J is for Jardine (Who else?)
Apologies for the (unconscionable?) delay in posting this latest installment. I know this has disappointed some of you. What can I say? Well, the truth is that Firefox ate this post and this set me back a few days as it was some time before I could muster the energy or enthusiasm to write a new version. Still, you can't discount indolence as a factor either.
Anyway, here we are at last. This series has featured teams skippered by: Armstrong, Benaud, Constantine, Dexter, Edrich, Fry, Gower, Hutton and Imran. There are some tough cookies in that list, you'll agree, but none sterner than the man leading the J XI onto the field: Douglas Robert Jardine.
THE J XI
1. Sanath Jayasuriya (SL)
2. Archie Jackson (AUS)
3. Mahela Jayawardene (SL)
4. FS Jackson (ENG)
5. Dean Jones (AUS)
6. DR Jardine (ENG) (Capt)
7. Gilbert Jessop (ENG)
8. Ridley Jacobs (WI) (Wkt)
9. Roly Jenkins (ENG)
10. Bill Johnston (AUS)
11. Les Jackson (ENG)
Country representation in the series: England 40, Australia 22, West Indies 13, Pakistan 10, India 9, South Africa 8, New Zealand 5, Sri Lanka 2, Zimbabwe 1.
There have been better sides in this series than this and there will be greater XIs to come yet, but this cricket team is still, nonetheless, a special one. There are great players from the past - Ranji, Hammond, Bradman, Grace and the like - whom one wishes one could have seen in their pomp. Then there's Archie Jackson, a player who was denied his pomp entirely, leaving us only to mourn perhaps the most poignant of all cricket's tragedies and wonder what might have been if the stars had been less grievously aligned.
Knowing how Don Bradman's career progressed we may think it presumptious that any batsman could have been considered the Don's superior. But many wise judges in Australia considered Jackson the better of the two shining stars that burst upon the Australian scene in the 1920s. Now clearly it would have been extraordinary if Jackson had gone on to match Bradman and given the failure of any batsman before or since to do so we may safely venture that Jackson would not have been as relentless a batting machine as the Don. Nonetheless, all accounts agree that his death from tuberculosis, aged just 23, robbed the game of a future great.
Though he was greatly influenced by his mentor Kippax, Jackson's batting carried echoes, in terms of style and accomplishment, of an earlier, even greater hero: Victor Trumper himself. Could there be a finer testament to his genius and, alas, any more poignant suggestion of what we lost? How one wishes one oculd have been present for his 164 against Engand on his test debut.
Jackson, in fact, was at the wicket when some of the seeds of Bodyline were sown. On a wet and fiery wicket at the Oval in 1930, Jackson was batting with Bradman and, as EW Swanton recounts:
While Jackson withstood Larwood in these conditions by clasically straight, correct defence, getting right behind the rising ball, Bradman hopped about, using his exceptional speed of foot to keep out of harm's way. One recalls so clearly the contrast of method. Whether or not he really disliked the situation, the little man looked as though he did. Mental notes were made, and the evidence stored up for future use.
Which brings me to observe that if Jackson was the best batsman ever born in Scotland (in Rutherglen in fact, before his father took the family to Australia), the other Scot in this XI was born in India, schooled in England and died in Switzerland. But DR Jardine was a Scot nonetheless (his father, also a child of empire born in India, was schooled at Fettes) whose harlequin cap (that so infurated Australian crowds who took it as a sign of aloof privilege) could not completely disguise the Calvinist rigour with which Jardine approached winning back the Ashes in 1932-33.
Jardine was not a man for fripperies. Cricket was a serious business that demanded to be taken seriously. There was a certain thrawn magnificence to his stubbornness and a ruthlessness to his approach to the captaincy that required respect and perhaps a measure of awe, even if it might also leave you chilled and just a little bit afraid. In other times and circumstances one - or I can at any rate - imagine Jardine as a Scots Covenanter, defiant to the end and utterly convinced by the righteousness of his cause. A cause that had to be prosecuted to the end and to hell with the consequences.
Never was this more apparent than during the Adelaide test. England and Australia were tied 1-1 and Adelaide would prove the pivotal moment in the series, both on and off the field. When Larwood, bowling to an orthodox field, hit Woodfull a heavy blow over the heart Jardine waited for the crowd's anger to fade before offering a clipped "Well bowled, Harold" and, before the next ball could be bowled, signalled for the field to move over to the leg-theory, or Bodyline, placings. Whatever else you might say of Jardine, you could not deny the acute psychological impact of this moment of captaincy. It was a master-stroke.
