Amiss touched on the thinking behind it in a fine little interview with Cricinfo today. 'In a tour game in 1976, I ducked into a bouncer from Michael Holding,' he says. 'I lost my confidence against fast bowling then. I came to the conclusion that there was only one way to play, like Ian Chappell and Kenny Barrington - back and across, and I changed my stance'.
Dennis earned those runs. A year later, fed up with being paid £200 per Test, he was playing World Series cricket. 'There were about a dozen fast bowlers,' he recalls. 'Since I'd been hit recently, I thought about wearing a helmet. I spoke to Tony Greig, Alan Knott and Keith Fletcher, and they said, 'why not?'. So I wore a motorcycle helmet made of fibreglass. It was heavy and hot when I wore it for the first time. My head was thumping and the sweat was pouring down. I thought I was going to pass out. That's how the helmet era started.'
I'd always thought that Brearley's little skull-cap had come first, but perhaps not. Anyhow, Amiss's was far superior. The best thing about it - and something he didn't mention - was the fact it had a bloody great numeral '1' on the front. It looked ace. Numbers on helmets should be resurrected immediately...
NB: Helmets weren't compulsary when I played junior cricket, and I didn't wear one for years, in games or in nets, where we took great pleasure in trying to knock each others' heads off. I never got hit. The third time I wore a helmet, I did. The psychology is strange.
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I'm convinced that my batting career would have hugely prolonged if helmets (and other padding beyond the basic leg pads, box and gloves) had come into schools earlier. I was a very keen and moderately talented opener - played for the school and also Portsmouth schools and then later Devon schools. One game I took a fearful pounding from the first really fast, loose, six-foot-plus bowler I'd faced. Blows in the chest, elbows, luckily not the face or my dashing good looks would have been ruined.
I didn't stop playing but I was never the same again, it dented my love for batting and badly hurt my confidence against short-pitched bowling. I basically wafted at everything short of a length, caught behind all the time. Dropped down the order, ended up a sparingly-used legspinner batting at 7 or 8, then dropped the game altogether. I'll bet there's plenty like me - cricket's dirty secret is that the ball is too hard and, even with but especially without helmets, you have to climb a mountain of fear every time you walk out.
Yes, I remember luxuriating in a thigh pad when I first got one, but I do feel that nerve is an essential test of the game. I don't mean that in a macho way - if you say someone is lacking it, it seems pejorative and it's not. It's entirely natural and sensible to feel fear. In many aspects of my life, I lack nerve, but for some reason that wariness was never hardwired in with respect to cricket. I've always got a buzz from facing fast bowling, and coming through it. A fear is there but it appears as a kind of exhilaration. As soon as it's over, I want to feel it again. There's something about finding the outer edge of what you can do that induces a kind of bloodymindedness, I suppose. I think what is essential is a sound technique - if you believe your body will react in the right way, you're halfway there. All of that said, I don't believe anyone who says they 'like' facing really quick, aggressive bowling. It gets you going, it's rewarding to survive, but it's never likeable in my experience.
Batting is a unique fear - physical fear of fast bowling, coupled with the even worse fear of humiliation. As you say, that's what gives the buzz, too, as few things in life can beat smacking a quick ball to the boundary with a cover drive. Football is a lot more likely to cause injury (just ask Mr Denly), and indeed I've had an absolute heap of football injuries over the last 20 years, but I never experienced fear playing football, purely because you're absorbed into a team. Batting exposes you horribly, in every sense.
True, that's why batting is greatest of endeavors... I was a terrible footballer, guilty of many acts of cowardice on the pitch...
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