to those of us who worked alongside him as well as to the hundreds of thousands of cricket fans who felt they knew him after listening to his interjections and mischievous grunt of a laugh on TMS for more than four decades, writes Vic Marks in the Guardian.
Bill would delight in recalling that he was born (in Epsom, Surrey) on the first day of the famous, timeless Test between England and South Africa in Durban on 3 March 1939, and that he was a "record" 11 days old when the game finished – prematurely – because the England team had to catch their boat ...
... Initially he became famous as Johnston's stooge on air. Bill was soon christened The Bearded Wonder and was a ready butt for Johnston's schoolboy humour. He also had an important role to play for Arlott. Bill would proudly tell of his first encounter with the Guardian's former cricket correspondent. "I hear you like driving," said Arlott. "Well, I like drinking. We're going to get on well." And so they did.
Whatever distractions there might have been (and with his sharp eye he was often the first to spot a pretty girl in the back of the commentary box or, for that matter, in Row H of the Warner Stand), Bill Frindall was also the one who did not miss a ball, writes Christopher Martin-Jenkins in the Times.
Bill linked not just John Arlott, Brian Johnston, Fred Trueman and Trevor Bailey to the present day, but the likes of Norman Yardley, Freddie Brown, Robert Hudson and Alan Gibson, too. It would not be quite true to say that he made himself indispensable, because there are other very competent practitioners of the essential art of cricket scoring, but he was indubitably the most illustrious, indefatigable and industrious of them all. The name Bill Frindall was, quite rightly, a byword for efficiency and reliability.
Bill Frindall had the most mundane and unsung job in cricket but somehow he turned it into an art form, writes Stephen Brenkley in the Independent.
When Graeme Swann took two wickets in his first over in Test cricket in Chennai in December, it was widely reported that this was the first time such a feat had been recorded in Test history. But Bill told the commentators to hang on for a few seconds - and from his pile of books he quickly discovered another occasion. Nothing in cricket was historic until Bill said so, writes Adam Mountford on BBC Sport.
In the Sunday Times, Simon Wilde writes about Frindall's role in making Test Match Special such a huge hit.
... his firm grip on the statistical nuts and bolts of play let gifted commentators such as Brian Johnston, John Arlott and Henry Blofeld indulge their flights of fancy.
This was the charm of TMS: it was never just about the cricket. And Frindall’s dogged insistence on reading out the facts behind Geoff Boycott’s 231-minute half-century containing three boundaries only highlighted this essential truth.
Also read the Daily Telegraph's Frindall obituary.
George Binoy is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo