The Anniversary

Today is the 64th anniversary of Bradman's last Test innings, perhaps the most famous duck ever made, and certainly the most statistically significant.

John Arlott was the BBC commentator as Bradman came to the crease. Arlott was 34 years old at the time, five years younger than the Don. Rex Alston had described Bradman's entrance, and he handed to Arlott as Bradman took guard. The day had already been dramatic enough, with England dismissed for 52 and Australia already past a hundred when Bradman walked in.

"I'm not as deadly as you Rex," Arlott began, "I don't expect to get a wicket, but it's rather good to be here when Don Bradman comes into bat in his last Test. And here's Hollies to bowl to him from the Vauxhall End. Bradman goes back across his wicket and pushes the ball gently in the direction of the Houses of Parliament, which are beyond mid-off. It doesn't go as far as that, merely goes to Watkins, the silly mid-off. No run."

The scene was set. No-one, Arlott included, could have known immediately the full implications of what happened next. There might have been a second innings for start, but the moment had weight even as it occurred. Here is what Arlott said:

"Hollies pitches the ball up slowly and... he's bowled... Bradman bowled Hollies, nought. And what do you say under these circumstances? I wonder if you see the ball very clearly in your last Test in England, on a ground where you've played some of the biggest cricket in your life and the opposing side has just stood round you and given you three cheers and the crowd has clapped you all the way to the wicket. I wonder if you see the ball at all."

The way that "I wonder if you see the ball clearly" is echoed in his final sentence is the work of a poet. "In through the eyes, out through the mouth," Arlott used to say. He drank it in that day.

Ceaseless time

To mark the twentieth anniversary of his death, last night the BBC screened John Arlott in conversation with Mike Brearley. It was filmed in 1984, four years after Arlott's retirement and the year after Brearley's, at Arlott's home on Alderney.

It took a sentence for Arlott to get to the heart of the matter, the centre of his life. Brearley first asked him why he had chosen Alderney. 'Well,' said Arlott in a voice rising up over the hot coals in his chest, 'the tempo here is magnificent'. Not for him a description of the views or the of the peace and quiet, but instead that connection he felt to the cadences of the place.

That was present in everything Arlott did, in the rhythm of his sentences, both spoken and written; the melancholic beats of his verse, the rise and fall of his commentary. The way that he could almost conduct a passage of Test cricket was Arlott's true talent as a speaker - 'in through the eyes, out through the mouth' as he put it - his internal sense of the rhythm of the over, and the session, and of the day and the match, all building symphonically. He confessed at one point that his favourite moments in Test matches were batting collapses, and again noted the way they produced their own momentum, fed by the noise of the crowd.

Not saying anything helped to produce that rhythm too. When he spoke to Brearley about his parents, or about the son he lost in a car accident, he paused for long periods and the camera held his face, which bore all of the iniquities of age. Its stillness, which he struggled to maintain, conveyed everything that words could not. 'No...' he said eventually. 'Let's talk about something else'.

He told Brealey that he'd had a lucky life, the son of a cemetery keeper who became a poet, author, broadcaster, friend of Dylan Thomas and Betjamin, Hobbs and Botham. 'Well, lucky in some ways...' and the camera held that face again.

They do0n't make 'em like him any more, and they don't make many programmes like this, either. You can see it here on the BBC iplayer, if you're within range. It's worth it.

Burn a little brighter now

A final, sort of free association addendum to the post below about Trevor 'The Boil' Bailey: as ever that era of the media brought to mind John Arlott, and then his unlikely, touching and longstanding friendship with Ian Botham, himself a current occupant of 'the comm-box'.

The outsider's view of that friendship is hostage to the public image of Beefy as a no-nonsense man's man whose rare collisions with the written word might occur via something by Tom Clancy. Yet that is to misjudge both men.

They met, according to Botham, when he was a 16 year old at Somerset and he was summoned to lug two of Arlott's hampers into the press box at Taunton. Arlott opened one, which was filled with wine, and asked Botham if he'd ever tried any. He proceeded to uncork several bottles and then the other hamper, which contained cheeses chosen as accompaniments. Botham had met the man he describes as his mentor. The friendship ended many years and many legends later when Arlott died on Alderney at 77. Botham was his neighbour at the time, and would visit him every day.

'At the end when the emphysema took over and he was struggling with speech he had an oxygen mask and I often had to empty his bag for him,' Botham told the Guardian in 2007. 'But he liked me being there because I knew to wait and let him finish his sentences between gasps. I didn't try to say the words for him because I knew how much they mattered.'

Anyone meeting Arlott when they were just 16 might have felt the same. As his obituary in Wisden noted, 'he was a man of deep humanity'. What's more interesting is what Arlott might have seen in Beefy. There was his talent of course, and his Falstaffian love of cricket and life. But there was much more than that. He could, by his own admission, be deeply selfish and annoyingly laddish, and conservative and reactionary. But he is also a man of great heart and loyalty, a man who has spent a lifetime raising millions of pounds for cancer research after spending just one afternoon at a children's hospital, a bloke who inspired equal loyalty in his friends and from others who've never met him.

Botham, you suspect, works quite hard to keep that side of himself hidden. Not everything can be public property. There's something else, too. Arlott did express a regret that he retired from commentary in 1980, and missed the chance to go through '81 with Botham.

Beefy was one of those players who stirred something in the spectator. In a fabulous piece on trying to write a book about the snooker player Jimmy White, Jonathan Rendall says: 'It doesn't really matter what people like Jimmy do; it's how they express it. They have "it", whatever "it" is, in the way that great painters, writers, poets and violinists have it. They're rare. So when they fall, they must be saved. It's a shame no one thought to save [Alex] Higgins - although technically there's still time - but I suppose the same could have been said of Dylan Thomas. That's my theory, anyway'.