He could take it as well as dishing it out too, mind you, as the 127 he scored against leg-theory bowling from Constantine and Martindale at Old Trafford in 1933 demonstrated. And in fact the controversy over the Bodyline series has obscured the fact that Jardine was an accomplished batsman in his own right. But it is, of course, for his captaincy that he is remembered and that's why he's the obvious choice to skipper this side, FS Jackson's claims to the title notwithstanding.
Nonetheless, it must be admitted that cricket would be a poorer game if everyone played it the way Jardine did. Yet there was an austere majesty to his tactics and behaviour in 1932-33 that remains compelling 75 years later. Typically, of course, the English cricket authorities punished Jardine and, especially, Larwood for doing their jobs and bringing back the Ashes. They were scapegoated, in part because of Australian threats to the future of the Ashes if either played against the touring Australians in 1934. Larwood was even denied the opportunity to play for Nottinghamshire against the tourists. With Jardine a certain type of cricket reached its apotheosis; the game would be poorer for its absence too.
The two Sri Lankans selected would be surer of their places if their records outside the friendly confines of home were quite as impressive as their performances on the island. Nonetheless, they offer class (Jayawardene) and dash (Jayasuriya), while the latter's more than occasional left-arm tweakers will also prove useful to a side less than blessed in spin-bowling.(I should also say here that Javed Miandad is considered an "M" not a "J").
The lead spinner is Worcester's Roly Jenkins, who had a decent claim to be, wth Eric Hollies, the leading wrist-spinner in England in the immediate post-war period. Though his test record was more modest than his talent he was a good enough bowler to take more than 1300 first class wickets at fewer than 24 runs apiece. Not bad. I'm sure you'll tell me if there's a more deserving tweaker out there. More to the point, I admire Jenkins's attitude and offer these anecdotes for the defence:
As a bowler, always in his cap, he had a short, fidgety roll to the wicket, a distinctive mix of muscle and anxiety as he threw the ball high and spun it prodigiously. "Spin for Roly," he would tell the ball, but his quest for perfection rarely left him satisfied.
"I've seen him take eight wickets and go straight into the nets," his team-mate Martin Horton says. "He particularly hated batsmen sweeping him. He used to say to Bill Alley, `I hope your chickens all die.' Jim Parks used to sweep him first ball, whatever. `Haven't they got any proper batsmen today?' he'd say."
One year in Glasgow he beat the Rev Jim Aitchison repeatedly but without success, and he came down the wicket. "They say you're a vicar. Well, with your luck, you'll be the Archbishop of Canterbury.'" Later, as he nursed a sore finger, he turned to the umpire: "I'll borrow the one you're not using." He returned to Worcester in a state of nervous distress and did not bowl again for a month.
"He was always talking," Olive says. "And he never bothered what he said. He just said it."
During the Second World War he was admonished by an officer batting with him. "Now listen, Jenkins, you don't say `come one,' you say `come one, sir.'" And Roly, with his insistent Worcester vowels, had to have the last word: "And if I'm wearing a cap, sir, should I salute when we cross?"
Great stuff.
The bowling, it must be admitted, is something of a cobbled-together effort. I gave some thought to including England's Simon Jones, but baulked on the grounds that his promise, alas, has remained unfulfilled, largely on account of the rotten string of injuries he has suffered. In a better world one would be able to revisit this selection in a few years and find a place for him.
As it is, we must remember that FS Jackson (of whom more later) was a bowler of sufficient means to take nearly 800 first class wickets while the great Gilbert Jessop (of whom, also, much more later) was originally picked as a fast bowler before injuries and over-bowling also took their toll. Still, for the purposes to this XI we may expect both men to play a part with ball in hand.
The attack is completed by a pair of unfashionable bowlers. Bil Johnston was understandably overshadowed by Lindwall and Miller, but his mixture of left-arm pace and orthodox spin brought him 160 wikets at 24. He is one of those unsung Australian cricketers guaranteed to be a bloody obstinate nuisance to the opposition.
