Keeper of Style by Christopher Sandford

Author:Christopher Sandford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2019-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Alex Bannister of the Daily Mail interviewed Murray in the downstairs library in the Oval pavilion about 90 minutes before the start of play. There may be no atmosphere quite like that of a sold-out cricket ground with the hum of arriving spectators and the clatter of players’ boots on the first morning of a Test match. ‘England, as you may have noticed, haven’t had a really proper wicketkeeper for years,’ Bannister, the paper’s cricket correspondent since 1947, observed. ‘Let’s face it, we’ve picked a lot of goalies to do the job, all nice chaps, who should never have been allowed near the Test team.

‘Why have the selectors consistently ignored the best man for the job?’

Murray said he understood Bannister’s concern. He assumed a tone of empathy as he responded in gentle buzzwords. ‘I can only keep doing my best, Alex, and hope to be ready when the call comes.’

‘Does this mark the beginning of your Test comeback?’

‘Let’s just focus on stuffing the West Indies here,’ said Murray, ‘and see what the future holds.’ The other journalists dotted around the room laughed, except the intrepid Mail reporter.

‘You’re not thinking ahead to touring Australia again, John?’

‘I’m only thinking ahead to next Tuesday,’ Murray said.

The raw facts of the match are that the West Indies won the toss, batted, and scored 268. Rohan Kanhai made 104 and Sobers added 81. No one else got over 30. England were in some bother in their reply when, at 166/7, Murray joined Tom Graveney halfway through the second day. You could argue that they were the two most aggrieved parties to all the English selection follies of the 1960s. In an age preoccupied with accountancy they’d sometimes underperformed statistically, but rarely disappointed those who like a touch of the classical, and also occasionally the fallible, to their cricketers. Only mediocrity is always at its best. Murray, having survived an almighty shout for lbw first ball, scored 112, with 13 fours, in just over four hours at the crease. Graveney made 165, and their 217-run stand still remains an eighth-wicket record for England against the West Indies. Garry Sobers once told me that the greatest compliment he could pay Murray was that ‘when you looked from Tom to John, and then back again, it was bloody difficult to tell them apart. Everything that could be hit they hit hard and straight.’ The partnership ended only when, on the third day, Graveney played a shot to gully, Murray’s prudent shout of ‘No!’ was lost in all the ambient Saturday-lunchtime din of hooters and klaxons, and the batsman was run out. ‘Frankly, we could have batted all day,’ Murray said, ‘and the end, when it came, had to be self-inflicted.’ The Oval scoreboard was soon spinning like a fruit machine again as Ken Higgs and John Snow then followed up with a last-ditch stand of 128, and England had a first innings lead of 259.

West Indies came out to bat a second time. The openers had both gone

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.