Peter Roebuck
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ROEBUCK, PETER MICHAEL, was found dead outside a Cape Town hotel on November 12, 2011. He was 55. Police said he had jumped from the window of his sixth- floor room after officers arrived to question him about an alleged sexual assault on a 26-year-old Zimbabwean man. Even in a game with a penchant for producing improbable characters, Roebuck was among the most fascinating. A brilliant student who got a first in law at Cambridge, he arrived in the Somerset dressing-room on April Fools' Day 1974, alongside Viv Richards, Ian Botham and Vic Marks. Sophocles might have struggled to script the drama that followed.
Not an obvious athlete, Roebuck was still a cricketing prodigy. One of six children from his schoolteacher father's two marriages, he arrived for interview at Millfield School in 1969 to be thrown an orange as he headed diffidently into the headmaster's study. He caught it. The orange came from the ever-unpredictable R. J. O. "Boss" Meyer, who offered him an assisted place and also employed his parents. He became Roebuck's idol and role model.
Before the summer was out Roebuck, then 13, got a game for Somerset Second Eleven as a leg-spinner. As a schoolboy cricketer, his record was solid rather than outstanding, though Marks remembered his youthful batting as being primarily aggressive: "He had an idiosyncratic shot which we called 'the old leg clip', which was a flick off middle and leg, a bit like Greg Chappell." But he was enough of a player to make the Somerset staff and enough of a scholar to get into Cambridge, where he flourished, hitting 158 in the 1975 University Match, including a six off Imran Khan into the Lord's Pavilion.
But as that fine Somerset team developed, so did his approach. The leg-spin was long forgotten, and so were the sixes. "Like a lot of players he reined himself in and eliminated risk," said Marks. "I don't think he realised how good he was." Brian Rose, who became Somerset captain in 1978, put it another way: "He could bat for long periods in his own way, and if anyone can do that they are bound to score runs. He was a great asset."
As Somerset progressed and began to win trophies, Roebuck was a vital part of the mix. He became the local equivalent of Ken Barrington, the trellis who allowed the strokemakers to bloom. He would say, only half-jokingly, that his job was to stop Richards and Botham batting together, which was a recipe for disaster. His scores were self-effacing too - he made only four centuries for Somerset in the first ten years - but he was a perpetual irritant to opposing bowlers, including some of the quickest. His nuisance-value was enhanced by his owlish specs, his strange stance ("he looked like a question mark," said Mike Selvey) and what some saw as an air of disdain.
He soon made his mark off the field too, writing pieces in The Cricketer that were collected into a well-received debut book, Slices of Cricket, in 1982. Two years later came It Never Rains..., a diary of the 1983 season. It was exceptional - full of wit, insight, self-deprecation but, tellingly, a great deal of despair: "I feel as if I am motoring from depressing place to depressing place with no sense of purpose except to bang my head against the same old stone wall. I've dedicated myself to being good at cricket and simply cannot do it, which is immensely frustrating. What's more, in my efforts to succeed I become irritable and tense... If that is what playing cricket does to me, why the hell do I continue with it?"
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No one has ever captured life on the county circuit with such elan, and in 2010 a panel from The Wisden Cricketer named it as the third-best cricket book of all time. Soon the Sunday Times began to see him as a potential successor to their unconventional cricket correspondent, Robin Marlar. Roebuck was by now spending his winters teaching at Cranbrook School in Sydney, where the Sydney Morning Herald took a shine to his work. Privately, he started to talk about a career as a Labour politician.
Yet within the Somerset dressing- room he remained largely one of the boys, if an unusual one. Richards called him "the professor"; Botham "Pete lad". They respected both his brain and his cricket. In 1984, the fifties turned into hundreds and he scored 1,702 runs; he was now a regular opener, a position England were finding problematic, and his name began to be murmured. However, after five one-day trophies in five years, Somerset's success dried up, and the dressing-room egos grew dangerously large. In 1985, the county - thought to be contenders for a maiden Championship - finished bottom, and Roebuck became increasingly angered by the captaincy of Rose's successor, Botham. That winter Roebuck took over.