Finally, there's Les Jackson who had, I'm afraid, the misfortune to be born in Derbyshire. I mean no disrespect to that lovely county, but it seems reasonable to suppose that had Jackson been born in and played for a more fashionable - by which I mean, any - county he would have won more than two caps. He took 7 wickets at 22 against, respectively, the 1949 New Zealanders and the 1961 Australians (by which time Jackson had passed his 40th birthday) but had the misfortune to ply his trade during England's golden age of fast bowling. Put it this way, if he played now he'd have appeared in 50 tests methinks. Or, to put it another way, no current England quick bowler can dream of taking 1733 first class wickets at 17.36 runs apiece.
Wisden wrote in 1959 that:
Seldom have the figures of any bowler made more impressive reading than did those of the Derbyshire fast-medium bowler, Herbert Leslie Jackson, which enabled him to head the first-class bowling averages of 1958. They read 829 overs, 295 maidens, 1,572 runs, 143 wickets at an average of 10.99 each. Impressive enough in any circumstances, but when it is realised that they were gained during a season throughout which Jackson suffered from a persistent groin-muscle injury, such figures represent a feat of the first magnitude.
Indeed, a search through Wisden back to 1900 has revealed that during this 20th century no bowler with at least 100 wickets to his credit in a season can match Jackson's final analysis of 1958. Only two Yorkshire left-arm slow bowlers approach him. In 1923 W. Rhodes took 134 wickets for 11.54 runs each, and in 1946 A. Booth had 111 for 11.61.
Small wonder that the inhabitants of Whitwell, the Derbyshire mining village of just under 5,000 population where Jackson has lived nearly all his life, declare with typical candour that their local hero should have had more honours.
How times change, eh? Hard to imagine Steve Harmison bowling nearly 900 overs in a year... Jackson earns his spot in the batting order, incidentally, for being one of those who took more wickets in his career than he scored runs. Marvellous!
Elsewhere: Ridley Jacobs wears the gloves and will be trusted to do his talent rather fuller justice in this side than he managed in the discouraging West Indies sides in which he featured.
It's testament to the number of great Australian batsmen these past 20 years that Dean Jones can be found in the overlooked and sometimes even forgotten category. One-day records play no part in the selection for this series but it might as well be acknowledged that Jones was an innovator and a devastatingly effective one at that when it came to the abbreviated game. Still, it's his admirable, even irrepressible, batting in test cricket that wins him favour here. Bobby Simpson considered his 210 in the tied test with India to be among the greatest ever innings played by an Australian.
And so to the final two, splendid selections. FS Jackson is another cricketer who may be too often over-looked today. Alas, he never toured Australia, but from 1893-1905 he averaged 48 in his 20 tests for England, establishing himself as one of the great batsmen of an age replete with now-legendary, kenspeckled figures. Next time you find yourself feeling glum, consider the plight of the poor schoolboys charged with bowling to Jackson and his Harrow contemporary AC MacLaren...
He was arguably the greatest amateur batsman in England in his day ("One of the most aristocratic batsmen in his outlook and manner" in Cardus's judgement), and his Wisden obituary pays tribute to his batting, thus:
Well-built and standing nearly six feet high, Stanley Jackson was equipped with special physical advantages for cricket; to these were added fine judgment, perseverance, and, above all, exceptional courage which amounted to belief in his own abilities. Free and stylish in method, he drove splendidly on either side of the wicket and was perhaps the finest forcing on-side batsman of his time. While essentially a forward player on hard wickets, he had at his command on sticky wickets a strength and science of back play to which few men have attained. His great stroke sent a good-length ball through the covers; he cut square or late and turned the ball cleverly on the leg side with similar precision. Nothing was better than the way he jumped in and drove the ball over the bowler's head, as shown in the life-like picture at Lord's, and as I saw at Bradford, where he sent the ball high over the football stand.
Jackson, in fact, was England's best batsman in the great 1902 series and he played a vital role in what came to be known as "Jessop's Match", contributing 49 to a stand of 104 with Jessop en route to England's one wicket victory at the Oval.
And so to Jessop himself. "The Croucher" remains one of the most thrilling hard-hitting batsmen to have bestrode the game. Ignore the figures which scarcely do justice to the destructie nature of Jessop's batting. He was the Botham or Flintoff of his age and, in the words of one writer, a "human catapult who wrecks the roofs of distant towns when set in his assault" who could change the flow of a match just as surely as Adam Gilchrist has so often done for Australia more recently. Only Jessop was greater still. Cardus wrote that Jessop was "the most astonishing of all cricketers ever born, a scientific quick scorer, a whirlwind of strokes which revolved around a point of calm ruthlessly punitive judgement".
