‘Times had changed.’
Robin Hobbs
‘At that age it’s difficult to tell people to piss off and leave you alone.’
Warwick Tidy
A RECURRING theme among top leg-spin bowlers is the length and loneliness of the journey they must undergo. Bernard Bosanquet and Sydney Barnes developed their own styles over several years. Clarrie Grimmett had to emigrate from New Zealand to Australia and play for three different state sides before his talents gained international recognition. Tommy Greenhough went from being severely injured in a factory accident to the Test team over the course of a decade. Ian Peebles left Scotland and a safe career in banking to pursue his ambitions.
None faced a more dangerous journey than the 15-year-old Robin Hobbs. The aspiring leg-spinner used to leave his home in Dagenham, on the borders of Essex and north-east London, and cycle under the Thames through the traffic-filled Blackwall Tunnel to a leisure centre in Lewisham, where Kent were holding nets for youngsters.
It was 1957 and Doug Wright was about to retire, so the county asked former wicketkeeper Les Ames – once Tich Freeman’s accomplice – to search for a successor.
A few months before nets started, Hobbs, who had recently left Raine’s Foundation School in Stepney, east London, and was working for the Employers’ Liability insurance company in London, had been invited down to Canterbury to take part in trials.
‘A hundred people turned up that day and I was picked as one of four to attend nets with Kent over the river at Lewisham Swimming Baths in the winter,’ he says. ‘Essex had shown no interest at that stage. But later, because I was an Essex boy, word got around and Essex told Kent they didn’t want them approaching me and I signed with Essex. It was ridiculous because, at that stage, Essex were playing on green wickets and they had about 11 spinners on the staff anyway. It was hard work getting even to the second team.’
Hobbs ached for success. In a scene reminiscent of a young Don Bradman using a stick to hit a golf ball thrown against a water tank at home in Bowral, he spent hours as a boy repeatedly bowling a ball against the wall of an outbuilding behind his father’s grocery shop.
‘That’s how I became a bowler,’ he says. ‘After that I used to take a dozen balls to Dagenham’s Central Park and spend hours just bowling. It seemed to work. I reckon that, up until three or four years ago, if you’d put a blindfold on me, I could still pitch six balls within the size of a newspaper because I’d done it so often.’
Hobbs used to grab oranges and apples and spin them around in his right hand, exercising his wrist and fingers. He impressed one of his teachers, Basil Dowling, who ran the school first XI. ‘It was just one of those things I could do. Even when I was seven or eight I bowled leg breaks. I could never bowl an off break. The action came naturally. I turned it a long way and pitched it in the right place and people didn’t play it very well. I was fortunate.’
He kept practising. ‘There’s no shortcut,’ Hobbs says. ‘You’ve got to bowl, bowl, bowl, bowl, day in and out. And you’ve got to want to do it, whether it be a cold day or a fine day. But the kids haven’t got the chance today because there are so many other things going on. They have computer games and TV to distract them.’
This sense of space to develop without too much pressure persisted at Essex, then one of the poorer-performing counties. Often, says Hobbs, in the days before a two-division County Championship, there was little to play for by mid-season. The lack of genuine competitiveness allowed more conversations between teams after play finished, usually in the bar. Hobbs spent time talking to Norman Gifford, a slow left-armer with Warwickshire, Worcestershire and England, the two of them sharing tips.
Hobbs made his county debut in 1961, aged 19. He played in 12 matches, taking 23 wickets at 28.65, statistics he can still reel off at will. Former England all-rounder Trevor Bailey was the captain. ‘I think he took a shine to me,’ says Hobbs. ‘I was kind of lucky as he shielded me. Don’t ask me why. I was in competition with a chap called Bill Greensmith at that time.’
Greensmith was a talented leg-spinner almost 12 years Hobbs’s senior who took 77 wickets in 1962, a season in which Hobbs did not play, but the next year he lost form and Hobbs was back in. He took 32 wickets.
Hobbs, a genial character, was invited to join the International Cavaliers tour to Jamaica the following winter. The team, made up of old stagers like Denis Compton, Jim Laker and Godfrey Evans, had a roistering time abroad. According to Hobbs the wickets, unlike those in England, ‘bounced like a table top’. He experimented with flight and dip and angles of spin, much like Bernard Bosanquet had done on an actual table top playing twisti-twosti in the late 19th century. Hobbs took 16 wickets in three first-class matches.
