Extract from

CHAPTER 7

WHERE IS WICKET KEEPING GOING?

1955-1961

Jim Parks played 46 Tests for England. He averaged 32 with the bat, and he stood back to most of the bowlers. When he did stand up, there was nobody as challenging as Alec Bedser or George Tribe. The slow bowlers of those years were mostly not great spinners of the ball.

He won his place as a wicket-keeper with a century in the Port-of-Spain Test in March 1960, and it was there eight years later that he lost it finally to a young Alan Knott and a new era began. Knott played 87 of England’s next 88 Tests, missing just one Test in New Zealand when he reluctantly stood down to allow his understudy Bob Taylor to win a cap.

Evans had put paid to the notion of the quiet, sphinx-like keeper. Parks had triumphed over the dictum that the best keeper should always be selected. Now Knott would change traditional thinking on standing up to the wicket.

In Knott’s calculation, the stumpings he took off medium-pacers were fewer by far than the extra edges he caught when standing back. “The tradition of standing up to anyone who was a fraction short of genuinely fast was a stupid example of pride,” he said. Ever health-conscious, he added that, by standing back and wearing larger, thicker gloves, he could keep free of injury. “Ideally I like to take away all sensation of the ball entering my hands.”

He was a great wicket-keeper and, like Evans, his admirers started to copy him. With one-day cricket and covered pitches leading to a decline in spin bowling, the keeper came to be seen less and less at the stumps – and, from that development and the arrival of Alan Knott’s larger gloves, it was not long before the England selectors returned to the example of Parks. The benefit of playing the top keeper was not equal to the extra runs that could be scored by an adequate substitute who could bat.

“I’d like to see a proper analysis of that,” Keith says, reverting to the mindset of his engineering training. “I don’t think that people are taking all the factors into account.”

Inevitably the comparison comes round to the relative merits in the England side of Jack Russell and Alec Stewart in the past ten years.

“I’m an immense fan of Alec Stewart. Standing back, he’s a very good catcher of the ball. As a batsman-keeper, rather than a keeper-batsman, he’s head and shoulders above anybody else. But, standing up, he’s too far back, and he’s catching the ball, not taking it. He’s got to reach forward to bring the ball back to the wicket.

“He had the potential to be a great batsman – after all, he scored a century in each innings in the West Indies, didn’t he? – and they sacrificed that so that they could economise on a wicket-keeper. They’ve done that to bring in some all-rounder who doesn’t score runs and sometimes doesn’t even bowl. And Jack wasn’t a bad batsman. I don’t know the figures, but I doubt if there was that much difference between his average and Alec’s when he’s been keeping. Seven or eight runs, maybe.”

The statistics in Spring 2003 confirm Keith’s hunch. Jack Russell’s batting average in Tests is 27.1. Alec Stewart is averaging 35.5 when playing as a wicket-keeper and 46.7 as a specialist batsman.

“Neither should we forget Alec’s fielding. With the possible exception of Graham Thorpe, he was our most outstanding fielder in any position.”

So, if Keith is right, this is the comparison. Add up Russell’s runs, the advantages of his keeping, the extra runs that Stewart would have scored as a specialist batsman, even the quality of Stewart’s fielding, and see if your additional player can contribute more than all that.

“But to do that, you have to be able to measure over a series of matches how many more chances Jack would take – and not just the catches and stumpings; his speed of hands may create an extra fraction of a second in a run-out. Then, if you could work all that out, you would still need to know the effect of each missed chance, how many runs it had cost. And, as far as I’m aware, nobody’s ever done that analysis.”

Keith is back in his element, his brain whirring away as it did when he estimated the speed of the Northants motor-coach between telegraph poles.

“But that isn’t the whole picture. You have to look at the difference between a top-class keeper standing up to the stumps and a good keeper standing back. It’s not just a matter of the chances. It’s the effect on the batsmen, the inhibition of their foot work. When a keeper’s stood up, the batsman has an entirely different feeling at the wicket against a medium-pace bowler who can swing the ball. Any good batsman will tell you that. Sobers said that to me, so did Frankie Worrell. They were free players, they liked the freedom of the crease. Look at Tendulkar.”

He is animated now, finding an eloquence born of passion and of scientific comprehension.

“Is it all right my talking like this? I’m not going on too much, am I?”

“Carry on, Keith. You’re talking a lot of sense.”

“Then there’s the effect on the bowler. Once you’ve restricted the batsman, you’ve enabled the bowler to pitch the ball further up, to a more attacking length, so it will do more in the air. And that will affect the field placings. If the batsman can’t move about so much, you can set a more attacking field. Keep a man in his crease, and you can attack him better. After all, what does a batsman do if he wants to put off the bowler? He goes down the wicket.

“When the keeper is standing up to the wicket, he’s working more closely with the bowler. The understanding between keeper and bowler is so important. That’s why I loved keeping to George Tribe. We were always working to a plan.”

“So what do you think of Simon Hughes, what he says about the wicket-keeper needing to be an all-rounder?”

“Simon is a good talker, and ‘Jargon-busting’ is a good book. But he’s talking one of the skills out of the game. As a player he was a useful medium-pace bowler. In fact, if he’d had a wicket-keeper standing up to him, I’ve no doubt he’d have been a better bowler.”

Slowly the scientific analysis which began our conversation has turned into a cry of passion – for the game he loves, for the game he sees being gradually transformed into a version that is less subtle, less artistic.

“The skills of the game, particularly the slow bowling and the wicket-keeping, have gone to the dogs in this country. If that’s the way it’s got to be, that’s fine. But somewhere along the line, shouldn’t there have been some sort of debate about it? Is everybody happy with it? Could it not be a better game with slow bowling? It’s happened too easily, without a lot of thought. The wicket-keeping is just one aspect of it.

“Look at Test cricket. What would it be like without Warne, Muralitharan, Saqlain, Harbhajan, Kumble? It would be boring.”

The man, whose reputation was for quiet unobtrusiveness, wants to be heard, and he is not the only one. He put a pair of his old gloves into auction, and they were bought by Jack Russell, who wrote him a letter that he treasures.

Where is wicket-keeping going? It does worry me. Heavens forbid. I have visions of a fielder with a baseball mitt. I hope I’m wrong, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

“Look at the effect Jack Russell has had on Gloucestershire. They wouldn’t have won all those one-day competitions if he’d been standing back.”

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