THE most remarkable bowling feat in the history of Test cricket, Jim Laker’s 19 for 90 against the might of Australia at Old Trafford in 1956, could have happened 100 years ago, not 50, for all the available pictorial evidence there is of it. There are strips and snaps, but nothing that conveys fully the deceptive indifference and leisurely carriage with which Laker functioned while the batsmen floundered.
From the way he walked down the street by that stage of his career — he was 34 at the time — there was nothing to tell the passer-by that Laker might be who or what he was. His gait was not that of a games player: it was too straight-legged and heavy-footed for that, so that, on the field, he was usually to be found in the gully, where mobility is less important than anticipation and a safe pair of hands.
Dour, dogmatic and with a dry wit, Laker was seldom, if ever, flustered and, if he was, he wouldn’t show it. On the very plumbest of pitches, his contemporary off spinner, Hugh Tayfield, of South Africa, had the finesse to be marginally more effective, although no more economical.
Neither in England nor on tour do I remember Laker ever being well and truly collared, even by Denis Compton, in any of his regular post-war hundreds for Middlesex against Surrey. The 1948 Australians came nearest to it in what was only his first full season in the game. Don Bradman and Arthur Morris had the measure of him, certainly, when they were scoring 404 for three to win on the ill-fated last day of the fourth Test match at Headingley.
Once, when Surrey were on their way to winning seven successive county championships in the 1950s, I must have implied in these columns that the pitches at the Oval were too heavily weighted in favour of Laker and his partner in spin, Tony Lock. Within two or three days, I received a long letter from Jim, laced with statistics and written in the clearest of hands and friendliest of terms, saying that, in fact, his figures in Surrey’s away matches were better than they were at the Oval.
He was a proud man in the way that the legendary and irascible S. F. Barnes must have been. After finishing off Australia that evening at Old Trafford, he strolled off the field, his sweater slung over his shoulder, much as though he was on his way back from the nets. Only Barnes’s haul of 49 wickets at 10.93 apiece in four Test matches played on the mat in South Africa in 1913-14 has surpassed Laker’s 46 in five Test matches against Australia in 1956, or is likely to.
Off spin was never more in vogue than in England at Laker’s time. Unlike today, few county, club or school sides took the field without someone who dealt in it. There were many reasons for this. Being still uncovered, the pitches were naturally and typically “English”; the forward defensive stroke was played, more often than not, with the bat thrust far enough in front of the front pad (rather than tucked in behind it, as it is today) to make the scotching of the spin more difficult; the bats themselves were mere batons compared with the modern railway sleepers; the craze for bowling fast and short off a long run was many years off; one-day cricket had yet to have its invigorating effect on the theory and practice of strokeplay; the boundaries had not been phonily shortened, as a way of jazzing up the game by multiplying the numbers of fours and sixes; and that perversion of a stroke, the reverse sweep, was not so much as a conception in the batsman’s mind.
Coming from a country where the off spinner has long been a relative outcast and the leg spinner the favoured one, because of the drier, bouncier pitches, Ian Johnson’s side found the sharply-turning off break altogether more than they could cope with, just as Bradman’s side had at Lord’s in 1934, when Hedley Verity’s orthodox left-arm spin took hold after a night of rain. Now that covering is compulsory, these occasional historical oddities don’t happen any more and more is the pity. The Australians who survived at Old Trafford in 1956, both when it was dusty and when it was damp, were the two grafters, Colin McDonald and Jimmy Burke. Richie Benaud fought it out on the last afternoon because he knew no other way.
To compound their plight, the Australians had good reason for thinking that the pitches at Headlingley and the Oval, as well as at Old Trafford, were prepared for Laker and Lock, come rain or shine. In seven matches against them for England and Surrey, Laker took 73 wickets at 8.63 runs apiece. It was just as eagerly, therefore, that Australia planned and duly took their revenge in Australia two years later.
Unlike Muttiah Muralitharan, Laker bowled off breaks in the classic manner. Other than relentless accuracy and the fact that their stock ball turned from off to leg, the two have little in common. Laker was not a conjuror in the way that Muralitharan is. He relied entirely upon line, flight, length and pivot, although, to the young cricketer, he always emphasised the importance of spin. “Concentrate first,” he would say, “on learning how to spin the ball. Then hammer away to control it with length and direction.”
His arm ball, the one that drifted away from the right-handed batsman in the hope of getting him stumped or caught behind, was as much a part of his armoury as Muralitharan’s “doosra” now is of his. Muralitharan is different and more baffling in the way that Sonny Ramadhin and Jack Iverson were in the 1950s or B. J. T. Bosanquet must have been when he suddenly started to bowl off breaks with a leg-break action.
Laker neither sought nor needed the unorthodox in the way that he might now. In saying that his 19 for 90 “would never” happen today, I am not praising the present or depreciating the past, but simply acknowledging the consequences of evolution.
Laker’s conventional style was as well suited to his time as Alex Loudon’s or Jamie Dalrymple’s is up against it today.
I last saw Laker when he was an established television commentator, standing at the pay-out window of the betting tent at the Oval, looking just as unaffected as when he got another Australian caught in his leg trap at Old Trafford. He could no more have been seen to be dancing with delight at backing a winner than hugging a team-mate who had taken a catch. He didn’t “do” emotion, which might, I suppose, have got him into trouble 50 years on.
To those who have heard that there were times on tour when he may have protested too much about the state of his spinning finger, I would only say that it did often look most horribly raw and sore. Both his captain and manager in Australia in 1958-59, Peter May and Freddie Brown, felt he could and probably should have played in the Adelaide Test match, which England needed to win (they lost it heavily) to keep the series alive.
In the event, Laker pulled out at the last moment, as outwardly indifferent to the consequences as he was when his ghosted autobiography did few, least of all himself, any favours. Uncompromising, impenitent and with a record to his name as prodigious as it is unassailable, Jim Laker died of septicaemia in 1986, at the age of 64.