Arlott was a friend of Dylan Thomas, as well as an accomplished poet and a connoisseur of wine and cricket and life; in short an aesthete, and he recognised another when he saw one. It's a shame that, with the demise of the pro broadcaster, a player like Beefy might not meet a man like Arlott in similar circumstances again.

'And after Trevor Bailey...'

The death of Trevor Bailey is another disconnect from the past. While most of the obituaries [rightly] focused on his playing career, to later generations like mine Bailey was known firstly as a voice on TMS. He appeared, with Fred Trueman, as one of the expert summarisers, men who sat alongside the commentators and provided the earthy insight of the trenches - Trueman the autodidact philosopher king, regally dismissive of flannel and Southern nonsense; Bailey the flint-hearted pro with an unexpected aesthetic eye.

Henry Blofeld gave a radio tribute this week, remembering how easily Bailey had slapped him into place early in his TMS career: Blofeld had said - hyperbolically by the standards of the mid-70s - that Greg Chappell had just provided an unmatchable example of an off drive. 'Greg Chappell of course,' sniffed Bailey, 'is better-known for the on drive...'

Both Trueman and Bailey were ribbed back by the commentators, Trueman for his tendency to rose-tint the past [especially any aspect of it that involved him], and Bailey for his legendary ability to remain at the crease almost runless for many hours at a time. It offered an interesting distinction between the pair. Fred didn't much like any challenge, however light-hearted, to his ability, whereas Bailey would chuckle happily at the same, and rejoiced in his nickname of 'The Boil'.

What we have lost, apart from a man who, even at 87 went before his time in awful circumstances, is that balance between pro broadcasters and pro players. TMS clearly delineated between them: the broadcasters commentated and the pros offered analysis and opinion. Bailey was not expected to describe Botham, as Arlott unforgettably did, as 'coming in from the Kirkstall Lane end like a shire horse cresting the breeze', just as Arlott wasn't obliged to hold forth on facing Wes Hall.

Some cricketers have been able to do it, Richie Benaud their nonpareil, but today, especially on television, all other talents have been lost. A richness has gone from the media surrounding the game. Arlott and Bailey would have very different careers today.

One word answer

Philosophy Football, they of the CB Fry T-shirt, have seen the future and produced more, including one from the unmatchable Arlott.

Arlott, who grew up watching cricket under the trees at May's Bounty and had friendships with Dylan Thomas and IT Botham [which tells you plenty about him], was the provider of one of history's great retorts [although to call it a retort is to diminish it], when he travelled to South Africa back in 1948. Required to fill in a landing card, he came to the box marked 'race'. In it he wrote simply 'human'.

That was John Arlott, the most human of men.

Those suns of June

Today I bought a copy of John Arlott's book Jack Hobbs: Profile of the Master for 10p in a charity shop. It begins with a poem Arlott wrote in 1952, To John Berry Hobbs on his Seventieth Birthday. The first and last two verses are:

There falls across this one December day

The light, remembered from those suns of June

That you reflected, in the summer play

Of perfect strokes across the afternoon.

The Master: Records prove the title good:

Yet figures fail you, for they cannot say

How many men whose names you never knew

Are proud to tell their sons they saw you play.

They share the sunlight of your summer day

Of thirty years: and they, with you, recall

How, through those well-wrought centuries, your hand

Reshaped the history of bat and ball.

The next time a newspaper reflexively appoints another retiring cricketer to the post of correspondent, or Sky pats itself on the back about the strength of the line-up in the 'comm box' today, feel free to point them this way.

Shire horses for courses

For most of us most of the time, professional cricket is a mediated experience, ie, we're not playing or watching it live, but getting it via the radio or the box (and these days via subscription to the box, another level of mediation - if you can't afford it, sod orf...). 

While the Batsman idled away his idyllic childhood, the experience was mediated by men like John Arlott, Richie Benaud, Don Mosey, Fred Trueman, Brian Johnson, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, Jim Laker and so on. Some were former cricketers and some were not. In general, the non-cricketers described and the cricketers added expert comment. That was the point of their partnership. 

The great Arlott, a man with a poet's soul who learned his cricket at the Batsman's beloved May's Bounty, offered not just description, but a way of living. When he went to South Africa, back in the mad, bad old days, he was required to enter his race on a customs form. He wrote 'human'. He befriended everyone from Dylan Thomas to Ian Botham. He took a leather satchel to the commentary box with him and inside it were two bottles of good claret and a glass. He pressed his face into the microphone until you could hear every plosive and sibilant of a genuine Hampshire accent and said things like, 'here comes Botham, running in like a shire horse cresting the breeze'. Perfect and beautiful visions of resonance and truth.

Sky Sports would not have employed John Arlott (and Arlott, let's be honest, wouldn't have worked for them). They wouldn't have employed him because he hasn't recently captained England, and thus, apparently, can't offer the level of insight provided by, say, Nasser Hussain. 

That's not to knock Nasser, or Sky, particularly. This movement towards ex-pros only is not confined to Sky or to cricket. But it's sad that no-one is growing up hearing rich and full voices like Arlott's alongside theirs, in genuine partnership. The reason we love cricket is for the way it fits into life, not stands apart from it. It has dimensions that former England captains cannot reach. 

NB: the best (English) former pro presenter/expert/analyst are quite palpably Mark Nicholas, Sir Geoffrey and Simon Hughes, none of whom are employed by Sky. Why is that, exactly?