The Shorter Wisden 2013 (15 page)

Frank Tyson managed five or six overs at that top velocity. Thomson, word on the circuit has it, is good for a dozen or 20.

The ambulance driver, trying to reach Bush in the corridor, cannot get through the gates. It is New Year’s Eve and Bush has a date with the girl who lives next door. He wonders about
stitches; if they are needed, what might his face look like? The ambulance driver gives up. Bush is carried out to the street. At Bankstown Hospital he is X-rayed and let go. The date is off, Bush
and the girl next door stay in, but there is more cricket to look forward to, a one-dayer, and he’ll play if he gets the all-clear in the morning from his nearest hospital. There, an eye
specialist interrupts his holidays to say: “Look up. Look right. Look left.” Bush obeys, or thinks he does. The eye does not budge. The bone beneath it, the orbit bone, is smashed
– that was the crack team-mates heard – and also sunken, rendering his two eyes crooked. Trapped and tangled in broken bone are the surrounding muscles. The eyeball’s a blood
clot. Bush will recover and play on, for decades. But first, a delicate operation, then a month in a bed in an old people’s annexe of Royal North Shore Hospital, lying perfectly still, lest
the eye bleed and he blind himself, listening to every ball of Australia and New Zealand on radio.

Pym is laying bets with team-mates on whether Thomson can bowl six byes – can actually bowl a cricket ball out of the ground.

Thomson has a strained calf, or groin, maybe slipped in his run-up again. Might have figures of six for four. No full scorecard is available. Four men bowled, one caught, one hit on the shoulder
and out hit wicket; one more hit in the eye and hospitalised. But, now, Thomson must stop.

He will bowl many more fast spells. But on December 13, 1975, something – something inside, and barely traceable – changes. A flatmate of Thomson’s,
22-year-old wicketkeeper Martin Bedkober, is batting in a Brisbane grade match. He lets a short ball hit his chest. The bowler is a medium-pacer. Bedkober waves help away, then falls. Not long
after, he is dead: a blood clot, in the spot where the ball struck, the hospital doctor cannot push oxygen through. Thomson will think, after this, “There’s no point trying to knock a
bloke out.”

On the afternoon before Christmas, 1976, Pakistan’s Zaheer Abbas spoons up an attempted pull shot in Adelaide. The bowler Thomson dives for the catch, midwicket Alan
Turner dives simultaneously, and they crash. Neither man gets up for a while – and Thomson’s right shoulder bone is wrenched five centimetres away from the joint. He will bowl again in
his life, many times, but with a longer run-up, and without the same serene elasticity in the moment before delivery. Seldom will a ball, neither full nor short, leap with the steep menace of
old.

First, his psyche; a year after, his shoulder. He is reduced, cut down – this man who on the last day of 1973 bowled faster probably than anyone in the universe ever has, and faster,
perhaps, than the universe wanted him to bowl.

Christian Ryan lives in Melbourne, writes and edits, and is the author of
Golden Boy.
His latest book is a pictorial collection of essays
, Australia: Story of
a Cricket Country.

CRICKET AND SEXUALITY

S
TEVE
D
AVIES

I’d always known I was gay, but for a long time it wasn’t an issue. It helped that I was good at sport, because at school that was a route to popularity. But when I
started touring with England, the dynamic changed. I couldn’t face long trips away from home trying to hide my sexuality the whole time. So before the last Ashes series, I made sure my
team-mates knew. That was two and a half years ago. And it was the best decision I’ve ever made – even if it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

But I knew I had to: it was eating me up inside. When I was at home I felt all right, because I was with my family, and I’d told them when I was 19. I hated being on tour, though. The
actual cricket was fine, but the social situations were not. If you go out in the evenings as a sports team, you sometimes attract interest from girls, and I found that uncomfortable. A two-week
trip would feel like two years. And the Ashes tour was going to last three and a half months. I’d had a couple of instances where I’d been out in gay clubs and been recognised, and I
knew I couldn’t go on like that. Keeping it quiet all that time would have been horrific.

The players’ response was amazing, and Australia turned out to be a very special trip. My life has changed since I came out. I feel so much more confident and happy. And I can now count
Elton John among my friends, which is something not many cricketers can say…

Your sexuality is no one’s business but your own: whether you choose to come out or not is an incredibly personal matter. No one should be made to do it, and you’ve got to choose a
moment you feel completely comfortable with. But hopefully I’ve proved that, since the announcement was made publicly in February 2011, being a gay cricketer is not an issue – that it
can be done.

I think it’s difficult telling people you’re gay in the sporting world. But it’s getting a lot easier, to the point where I honestly don’t think people care. Being a
cricketer helps, because it’s a decent world, and I haven’t had a single jibe. In fact, the banter has been good, in both the England and Surrey dressing-rooms, and I occasionally like
to get a reaction out of team-mates by pretending to take offence on behalf of the gay brethren. One county colleague – I won’t name and embarrass him – has even learned a thing
or two: he thought all gay guys were as camp as Christmas. I hope I’ve opened one or two eyes.

I’ve been asked why, if coming out as a cricketer isn’t an issue, other professionals haven’t followed suit. I can see it’s a bit of a contradiction: if something really
isn’t taboo, why the silence? I think it goes beyond cricket, both because sexuality is still an issue in some parts of society, and because of the personal nature of the decision.

Everyone has a different set of circumstances. Being gay and not being able to tell anyone can be a lonely place. I know a few people who have told their parents and then been kicked out of
their own homes. But the ingredients were there for me to tell people. I’m lucky to have a supportive and loving family, and the way Andy Flower and Andrew Strauss handled breaking the news
to my England team-mates was brilliant. But I can’t pretend I didn’t have sleepless nights worrying about their reaction.