At the Oval in 1902, England had slumped to 48/5 chasing 263 on a treacherous wicket. Enter "Jessopus". To quote Cardus again:
‘Jessop came forth, and he at once took the game out of the prison of cause and effect; he plunged it into the realms of melodrama, where virtue is always triumphant. Before he came to the wicket on this lurid afternoon, the Australian team had been a ruthless machine — the unplayable ball and the clutching hand in the slips. In a short period this same Australian team had been reduced to a rabble. Jessop scored 50 in 55 minutes, and then another 54 in ten minutes… Kennington Oval that day went crazy. People had been leaving the ground in thousands. Jessop caused delirium; perfect strangers embraced.’
Cardus exaggerates a little: in fact Jessop's 104 came in 77 minutes off 76 deliveries. Even allowing for the more rapid over-rates of the time, this is remarkable. Bear in mind too that you had to knock the ball out the ground to score a six in those days. One of Jessop's 17 fours was caught on the players' balcony at the Oval...
But if this was Jessop's greatest hour it was also entirely typical. In 1901 playing for Gloucestershire against Sussex he strode to the wicket with the score 4/1. By the time he was out for 66, the score was 70/2. No wonder that:
Such batting made him the biggest draw in cricket, and spectators were frenzied with excitement at his hitting. If you heard that Jessop was batting you had to get quickly to the ground. At Hove, for example, in 1903, he knocked up 286 out of 355 in a matter of 170 minutes; what a Whit-Monday feast that was! His average time for reaching a score of 100 was 72 minutes - a time that would win a fastest-hundred prize in most seasons.
Twelve times he reached his hundred within an hour - a feat achieved only about 40 times in the history of the game. His fastest hundred was his 101 in 40 minutes against Yorkshire at Harrogate in 1897 - an innings divided by a lunch interval in the middle of it. In 1907 at Hastings when playing for the Gentlemen of the South against the Players he reached 100 in 42 minutes, and went on to score 191 out of 234 in exactly 90 minutes...
Now we may say with some reason that more flexible modern field-settings might cramp the Croucher's style. We may also hazard that developments in swing bowling might have hindered his style just as much as they might dent the reputations of other doyens of the Golden Age. Few things, after all, are as unforgiving as an outswinger. But still, the notion that greatness could not accommodate itself to changing circumstances and still find a way to thrive is a thought too depressing to contemplate for more than a second or two. In any case, I don't believe it and doubt you do either. The qualities that make for cricketing greatness have not changed so very much; had they done so an exercise of this sort would have precious little value and be even less diverting.
As I say, Cardus was known to gild his stories. But how can you resist this?
A favourite story about Jessop is one told in the first person by Neville Cardus. As a small boy one day at Old Trafford when Lancashire were playing Gloucestershire, Cardus missed the last few minutes before lunch to buy his drink of lemonade for the interval. He was so short that his head barely came above the bar counter, and he had just given his order when there was a tremendous noise and the glasses on the counter, together with other items of crockery, were sent crashing in all directions.
Young Cardus thought the end of the world had come, but the barman had seen it all before and was able to reassure him. "Don't worry, son," he said. "It's only Mr Jessop just beginning his innings."
One test of greatness is whether you would, on learning that so-and-so was 25 not out at Lunch at Lord's abandon your plans for the afternoon and make haste for St Johns Wood to steal time at the cricket. I call you a fool if you put business or trade ahead of the prospect of seeing Gilbert Laird Jessop bat. This is a test he passes with colours flying.
Oh, and it should be remembered that Jessop was also one of the greatest cover points the game has known. And a hostile, more than peppy fast bowler in his youth too.
So there you have it: a team with more than a passing interest and in Jessop, FS Jackson and Archie Jackson three players one would pay good money to see. That trio's presence elevates this side well beyond the average even if, in a final analysis, they might not be quite good enough to prevail against the greatest sides. Still, no match could be considered lost until after Jessop had been sent back to the pavilion for the second time...
Fine work again. Don't think much of Jacobs though I'd struggle to think of a replacement. But I wouldn't have any reservations about Mahela Jayawardene, for entertainment purposes aside from anything else ...
Posted by: Political Umpire | May 20, 2008 at 11:18 AM
How about Ray Jennings for keeper?
Posted by: stuart | May 21, 2008 at 10:50 AM