The Ashes According to Bumble. David Lloyd
a few times to look down upon famous landmarks such as the white horse at Kilburn and arrive back in Leeds within the half-hour. ‘Because if it’s not in Yorkshire, it’s not worth bloody going,’ they used to say.
Goodness knows why Darwin in the Northern Territory was our first port of call but this was my first disembarkation down under. ‘Cor blimey, these engines don’t half get hot, do they?’ I said as we clambered down onto the tarmac. It took seasoned traveller John Edrich to put me right: ‘That heat you can feel’s not the engines, you pillock, it’s this bloody place!’ You see, I was a bit wet behind the ears as a tourist and unaccustomed to anything other than cloud and mizzle for the first 18 years of my life, so the temperature was severe enough to really take me aback.
The previous England team that had travelled to Australia in 1970–71, under the captaincy of Ray Illingworth, had returned victorious, of course, one of the great (and rare) wins for an England team down under. John Snow was a key figure in that victory, as we know, but subsequently came under something of a cloud, and was not in our party. Another figure missing was Geoff Boycott, and it was his absence to which I owed my chance at international level.
Boycs had not been selected the previous summer, and although there were rumours surrounding his omission I never knew the official reason why. There were all kinds of suggestions made, conjecture in the newspapers that he had been dropped, other reports that he was preoccupied with the organisation of his benefit, but I never knew the truth, and why would I want to know? There was even persistent talk of him falling out with the then captain Mike Denness but I was not in a position to dwell on such matters. What interested me was doing well for England, having been selected as his direct replacement as opening batsman.
As far as I was concerned, he was just out of the reckoning, I had been picked, given the chance to fulfil a dream and play for my country, and everything else went over my head. I was concentrating on the business of scoring runs to better myself, focusing on that red, spherical leather object being hurled down at me from 22 yards – not analysing the personality clashes, or the torment he surprisingly suffered at the hands of the innocuous-looking swing bowler Solkar at the start of that series against India, that may have played some part in providing the initial opportunity.
I had made my maiden Test hundred against India during this initial spell of Boycs’s absence, and followed that up with another in a limited-overs international match at the end of a troubled tour of England by Pakistan. Relations had become quite strained between the teams after the Pakistanis levelled accusations of skullduggery during the Lord’s Test when Derek Underwood bowled them out. If there was any damp around, Deadly was well, deadly, and water had got under the covers. Persistent showers left a wet patch on the pitch, he kept hitting it and they simply couldn’t cope. I was stood at short leg and it was like picking cherries.
Accusations that we were complicit in the state of the pitch were complete and utter nonsense. Pakistan had been ripped apart by Underwood in the first innings on a drying surface after a lengthy downpour on the opening day, and then after we batted to secure a 140-run lead, rain struck again when Pakistan came out to bat for a second time.
It was actually during the rest day of the match, the Sunday, that London was the subject of some major downpours and these continued into the Monday, which meant that when the temporary tent-like covering was removed, the pitch was discovered to be sodden. The rain had seeped through and in these conditions it was a different game altogether.
Deadly bagged a bundle of wickets with his idiosyncratic left-arm-round stuff – six to be precise – when the match finally resumed at around 5pm on the fourth evening. In plunging Pakistan from 192 for three half an hour into play to 226 all out, he took his innings haul to eight and provided match figures of 13 for 71, in addition to setting up a victory target of just 87 runs.
Dennis Amiss and I wiped 27 from that target before the close of play. But our efforts in 10 overs against the new ball were not the focus of attention that night, due to Pakistan manager Omar Kureishi’s utter indignation. Kureishi put in an official complaint in which he accused MCC of ‘negligence’ and ‘incompetence’ in their attempts to cover the wicket. In those days, if it rained once the Test match was underway then the run-ups and edges of the square were protected but the pitch itself was exposed to the elements. On rest days, however, every effort was made to protect it from the elements, and Pakistan argued that they were entitled to be able to bat on a pitch in the same condition it had been in when stumps were drawn on the Saturday evening.
As it happened, we didn’t get on again. Despite re-marking of the pitch during the final session on day five, the rain returned, and the contest, which had become more political than sporting, was abandoned as a draw and a three-Test series was on its way to a 0–0 stalemate. It was a series which bore few runs for me personally but the news I wanted to hear was delivered during a six-wicket win over Sir Garfield Sobers’s Notts. That match concluded on 30 August, and I celebrated with 116 not out in the one-dayer against Pakistan in Nottingham the very next day.
Preparing for Battle
We felt almost from the moment we arrived that Australia were determined to show they were the better team and that they would avenge that defeat by Illingworth and Co four years earlier. And it is fair to say that we were caught on the hop by their line-up.
For a start, we did not anticipate Dennis Lillee being declared fit, and when he was, on the eve of the series, it undoubtedly gave the Australians a boost. The main thrust of the pre-series talk had been that Lillee was not going to play. He had suffered a serious back injury, spinal fractures that had caused him to be set in plaster from his backside to his shoulders for six whole weeks earlier in the year, and word was he wasn’t going to be ready in time.
With him missing, we really didn’t have anything to fear. Truth was that Australia were a little bit thin on the ground for fast bowlers. Or so we anticipated. They had Gary Gilmour and David Colley, the pairing who opened the bowling for New South Wales against us ahead of the first Test. Both had a couple of caps to their names – Colley’s earned during the 1972 Ashes – while there was a recurring whisper doing the rounds that a chap called Thomson was in the mix too.
We had encountered two blokes of this surname during our four pre-series games – a bit of a beach bum, called Jeff, who sent down some fairly innocuous new-ball fare for Queensland, and who on his Test debut 12 months earlier against Pakistan had, by all accounts, gone around the park, finishing with match figures of nought for 110; and Alan Thomson, otherwise known as Froggy because of the way he sprang to the crease and bowled off the wrong foot, who had featured against England four years earlier when he got involved in a bouncer war with Snow. Because of his experience, we anticipated it would be the latter called up for the opener in Brisbane. But this hardly filled us with fear as his return for Victoria against us a fortnight earlier read 17-0-85-0.
We were hoodwinked, of course, as they wheeled out the man who would no longer be referred to as either Jeff or Thomson from that year forth. Following his selection he was forever known as Thommo and in tandem with Lillee ambushed us right good and proper. When he’d opened the bowling for Queensland against us in that first-class contest, he did no more than amble into the crease, under the express instruction of Australia captain Ian Chappell. He was merely playing to have a good look at us while being careful not to show anything of his true self – so that we didn’t get accustomed to how freakishly fast he could send this ball down at you and would be caught unawares when the serious business began.
Facing up to Thommo was a real challenge not least because of his rather unique bowling action. In modern day cricket you will see batsmen such as Ian Bell and Eoin Morgan muttering to themselves: ‘Watch the ball.’ The television close-ups and slow-motion shots reveal that they mouth those words as the bowler runs up to the crease.
However, occasionally, you come up against bowlers that make it more difficult for you to be able to do that because of slight quirks in their actions. And then there was Thommo, who made it absolutely impossible because he didn’t let you see it at all as he wound up to wang it down. With other people you knew where their hands were going and you could watch the ball all the