Shaggy dogs and mystery spinners
Not many remember, now, the extraordinary story of Tom Spedegue, and how he won the Ashes for England, though it was the unlikeliest tale. Spedegue was a schoolteacher from the little village of Bishops Bramley, who had never played so much as an innings of first class cricket when he was called up for the fifth Test in 1928. It was a difficult decision for the selectors. One bolstered himself with whisky-and-soda, and another kept his passport in his pocket so he could make a swift getaway if it all went wrong. He didn’t need it. Spedegue took seven for 31 in the first innings, eight for 61 in the second. England won the match by an innings and some, the series three to two.
Spedegue bowled great looping lobs, some of them rising 50ft high, which landed, with unerring accuracy, flush on the top of the stumps. It wasn’t the trajectory that foxed the Australians, but the surprise they felt at having to face something so unfamiliar. “Here was something of which they had never heard, for which they had never prepared, and which was unlike anything in the history of cricket,” wrote Arthur Conan Doyle, for “these great cricketers, to whom the orthodox method was the only way. Every rule learned, every experience endured, had in a moment become useless. How could you play with a straight bat at a ball that fell from the clouds?”
Conan Doyle was a slow bowler himself. And though he once took the wicket of WG Grace in a match at Crystal Palace (caught-and-bowled trying to hit into the “neighbouring parish”) he surely never spun a ball so well as he did the tale of Spedegue’s Dropper, which was published in The Strand Magazine in October 1928. It was inspired by Bernard Bosanquet, the man who invented the googly, after hours of practice with a ping-pong ball. Spedegue was an archetypal mystery spinner. He had a unique technique, which he taught himself by tossing the ball over a cord strung between two tall oaks, was a tremendous success in his only Test, and then never played again. His weak physique wouldn’t allow it.
Before Spedegue, and Bosanquet, there was Tom McKibbin, who was picked by Australia for the Ashes tour of 1896. His teammate Clem Hill wrote that McKibbin “was always a puzzle to any wicketkeeper when he was bowling at his best on a sticky wicket. He could bowl a leg break with scarcely any alteration of his action at all, and no end of watching.” According to Hill, McKibbin would touch his cap at the start of his run-up, to let his ‘keeper know which way the ball would break. Before Australia’s match against the MCC, their captain, Harry Trott, is supposed to have warned WG Grace: “We’ve got a mystery bowler. Tom McKibbin. You’ll have to watch him Doctor, he mixes them, he mixes them.”
After playing McKibbin’s first three maiden overs as though, as Neville Cardus had it, “Satan himself were poisoning the air”, Grace then drove him for four, four, and three. As he was coming back for the second run, he called out to his batting partner “Hurry up! Run up! We’ll mix them for him, we’ll mix them for him!” Which sounds, like so much of what Cardus wrote, as though it might be true in spirit, if not detail. McKibbin took 13 wickets in three Tests that season. But he was called out for chucking by the editor of Wisden, Sydney Pardon, and his career petered out after a couple more matches. English cricket has always been a little leery of anything too unorthodox. It took a South African to perfect the googly, after Bosanquet passed on the secret to his Middlesex team-mate Reggie Schwarz.
Just as Spedegue was inspired by Bosanquet, John Gleeson, who died last Saturday, at the age of 78, learned his mystery spin from Jack Iverson. Gleeson flicked the ball off his fingers, and could make it break it both ways with no readily discernible change in action. Much like Ajantha Mendis. Gleeson learned to do it when he was a schoolboy, by studying a series of photographs of Iverson in Sporting Life. It was another 10 years before he started bowling it in matches, and six more before he finally made his first class debut. This after he was spotted by Richie Benaud in an upcountry match. “Benaud,” wrote Jack Fingleton, “could not pick Gleeson’s spin through binoculars”.
The British knew nothing much about Iverson, who played only five Tests, all in the 1950-51 Ashes, where he took 21 wickets at 15 apiece. “As to Iverson, he must temporarily be represented by the letter X,” was the Times’ sole observation when he was named in Australia’s team. But Gleeson was hyped before he arrived here for the 1968 Ashes tour. The Times ran a long profile of the “Bowler from the Bush” including close-up photos of his grip. It promised that Gleeson could bowl “four basic types of spin”, and, on top of that, that he apparently “had another, a ‘mystery’ ball, which he never discussed with anybody”. Cardus was sceptical, and dismissed all this as the work of “one or two Australian propagandists”.
By the end of the summer, Cardus had come around. “Gleeson need but twiddle a finger and the faces of several English batsmen are sicklied over by the pale cast of thought.” He took 58 wickets at 20 on the tour, though only 12 in the Tests. Long after he’d retired, Gleeson insisted “the papers started the ‘mystery’ business. I was told that I had six different balls. That was bullshit. You’ve only got three as far as I’m concerned: one goes straight, one spins from leg and the other spins from off.” Like Mendis, Gleeson became less mysterious the longer he went on. As Gideon Haigh wrote, “the limitations of Australia’s attack condemned him to hard labour, often on surfaces inimical to him”. He became a stock bowler. Better, perhaps, to make like Spedegue and disappear from view, for mystery’s sake, if nothing else.
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