Cricket

In The Spectator dated 19.7.2008, Roger Alton recommends an obituary in  Daily Telegraph with these words :  "The obit is one of the best bits of sports journalism I have seen all year. Read it please."

That sent me to the article on Bryan "Bomber" Wells. It is good, I think there are many such characters in India too, but no one bothers to write about them.

I will try to give you the parts I like, in case you are not looking to click the link to Daily Telegraph Obit. 

It seems that Wells took 998 wickets playing for Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire. They cost him 24.26 apiece. His career batting average was 7.47, and in Wikipedia it says that he scored about 25% of those runs in sixes. Wells himself is supposed to have remarked, "If I hit the ball, it went a long way and the crowd and I were happy. If I missed it, well, I was that much nearer bowling."

He seemed to have loved the bowling part. In his debut, he came in as the sixth change bowler, and got 6-47. On returning to pavilion, he told his team mates, "I can see if I'm going to play for this side, I'm going to have to do a lot of bowling. I shall have to cut my run down."

And Wells did cut down his run up. Overweight and undertrained, he took two steps when he was cold and one when he was hot; and sometimes he simply delivered the ball from a stationary position. Once when reprimanded by his captain for this, and ordered to take eight paces for run up, he obeyed. But then, he took just two steps forward and delivered the ball spot on the length!

He seems to be a maverick cricketer, always changing his pace,  mixing off-spin with away swingers and leg breaks. Even Brian Close felt that Wells's unpredictability made him  dangerous.

His irreverent attitude can't be replicated in anyone, not these days, when cricket is played for money. It is serious business now, not a sport. Wells,  awful in his running between the wickets, infuriated his team mates with his nonchalant attitude. "Can't you say anything?" Sam Cook once shouted, stranded in mid-pitch by Bomber's failure to call. "Goodbye," Bomber volunteered.

(Bryan Douglas Wells, born in Gloucester on July 27 1930, an off-spin bowler for Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire,  one of the funniest and most eccentric county cricketers of the 1950s and 1960s,  suffered a stroke in 1998,  was confined to a wheelchair, died on  June 19 this year.)