leg.’
In these days the sports pages are full of batsmen who never touched the ball but were given out caught behind, or off bat and pad at forward-short-leg, and often we are none the wiser after watching the television replay half-a-dozen times.
So, while W.G. may frequently have stretched the laws as far as he could, the idea that he invariably disregarded the umpire’s verdict if he did not agree with it is an exaggeration. He once prevented a Gloucestershire batsman from leaving the pavilion to go out to the wicket at Bristol because he believed the last man out, Gilbert Jessop, had not been fairly caught on the boundary. The game was held up for half an hour while the argument raged but the umpires had their way in the end.
W.G. was essentially a cricketer who liked to win and occasionally crossed the barrier between fair and foul play in tight situations, like many others before and since. He was involved in a number of notorious incidents in first-class cricket, such as when he ran out the Australian batsman Sammy Jones in the legendary match at The Oval in 1882 when Jones wandered up the pitch to do a spot of ‘gardening’. Most people – including the batsman – thought the ball was dead but the umpire bowed to W.G.’s appeal.
Tony Greig did something very similar to Alvin Kallicharran in 1974, and the umpire agreed with him too. Such was the outcry that the appeal was withdrawn and the West Indian reinstated, but when people think of Greig today they don’t think of him primarily as a cheat but as occasionally over-enthusiastic for the best motives. (Incidentally, had Kerry Packer existed in W.G.’s day, he would have been strongly tempted to throw in his lot with Packer, as Greig did, for W.G. was always keen on money. He would have made a great limited-overs player too.)
Like players today, he behaved worse than normally if he thought the standard of umpiring was low, as it probably was on his two tours of Australia where he repeatedly took umbrage at the umpires’ decisions, and thereby earned the hostility of press and public, though interestingly not of the Australian players. They knew a tough competitor when they saw one, and probably didn’t think much of their own officials either.
Nothing W.G. got up to in Australia was anything like as bad as the row between the England captain Mike Gatting and the local umpire Shakoor Rana in Pakistan in 1987 which helped to sour cricketing relations between the two countries for years.
Many of the stories about W.G. and umpires stem from club matches where nothing was at stake and where the crowd undoubtedly wanted to see the legendary figure in action. He went out to open the innings in a charity match, attended by a large and expectant crowd, only to see the second ball remove the off bail. W.G. bent down, picked it up and replaced it, saying to the wicketkeeper in his inimitable Gloucestershire accent, ‘Strong wind today, Jarge.’ No one queried his action and he went on to hit 142 – which is what everyone had hoped to see.
His contemporaries had no doubt about his stature. Those two cricketing peers who dominated the councils of the Victorian game, Lords Hawke and Harris, produced very similar verdicts on him. ‘As a cricketer,’ wrote Hawke,
I do not hesitate to say that not only was he the greatest that ever lived, but also the greatest that ever can be, because no future batsman will ever have to play on the bad wickets on which he made his mark and proved himself so immeasurably superior to all his contemporaries.
According to Harris,
he was … always a most genial, even-tempered, considerate companion and of all the many cricketers I have ever known the kindest as well as the best. He was ever ready with an encouraging word for the novice, and a compassionate one for the man who had made a mistake … It is difficult to believe that a combination so remarkable of health, activity, power, eye, hand, devotion and opportunity will ever present itself again.
There is much more anecdotal evidence about his kindness to young players and modesty about his own achievements.
If he had a weakness, it was as a captain. While he was a dab hand at enticing a batsman out with a crafty bit of field placing, he had a tendency to let things drift along when imagination and daring were called for. He was no innovator, but an instinctive conservative, and he brooked no opposition to his way of doing things. His record was patchy. He led Gloucestershire with great success in the first years of the county’s official existence but that was due more to his own overwhelming dominance with bat and ball, ably backed up by his brothers E.M. and G.F. The county’s fortunes declined and W.G. failed to bring on enough new players to restore it to its previous eminence.
But of his own playing ability there will never be any doubt. In our century, Gary Sobers was a purer all-rounder and Don Bradman a greater run-getter, although there are some interesting parallels between Bradman and Grace. Both were country boys who displayed a fierce dedication from a very young age, while their adult play was characterised by enormous patience and discipline. Neither was a stylist; instead, they were brutally effective, deriving an almost sadistic pleasure from reducing a bowling attack to rubble. Bradman’s career batting figures (first-class average: 95.14, Test average 99.94) were far superior to Grace’s but he played on much better pitches. Perhaps the greatest similarity between them was that they represented more than cricket to the common man in his own country. Bradman was the personification of an Australia emerging from the dominance of its colonial master, Grace the hero to the working class of industrial Victorian England.
W.G.’s abiding legacy, however, is that no single cricketer has since dominated the game so totally as he did for more than thirty years. English cricket these days could do with someone possessing one tenth of his talent, discipline and will to win.
THE year is 1858, the scene the garden of a large house in the village of Downend, near Bristol. The big lawn is shaded by several spreading chestnut trees. It is an early summer’s day, clear and bright, a light breeze chases a few clouds quickly across the blue sky. In the garden, a stocky teenage boy in shirt-sleeves is driving three cricket stumps into the grass at the end of the lawn nearest the house. A strip of grass has been mown shorter than the rest to make a pitch. A single stump has already been set up some twenty yards away.
Another young man, sporting a dark moustache, is rolling up his shirt-sleeves. Two older men, well into middle age, talk with each other as they take off their jackets and lay them on the grass. A little boy of seven capers around the lawn and begs to be allowed to play with the grown-ups. A peal of laughter comes from the edge of the lawn under a large chestnut tree where stand a middle-aged lady and her daughters – two young women and two much younger girls in their early teens, in blouses and demure ankle-length skirts. Occasionally they bend to stroke two dogs lying at their feet, a golden retriever and a pointer. Another pointer crouches near by, wagging its tail and watching the activity on the lawn intently as if waiting for an invitation to join in.
There is one other person on the lawn: a boy about ten years old, kneeling as he straps a pad on to his leg. That done, he picks up a bat from the grass beside him, stands up and walks to a position just in front of the stumps. He is a slim, slight figure compared to the adults, with jet-black hair and intense dark eyes that stand out against his pale face. He has an air of seriousness, watchfulness and concentration.
The middle-aged men and the smallest boy stroll to positions around the lawn. The young man with the moustache walks up the wicket, exchanges a word with the dark-haired boy and proceeds to crouch behind the stumps. The teenager picks up a cricket ball, waits for the dark-haired boy to take guard, then runs a few paces to the single stump and delivers the ball with a round-arm slinging action. The boy picks his bat up cleanly, plants his padded left leg down the wicket and strikes the ball on the off side towards the young women chatting under the chestnut. As it speeds towards them, bouncing off the uneven surface of the lawn, the black dog at their feet snaps out of his crouch and leaps at the ball as it breasts him, knocks it down with his chest and pounces on it. At this, the girls laugh and clap and the men cheer. ‘Well