Keeper of Style: John Murray, the King of Lord's by Christopher Sandford

Author:Christopher Sandford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

‘We acted more in sorrow than in anger in leaving you out of the side for Lord’s. I think our feeling is that it is the only practical way of demonstrating that we are not prepared to condone cricket of the Edgbaston variety.’

Murray was one of those who believed that his friend Barrington, one of life’s inveterate worriers, never quite recovered from this blow to his self-confidence, if anything becoming a worse batsman, not a better one, as a result. ‘There was always that nagging doubt in the back of Kenny’s mind from then on, and you saw him getting out to shots that he never would have played without the extra pressure he felt on him from the selectors. It did his head in. That was the reality of “brighter cricket”.’ Nor was this a concept necessarily embraced by the Australians or their hatchet-faced captain Bill Lawry, a man whose own core batting technique once won him the derisive description of a ‘corpse with pads on’. By the time MCC met Victoria at Melbourne the gaudy optimism that had characterised the early press forecasts that the series would be played in a spirit of unfailing enterprise and mutual goodwill had long since evaporated. In that same game where Barrington scored 158, Murray watched Lawry dislodge the bails with the heel of his boot and then calmly set off for a single. ‘I appealed, but the umpire said not out. He hadn’t seen what happened, and Lawry wasn’t about to walk. I stumped the bugger later, though,’ Murray chuckled.

***

‘J.T. Murray made an excellent impression throughout Australia,’ Griffith later wrote for the record in his official report on the tour. When given the chance he ‘kept wicket admirably well, catch[ing] everything that came to him’. Batting for MCC against South Australia at Adelaide over Christmas week 1965, Murray also top-scored over the likes of Smith, Cowdrey and Barrington with a counter-attacking innings of 110. ‘In the power and cleanness of his hitting, he looked the equal of any batsman in the world,’ the Advertiser wrote. Geoff Boycott added that ‘the whole tour was a slog, with people sharing poky little hotel rooms, no money to speak of, not even a doctor on call when you got sick, which most of us did – and through it all my memory is of John being permanently friendly and cheerful. He knew how to get along with people, even with some of the Aussies who could be irascible and uptight. He was a good tourist. He was also a great keeper, and when he batted he batted elegantly. You were always glad to have him in the side.’

The more Murray was kicked around by the England selectors, the more genial and beatifically laid-back he seemed to become. He was most in his element somewhere like the small park at Euroa, 90 miles upcountry from Melbourne, where the MCC match with a Victoria XI had to be suspended after heavy rain, and the journalist E.M.

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