Alec and Fred

Talking to my dad yesterday whilst savouring the enduring mastery and mystery of Warne - all the more bittersweet for not knowing how many more times we'll see it - he mentioned Alec Bedser.

My dad said he met him once, when he had a day at Lord's in a freebie box. He was walking down the corridor, some distance from the exit, and noticed Bedser ahead of him. At the door, Bedser stopped, held it open, raised his hat and spent a few minutes talking about the cricket before parting with a cheery 'good morning'.

That same day, he saw that other great quick man, Frederick Sewards Trueman, in the next box along. He asked him for an autograph to give to me. Trueman looked him up and down. 'Not bloody now...' he said.

Somehow, we agreed, the story makes you like both of them more...

NB: Warne finished freaking out Deccan just as the Tiger Woods presser started on Sky Sports News. It struck me that Woods possesses that same quality Warne does: when push comes to shove, they know they're going to win, you know that they know they're going to win, and they know that you know that they know they're going to win. As Warnie's proven many times, the odd sex-text scandal isn't enough to dispell it...

The odd bird

'There's no way I'll be without my wife for eleven weeks again'.

As Kevin Pietersen emerges, rather touchingly, as cricket's most uxorious man, it's hard not to wish that Frederick Sewards Trueman were still here to offer a view from behind a cloud of pipesmoke.

When I was a kid, I had one of Fred's numerous autobiographies as an audiobook. He read it himself. It was called Ball Of Fire, a title that, given the contents, qualified only as a single entendre.

Fred had enjoyed a career renaissance in his middle years, mainly as a glorious, naysaying expert on Test Match Special, but also as the presenter of a lunchtime television programme called Indoor League, in which people played darts, billiards, skittles, arm-wrestling and other pub games in real pubs while Fred smoked his pipe, supped ale and added colour commentary. He closed each show with the catchphrase 'Ah'll sithee'.

Ball Of Fire was similarly rough-hewn. In a section about married life, he wrote about the six-month winter tours without wives that England undertook, and the strains they placed on him. Of Mrs Trueman, he said, 'she must have known that I'd had the odd bird'.

Well if she didn't, she did after Ball Of Fire came out. 

The other part I remember clearly was Fred's disdainful comment on Lance Gibbs beating his world record of 307 Test wickets. 'I know that Gibbs crawled past it eventually,' he drawled, 'but he was an off-spinner'. 

Which we all know doesn't count. Ah'll sithee.