What has been encouraging, apart from the indifference in the cricket world, is the response from elsewhere. I was hoping my story would help others, and I got plenty of support on Facebook,
Twitter and in letters. One guy aged 21 and really into his sport wrote to me saying he was gay and that no one knew about it. He said he felt fake socialising with his friends, and that my story
helped a lot. Plenty have said that. It makes me feel like I can do some good.

The one thing that does annoy me at times is when people say: “You must know whether so-and-so is gay.” I don’t – and I don’t think I have what some people call a
“gaydar”. I also find the idea that I might be attracted to my team-mates in the shower a ridiculous one. They’re more like family to me.

The truth is, I don’t know if there are other gay county cricketers out there. If there are, I do hope they will look at my experience and realise that coming out is not necessarily an
ordeal. But I would stress again that the decision has to feel right. And I’m certainly not here to lecture them.

The process has been surreal at times. When the story broke, I went to buy the papers at my local garage, and could see my face on the front pages from 30 yards away. That was an uncomfortable
time. But it turned out to be the right thing to do. Now, I just want to be recognised as a good cricketer. If people aren’t mentioning my sexuality by the time I retire, I’ll be happy
with that.

Steve Davies has kept wicket for England in eight one-day internationals. He was talking to Lawrence Booth.

150 YEARS OF YORKSHIRE COUNTY CRICKET CLUB

D
UNCAN
H
AMILTON

At the rump end of 1933, an impish, greying and bandy-legged middle-aged man travelled by bus and on foot across the high-ridged toe of the Yorkshire Dales to make an
unannounced house call. Under his arm he carried a brown paper parcel, which contained a belated wedding gift. He’d bought it especially for the groom; whether the bride liked it, wanted it
or would find any practical use for it was immaterial.

The recipient was Bill Bowes, and the generous giver Emmott Robinson, who told Bowes on the doorstep what the thick wrapping concealed, so ruining the element of surprise. “I’ve
brought you a weather glass, Bill,” he said. “It’s same make as mine, an’ tha wants to look at it night and morning. It’s seldom that I’ve been let down,
an’ it’s nice to know when there’s a sticky wicket in t’offing.” Robinson wasn’t being flippant: he spoke solemnly. As though regarding the barometer as the
bowler’s equivalent of the philosopher’s stone, he began an elaborate description of its benefits. “He instanced matches when Yorkshire had sent the other side in to bat,”
remembered Bowes. “Occasions when a little more confidence in the barometer would have helped, and left the house with a parting injunction, ‘
Be sure that tha makes good use of
it
.’”

From a first-floor window in my home I can follow the curve of the rutted lane along which Robinson went, clutching that parcel. Poking between the trees I can see the Indian-red tiles of the
roof of Bowes’s old semi-detached, which overlooks the Wharfe valley. And, passing the front door, I imagine the two of them standing beneath the lintel. In my mind’s eye, Bowes nods
his surprised thanks and the garrulous Robinson gossips away in front of him.

It’s an ostensibly minor moment; an obscure exchange that, I suppose, seems insignificant amid the brass-band-and-bunting celebrations arranged for Yorkshire’s sesquicentennial
summer of 2013. Landmark anniversaries are essentially about the remembrance of things past and, since history is made up of the biography of Great Men, Yorkshire have a lot to draw on. Old ghosts
will be summoned: Lord Hawke and Wilfred Rhodes, F. S. Jackson and J. T. Brown, Schofield Haigh and Alonzo Drake. But I think the vignette about Robinson and the barometer contains something
subliminally telling, and is useful in understanding three fundamental aspects about Yorkshire: how seriously they take their cricket; what it required to achieve the unmatched glory of 30 official
Championships won outright, and another that was shared, grudgingly, during those 150 crowded years; and, improbable as this seems, why the county’s long period of trophy-austerity turned so
poisonous and militantly rebellious.

No one was more authoritative about Yorkshire than J. M. Kilburn, who as correspondent of the
Yorkshire Post
counts as the Herodotus of Tyke territory. He either saw or knew, with a
casual familiarity, almost everyone now honoured in Headingley’s impressive museum. George Hirst coached him, speaking in a voice so hoarse that any instruction must have sounded like gravel
pouring down a chute. He observed a padded-up Herbert Sutcliffe writing his correspondence in immaculate copperplate, stopping unperturbedly in mid-sentence when the pavilion bell obliged him to go
out and bat. He counted Len Hutton as a friend; and Hutton reciprocated, also counting him as an educational tutor. He wrote about Brian Close as a callow teen, saw almost all Geoffrey
Boycott’s formative innings, and Ray Illingworth’s first, tweaked delivery. He said some of his grandest days were spent admiring “the rampant” Fred Trueman flattening the
stumps.

Kilburn always maintained that Yorkshire’s success was based on what he called “the many strivers, the bread and butter cricketers”. Robinson belongs in that category.
Statistically he doesn’t rank among the greatest of the club’s great. He didn’t make his debut until 1919, aged 35, when he was called up to fill one of those tragic gaps created
by the First World War. He retired, aged 47, in 1931 after taking 100 wickets in only one season and scoring 1,000 runs just twice. He was one of those figures whom P. G. Wodehouse – fond of
the cricketing idiosyncratic – could have invented if God had not got there first. His cap was askew. He wore loose, wrinkled whites, each creased trouser leg rolled up as though, like a
Scarborough holiday-maker, he was about to paddle into the North Sea. But, as the ultra-professional, Robinson had a scrupulous devotion to his business. Every evening he wrote his observations
into cheap notebooks, compulsively accumulating intelligence which, he said, comprised: “Wheer t’batsmen got t’runs, how they got out, their best shots, state o’
t’wicket an’ stuff like that.” He lived Yorkshire cricket 24 hours a day during the summer and thought about it all winter.