Cricket: The Founding Fathers

William Gilbert Grace was a modern cricketer in two senses of the term. He invented batsmanship as we know it today. To quote his great contemporary Ranji, “Grace founded the modern theory of batting by making forward and back play of equal importance… he turned a one-stringed instrument into a many chorded lyre…” His cricket was about great synthesis and stunning invention.

His record is phenomenal. On wickets where (even at Lord’s), batsmen had to often pick stones out of the track, he once made 344, 177 and 318 not out in successive innings. In all first-class cricket in a career lasting 43 years he made 54, 211 runs (including 124 centuries) and claimed 2,809 wickets.

Grace was modern in a second sense too. He sledged. He walked on the edge of the acceptable on the field. He would do anything within the rules to win a game. He made money from the game although technically he was an amateur.

In an early biography, Bernard Darwin, who knew him, wrote that for Grace, ‘what the law allowed was allowable.’ And nobody knew the law better than WG. ‘He was so essentially loveable,’ wrote Darwin, ‘that he could steal a horse now and then…’ There is, however, no record of his actually having done so.

Naturally for a character as colourful as WG, perhaps the best-known Englishman of his time (certainly CLR James thought so, although Prime Ministers Gladstone and Disraeli were Grace’s near contemporaries), legends abound. The story of his being bowled only to calmly replace the bails and tell the bowler, “Folks have come here to see me bat, not you bowl,” is as much a part of the Grace persona as his beard and girth.

Cricket historian David Frith writes, ‘His reputation for gamesmanship and as a bully was emphasised with each passing summer, and was facilitated by timid umpires and opponents and sycophants who, overwhelmed by his force of character, allowed him to prevail.’

Yet, without amazing Grace, cricket might not have had a prayer. With the possible exception of Don Bradman, no one player dominated cricket in the manner Grace did as batsman, captain, bowler, and symbol of both the sport and its times. He was a giant in every sense of the term.

Once, Grace was dismissed thrice successively by the fast bowler Charles Korthright—leg before, caught behind, and bowled. He stood his ground on the first two occasions, but had to finally walk away. “Surely you’re not leaving us, Doctor?” cried the bowler, “There’s one stump still standing.”

Charlie Connelly’s charming fictional portrait of WG’s final years begins with this anecdote. Gilbert is a retelling of the WG legend which fills in the unknown with imagination and compassion. ‘Faction’, a simple combination of fiction and fact is a respectable literary genre, its aim to better understand the subject than a mere recitation of facts and quotes will provide. In recent years, Henry James has been novelised by both Colm Tóibín and David Lodge. Ian Buruma’s Playing the Game is a similar attempt at filling the unknowable interstices of a public figure’s life with imagined substance; in this case, the subject is Ranji.

The year 2015 marked the 150th year of WG’s first-class debut as well as the 100th year of his death. That he is still being written about and read about is a testimony to his standing as sport’s first superstar—he was one before the word was coined. The best portions of Gilbert are the passages of the personal: the devastation at death of his children, the first ride in a car, the curses hurled at the Zeppelins flying overhead during the War, the realisation at the age of 51 that although he could still hold his place in the England side as a batsman, but as a fielder, the “ground had become too damned far away.”

Connelly characterises WG as a ‘blank canvas presented as a finished work,’ endorsing the legend that the champion batsman was not simultaneously an intellectual giant. Later biographers have pointed to more than a hundred books that WG owned (and presumably read), as well as his advice to his grandchildren that they should ‘always love books.’

Gilbert is a portrait of a great sportsman as a human being; the pick-and-choose technique makes for intimacy, and the confidence of the what-possibly-was gives us insights into a man who expressed himself best with a bat in hand and a match to be won.

Of the many ways to bring an icon alive, Gilbert explores fictional retelling. Benaud in Wisden takes a second route— through essays by those who knew him and the writings of Richie Benaud, the captain and commentator, himself. Of no other player can the term ‘great’ be applied in the two separate fields. Australia never lost a Test where he scored a century or took a five-for. In 1958, he captained Australia to a 4-0 rout of England that till then had been the team of the decade. Two years later, his positive brand of cricket reciprocated that of the West Indies captain Frank Worrell and led to the first tied Test in Brisbane.

As commentator, he saw his job as “adding a caption to the pictures” and was the master of the unspoken. “Silence is your greatest weapon,” he once said, and he used the pause with the dramatic effect of Harold Pinter in his plays. Mike Atherton called him the Hemingway of the airwaves; for Tim de Lisle, he was the Bradman of broadcasting.

Some years ago, Wisden calculated that Richie Benaud must have seen more Tests than anybody else, as player, reporter and commentator. The figure was over 500. It gave him the kind of authority that is challenged only by Wisden itself, which has seen every single Test ever played.

Both literally and figuratively, Benaud was the voice of cricket, its greatest PR person, and one, who, despite his public appeal was in essence the cricketer’s cricketer. One reason for this is supplied by Atherton here: “Richie never morphed into an old-school bore. He rarely talked about his playing days, or his considerable achievements as a player. He never began a commentary stint or a sentence with ‘in my day’… He admired the modern player; he loved Twenty20 and all the technological advances, especially his beloved Snicko… He recognised that times change and comparisons are pointless. Because of that, the modern players loved him.”

As Gideon Haigh points out, Benaud’s apprenticeship was lengthy, and in his first 27 Tests he picked up just 73 wickets and scored 868 runs. In his next 23 Tests, he had 131 wickets and 830 runs. Australia did not lose a series under Benaud. “One of Benaud’s legacies is the demonstrative celebration of wickets and catches which was a conspicuous aspect of his teams’ communal spirit and is today de rigueur,” says Haigh.

Tight editing has meant that there are hardly any repetitions— after all, the facts of a player’s life remain the same— and the volume ends up playing a double role. It is both a wonderfully well-written introduction to the life and work of a sporting icon, and a ready reckoner for those who are familiar with the legend. By definition, it is a warm, affectionate look at one of the most recognised faces in the game; not in the same way WG Grace’s was, but as a symbol of the television age.

(Suresh Menon is Editor, Wisden India Almanack)

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Suresh Menon