Early in May 1955, Paramount sent a camera crew to the county ground in Northampton to film Frank Tyson. They brought a new “multi-speed camera” to “show how Tyson does it” in slow motion. The previous winter Tyson had won England the Ashes in Australia, 10 wickets in the second Test at Sydney, nine in the third at Melbourne, six in the fourth at Adelaide, 28 altogether at 21 runs each. He had proved himself the fastest bowler in the world, fast enough that he gave Fred Trueman – “The finest bloody fast bowler who ever drew breath” – something of an inferiority complex.
When the two were picked for the Players against the Gentlemen at Scarborough, it was Tyson who was given the choice of ends and Trueman who was told it was his job to bowl into the wind, “a south-westerly gale” that “rattled the windows of the pavilion”.
“Why?” Trueman asked the captain, Godfrey Evans. “He’s faster,” Evans replied. Trueman “was forever being told that when it came to bowling I was very fast, but on his day Frank was faster”.
The Paramount film is 35 seconds long. It’s a cold day, Tyson is wearing a sweater and bowling off a short run, but you still get an idea of that “glad animal action”, as he called it. The ungainly stance, elbows out, back bent, long, loping strides, like a man ploughing into the sea after a ball caught in the backwash, then the pickaxe-swing of those broad shoulders and a little flourish as he flicks and drags his back foot across the crease. It’s a thumping, pumping, twisting, thrusting, thing, all muscular grace. He’s Gene Kelly rather than Fred Astaire. The effort is obvious and impressive.
When Tyson died in 2015, David Frith wrote in the Guardian: “Before Tyson, England produced bowlers of extreme and frightening pace … but there has been none since.” There are at least nine South Africans who faced Devon Malcolm at the Oval in 1994 who might disagree with that. But it is a short list. Bob Willis, perhaps, Malcolm maybe, Simon Jones had his moments.
Mark Wood made his England debut in 2015, the same year Tyson died, Olly Stone was trying to hold down a place in Northamptonshire’s first team, Jofra Archer was still playing for Middleton-on-Sea in the Sussex League, terrifying the hapless batsmen of Horsham and Eastbourne and Cuckfield. Between the three of them, England have more pace to play with than they have since Trueman and Tyson last played together, in 1959. Tyson was already on the wane by then. His career lasted eight years, still long enough for him to sustain two stress fractures and nine ankle sprains, “just through pounding, pounding, pounding up and down”.
Tyson was a journalist, coach and teacher and he wrote better than anyone about the art of very fast bowling too. I was re-reading his autobiography while watching Archer’s comeback match for Sussex last week. Tyson is one of the few Englishmen who has been through anything similar to what Archer is enduring now.
There were glimpses against Kent, a glimmer of what Archer is capable of. Maybe you saw the ball that got Zak Crawley, which spat like hot fat: Crawley was still staring at the pitch, shaking his head in disbelief, while Archer was away celebrating with his teammates.
Then it all began to unravel, from 13 overs on the first day, five on the second, a spell of fielding on the third and a little back-and-forth with his captain, Ben Brown, over whether he would be able to bowl or not. By the end of the fourth day he was off the field.
Thencame a statement confirming he needed treatment on his elbow, would miss the two Tests against New Zealand and would need to see a consultant to talk about what to do next, and, you guess, whether he needs surgery on it or not.
The war of Jenkins’ Ear lasted nine years; the worry of Jofra’s elbow will run at least nine months, through the World T20 and the Ashes. England want and need him for both because at his best, like Tyson, he’s the quickest there is. Biomechanists say the injury is linked to the way his elbow is able to hyperextend beyond 180 degrees, which is also the source of that last little bit of his lethal speed.
If English fast bowlers are rare, English fast bowlers who enjoy long careers vanishingly so. Tyson decided that if he couldn’t bowl fast, he wouldn’t bowl at all. He didn’t want to make the trade-off. “The coming of guile to the fast bowler can be like the advance of creeping paralysis to the body,” he wrote. “Outwardly, thought and cunning methods add to the armoury of the quick bowler and make him the complete, shrewd, mechanically perfect athlete. Inwardly, guile saps the physical foundations to the edifice of fast bowling until it takes away the real desire and very reasons for wanting to bowl quick.”
For Archer, and Wood, there is also the lure of a career in white-ball cricket, something Wood touched on just last year: “I was actually close a couple of times to saying: ‘I’ve had enough.’ Just because I didn’t think I could cope with it with my body.”
Tyson preferred to burn out than fade away. According to Frith: “he knew the physical strain would tell against him”. The worry is that Archer, 26, will face a similar dilemma.
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