Relations did not collapse immediately: in 1986, Roebuck ghosted one of Botham's many autobiographies, It Sort of Clicks. But the new leadership began to chafe the galacticos. The team improved only from 17th to 16th and, between the committee and the new captain, a plan emerged - to replace the overseas players, the increasingly distracted Richards and the now-wearying Joel Garner, with the New Zealander Martin Crowe, who had successfully guested when the West Indians were touring in 1984. The upshot was disaster: the news came as a bombshell and Botham stormed out in protest. The club were convulsed and, though the committee survived a no-confidence vote at a huge meeting in Shepton Mallet, the bitterness lingered. And Crowe, after a promising start, turned out not to be Somerset's saviour. But the most devastating effect was on the captain. Botham was unforgiving, but was busy elsewhere. For Roebuck, it marked the descent towards paranoia: for the rest of his life he imagined Botham-inspired plots.
In the short term, Roebuck thrived. He gave up his Australian teaching to report the 1986-87 Ashes tour, was anointed Bill O'Reilly's improbable Pommie heir as columnist for both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne, and wrote a fine tour book, Ashes to Ashes. He had a wonderful summer with the bat in 1987, despite suffering one of his many broken fingers, and was named one of Wisden's Five the next spring. After Australia crushed David Gower's England in 1989, the press, for a few wild weeks, saw him as the next captain. The speculation was not wholly dampened when he led a young England XI to a bizarre defeat in an unofficial international on matting in the Netherlands. But the truth was that the selectors had long since decided Roebuck - a pressman, yuck! - was a loose cannon: he had not even been first choice for the Netherlands job. And a few weeks earlier Somerset had taken a call from Lord's asking who should come in for the Edgbaston Test, Roebuck or Chris Tavare. The message came back that Roebuck was hungrier and in better nick; Tavare ́ was chosen. On the captaincy, the selectors were clearly right: Roebuck's playing claims were marginal and his brittle personality would never have withstood the pressure. The tabloids would have eaten him alive.
He had already given up the Somerset captaincy and, in 1991, he retired and increasingly gravitated towards Australia. But he had a decade of unlikely English summers captaining Devon to four successive Minor Counties championships, turning into a purveyor of brisk off-cutters, a middle-order thumper and a studiedly eccentric leader. He enlivened an often grey competition and his players adored him. However, his career in English journalism tapered off: the Sunday Times lost patience because he wanted to winter in Australia no matter where England were touring, and by then they valued news sense more than quirkiness. In contrast, his Australian portfolio soon included a place on the ABC commentary team. In the 1990s, he also discovered southern Africa, and began to support orphans in Zimbabwe. When he was in England, he shied away from "hostile" Taunton, and filled his home with African and Australian school leavers. He coached them, mentored them, and sometimes, if he thought them unfit, caned them.
At Taunton Crown Court in 2001, Judge Graham Hume Jones gave Roebuck a suspended sentence after he admitted three charges of common assault, and commented: "It must have been done to satisfy some need in you, whatever that may have been." Roebuck's defence was feeble (his word), though not as feeble as his apologia in his generally ill-judged 2004 autobiography Sometimes I Forgot to Laugh: "I had not grasped that pleading guilty meant accepting everything in the statements made by the complainants." This from a man with a first-class law degree.
The case completed his disillusionment with England: he returned only to cover the 2005 and 2009 Ashes. His embitterment was already to some extent distorting his cricketing judgments although, as Australia's long reign continued, denigrating English cricket chimed with the times. When the Ashes story changed after 2005, his work recaptured much of its old incision: his self-imposed rootlessness had given him an unrivalled grasp of the global game. And on radio he was superb, his insight and humour spoiled only by an accent that now wandered from Oxbridge to Bondi depending on his mood. Sometimes it even veered towards Natal, where he set up a home for the deprived boys he called his "sons".
Some of those sons have added to the allegations about Roebuck's sexual behaviour, but these remained unproven. He was palpably a lonely man: even those who knew him well had no knowledge of anything approaching a normal adult relationship, straight or gay. He was distant, though not estranged, from his family, not helped by his lateness in discovering computers. He sensed enemies where there were only well-wishers. Though a great talker, he was a shocking listener, with little empathy for those whose lives were not Petercentric (he would have been a dreadful politician). He preferred disciples - Devonians or African boys or young cricket writers - to equals. Of all his gifts, perhaps the most innate was that of teaching. The Meyer influence never faded: he liked being the Boss, the genial and beloved master who would always be the one to decide when enough was enough. Indeed, it seems as though that was his final decision.
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