openers

memorable
comment,

moments
and this
analysis

month’s
news,
XI
The

bespectacled
cricketers
Never mind Twenty20,
what about 20:20 vision?
Not for these fellows, as
Will Finch discovers

1 Daniel Vettori
“Skinny white men with glasses
shouldn’t do hakas,” Vettori
said recently. Christened ‘Harry
Potter’ by a jealous Australian
media, the New Zealand captain
is used to the name-calling – he’s
been wearing glasses since the
age of three. After a brief and
uncomfortable experiment with
contacts, he is now a poster boy
for spectacle-wearing Kiwis,
appearing in an advert earlier
this year encouraging five-year-
olds to wear sunglasses. He has
patrick eagar

also used his bookish image to

help a government-sponsored
campaign extolling the virtues of
reading and using libraries.

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openers
XI bespectacled
cricketers
2 Geoffrey Boycott
Boycott suffered a ruptured spleen
as a child but he was shattered
by the news, at 14, that he would
have to wear glasses. “His world
had fallen apart,” recalled his
Uncle Algie in Don Mosey’s 1985
biography. But specs certainly
didn’t hamper Boycs. He wore
them with conspicuous success
until 1969 when he decided to
switch to contact lenses. The initial
transition was problematic – he
averaged only 38 in 1969, compared
to 64 the previous season.
3 Clive Lloyd
Nicknamed ‘Supercat’ for his
prowess in the field, Lloyd
damaged his eyesight when
breaking up a fight as a schoolboy.
“In some ways it worked for me,”
he said in his autobiography.
“Other players used to say ‘who’s
this fellow coming in who can’t
see?’ They thought they were funny
until I exploded with a few cuts
and drives.” Those cuts and drives
helped Lloyd make a century in the
inaugural World Cup final of 1975,
plus many more besides.
4 Bill Bowes
Appearances can be deceptive.
The round John Lennon specs
and thinning hair were hardly
calculated to strike fear in
opposing batsmen but Bill Bowes
was not a man to be messed with.
He repeatedly bounced a 50-year-
old Jack Hobbs for Yorkshire at
The Oval in August 1932, a pre-
cursor to the winter when Bowes
would be one of Douglas Jardine’s
executors of his momentous leg-
theory tactics.
5 Tommy Mitchell
A former coal miner, Tommy
Mitchell had the misfortune of
being England’s main spinner
on the Bodyline tour in 1932-
33. The dark-rimmed spectacles
he acquired some years into his
cricketing career transformed him
into a brilliant cover fielder and a
hard-hitting batsman who loved
to advance down the pitch to hit
fast bowlers for six. The bowling
was a given: Neville Cardus wrote
that “the ball had only to see
those spectacles in order to start
spinning madly”.
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2 3
5 6
8 9
6 Eddie Barlow
Known as ‘Bunter’ for his glasses
and his build, South African
legend Barlow was a victim of his
short-sightedness while playing
for Kerry Packer’s World Series
Cricket in the New South Wales
town of Wagga Wagga. Barlow
woke up with a start one night to
find a “human body lying beside
me. At least I thought it was a
body. I can never see a thing at
night”. It turned out the body was
a prostitute posing as a spy and
all part of an elaborate prank by
team-mate Mike Procter.
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11
7 Alf Valentine
When Alf Valentine arrived in
England in 1950 he was a little-
known left-arm spinner, with just
two first-class appearances behind
him. He returned to Jamaica with
33 wickets from four Test matches,
and a pair of NHS specs which
he secured when bowling using
sticking-plaster. His team-mates
had known something was wrong
when he was unable to read the
scoreboard during a tour match. His
glasses didn’t help him when batting
– in three tours of England, he never
once reached double figures.
9 Geoff Lawson
Although Geoff Lawson preferred
contact lenses to glasses on the
pitch, he deserves a special mention
7 for qualifying as an optometrist
while still playing for New South
Wales. He took a year off to tour
India and Pakistan with Australia
in 1979-80, and eventually
completed the four-year course at
the University of New South Wales
seven years after it began. Spurred
on by his recent experiences in
Pakistan, Lawson now acts as an
ambassador for World Sight Day, in
which optometrists donate their
fees for a day to the vision charity
Optometry Giving Sight.
10
10 Devon Malcolm
Devon Malcolm was wearing
contact lenses when he took 9 for
57 against South Africa at The
Oval in 1994, the eighth-best Test
figures of all time, but he began
his England career in bottle-top
canberra times, patrick eagar (4), hulton archive/getty images (4), PA Photos
glasses, kept on his head by an
elastic band and before that, as
the picture shows, archetypal
big 1980s specs. Malcolm’s visual
impairment and his spectacle-
wearing all contributed to the
great affection in which he is
still held by England followers.
But it might have been better had
someone other than Devon shaved
Chris Lewis’s head on England’s
tour to the West Indies in 1993-
94. “There were so many cuts
that Lewis came down the next
morning with toilet paper stuck
all over his head,” remembers
Keith Fletcher, the England coach.
11 Bob Hawke
Cricket-mad former Aussie PM
Hawke was once 12th man for
8 Murray Bennett Oxford University and had played
Like his contemporary Dirk first-grade cricket in Sydney so
Wellham, Australian left-arm he was no mug. But playing for
