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.
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.
ReplyDeleteI 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.
ReplyDeleteBatting 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.
ReplyDeleteTrue, 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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