spinner Murray Bennett wasn’t Parliamentarians against a Press
afraid to stand up to glasses- team in 1984, Hawke, 53, was
related discrimination. During struck in the face by the Herald’s
his Test debut for Australia Gary O’Neill. His glasses smashed
against the West Indies in and he had to have fragments
Melbourne in 1984-85, he became removed from around his eye.
the first cricketer to play in Although he retired hurt on 28,
photochromic prescription he gamely returned later to help
sunglasses, and it is still why his side to victory. Labor party
most people remember him. This secretary Bob McMullen was later
is perhaps fortunate as he only carried off with concussion after
played three Tests, taking six missing the ball while going for a
wickets at an average of 54. catch in the deep.
expert eye Andy Atkinson
Time to grass up the pitches
It was very disappointing to see how bland some
of the pitches were during England’s recent Test
series in the West Indies. Most of them are new
pitches laid specifically for the World Cup in 2007
and yet they seem to have deteriorated since then.
As the ICC’s pitches consultant, I was heavily
involved with the preparation of the Caribbean
venues and I thought we produced some pretty
good wickets at the time.
With the huge amount of one-day and
Twenty20 cricket around the world, it seems
that some people have forgotten the art of
preparing a five-day pitch. The quality of the
surfaces might be improving but that doesn’t
mean the pitches are better for cricket as a
whole. It’s about getting the right balance and it
is now too far in favour of the batsman. It needs
to come back towards the bowler.
One of the great myths is that the ICC wants
to standardise pitches. Nothing could be further
from the truth. The ICC
wants to preserve the
} Some of the
primacy of Test cricket
and part of that is having equipment being
used is antique~
pitches that produce good
games, not bore draws.
They want pace and even
bounce but beyond that they want pitches to
retain their local, traditional characteristics like
seam in England or spin in India.
The ICC only has control over pitches for their
own tournaments and does not – and could not
in reality – take control of pitch preparation for
bilateral Test series, which is the responsibility of
the home board.
And that is where it gets tricky for groundsmen
because some of them do work under considerable
pressure from their employers to produce a certain
type of pitch, whether it be to suit the home team’s
requirements or the commercially-driven desire
for a full five days of cricket. My first Test as the
Edgbaston groundsman in 1991 was over in four
days and I was told in no uncertain terms that I
had cost the club £100,000.
In 2004, I went to Pakistan below at the
request of Ramiz Raja, then chief executive of
the board, to help with
the pitches for their Test
series against India. In
the first Test I tried to
please too many people
and took the grass
off the pitch, which I
shouldn’t have done.
But we got results
in all three Tests
which, for Pakistan-
India contests, was
remarkable.
The key to a good pitch is to leave some grass
on the surface. I’m not talking about a raging
green-top. You see pitches in Australia that have
a beautiful covering of grass but it’s white grass.
Generally speaking, the more grass you take off
the surface, the lower the bounce. The ball skids
quicker off the grass, which acts almost as a
lubricant, than against the bare earth.
The main function of the grass is that the
roots suck out the moisture from underneath.
Leaving grass on the pitch extends the roots
under the ground and allows moisture to escape.
If you cut the grass really short then the roots
die. When you roll a pitch, the soil will only
compact to a depth of an inch (25mm). Below
that it can only compact by drying out so if
there are no roots for the moisture to escape
through then you just get a hard crusty surface
and putty underneath. Result: low, slow pitch.
The more grass you keep on a pitch, the longer
the roots, the dryer and
harder it gets down below
and the more pace and
bounce. But increasingly
around the world you see
the first thing they do is
shave the grass off then roll
it rather than rolling the grass in then shaving it.
It’s a matter of education as much as anything
else but also resource. Some of the equipment
being used in some territories is antique. You find
in places where labour is cheap that they replace
expensive but necessary equipment with labour.
Although the ICC does not involve itself
directly with a home board’s pitch preparation
(unless asked), there are a number of actions
occurring which will hopefully redress the
balance between bat and ball. The marking system
used to judge the quality of pitches has been
changed so that a wicket can be now marked
down if it is too batsman-friendly as well as if it
is too bowler-friendly. In addition, each February
from now on each country will have to state which
venues they are planning to use in the coming
year so that if we have any concerns we can check
them out. Hopefully, this should avoid a repeat of
the recent abandoned
Test in Antigua.
Andy Atkinson is the ICC’s
chief pitches consultant. He
has previously been head
groundsman at Chelmsford,
Edgbaston, Cape Town
and Johannesburg. He
recently assisted with the
getty images
preparation of the Cardiff
pitch ahead of the first
Ashes Test in July
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