On the International Cavaliers tour another leg-spin bowler, Alan Castell of Hampshire, lost form and, according to Hobbs, ‘did the right thing and took up seam bowling’. Hobbs enjoyed the extra bounce pitches offered. There is also a sense that Hobbs, under the loveably reprobate guidance of Compton, Evans et al entered manhood during that winter. ‘That actually made me,’ says Hobbs. ‘I was a different person.’
The 1964 season saw a county breakthrough, Hobbs taking 81 wickets at 28.91. That winter he was picked to go to South Africa with England under MJK Smith. There was some excitement in the press. ‘I had one or two people like Keith Miller or the recently retired Richie Benaud, who’d written articles about me being the next great leg-spinner,’ he says. ‘It was rubbish, of course, but they really trumpeted my cause.’ Hobbs did not play in the Tests.
He took 75 wickets in 1965 and 88 in 1966, his average also improving. In 1967 he made his Test debut at Headingley. England were playing India, no slouches against spin. Captain Brian Close assured him he would play the whole series.
The Headingley Test is most remembered as the one after which Geoffrey Boycott was dropped for batting too slowly in making 246 not out. Hobbs had a decent match, getting 3-45 in the first innings and 1-100 in the second. He indeed saw out the series, staying in the side for the first Test against Pakistan that summer. He was unlucky at Lord’s against Pakistan, having Hanif Mohammad dropped several times on his way to 187 not out. Hobbs took 1-46, but reckons he could have had five wickets with a little bit of fortune, which ‘could’ve changed my life’.
Outside cricket, the ‘summer of love’ was going on. When Hobbs made his debut in June, ‘Silence is Golden’ by the Tremeloes was at number one. This was succeeded by the more hippyish ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ by Procul Harem, The Beatles’ ‘All You Need is Love’ and ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear some Flowers in your Hair)’ by Scott MacKenzie. All around was flower power and peace. The frilly-collared male aesthetic – mocked in recent years by the Austin Powers films – had a decidedly Edwardian tinge. Surely leg spin, with its atavistic, non-physical, even mind-bending associations would have been ripe for a comeback. Leg spin in the sky with diamonds? Unfortunately cricket, unlike youth culture, was more imbued with the spirit of those who had served in the war or done National Service, only abolished in 1960.
‘There were certain people like John Woodcock, of The Times, who were very pro-leg spin in their reporting,’ says Hobbs. When the selectors announced Hobbs was in his first Test squad, Woodcock wrote that he would be the first specialist England leg-spinner since Tommy Greenhough in 1960, all-rounder Bob Barber and Ken Barrington, primarily a batsman, having put in the overs. ‘Leg-spin bowling, unlike bowling at medium pace, calls for more craft and touch than industry,’ according to Woodcock’s report. ‘It is associated with sunshine and freedom of expression and many of the best things in cricket. For having been chosen, Hobbs may pass a word of thanks to Brian Taylor, his new county captain, who has given him every opportunity, even in the persistent floods rather than the darling buds of May.’
Taylor had indeed encouraged Hobbs to bowl with flight and turn. But tossing the ball up against the Indians seemed a little cavalier to the thoughtful newcomer. ‘Hobbs… was not out of his element,’ wrote Woodcock in The Cricketer, ‘although he will find few better players of leg spin than these Indians, who feed on it at home. It is only a pity that he doesn’t trust himself to give the ball a little more air a little more often.’
After that summer Hobbs played only three more Tests, against West Indies and Pakistan, finishing in 1971. Bishan Bedi, a beautifully poised Indian left-arm spinner but not much of a batsman, accounted for five of his 12 wickets at 40.08. They are decent figures in the context of so many matches against subcontinental sides.
‘Times had changed by then,’ Hobbs says. ‘Derek Underwood had arrived. Norman Gifford was on the scene and [off-spinner] Pat Pocock to some extent.’
Hobbs, who lives in the Essex countryside, is unexpectedly lacking in self-assurance for someone who reached the highest level. ‘I don’t know whether I was quite good enough to play Test cricket,’ he wonders. ‘I have my doubts in some respects, but I’m not alone. There’s a few who played Test cricket.’
Older observers at around the time of Hobbs’s Test career were divided on what the future held for leg spin. Denis Compton saw ‘brighter times ahead’ with the likes of the Essex player on the scene. He was ‘able to clown in the field without detracting from his ability. Such personalities should be encouraged. If more players were allowed to express themselves naturally, our legislators would find half their problems on the way to being solved. Cricket is too splendid a game to be muted by dull attitudes.’
Father Marriott was less optimistic. Shortly before his death in 1966 he took umbrage at a television commentator who remarked that, during Yorkshire’s most successful era, the 1930s, championships had been won without a leg-spinner. Marriott bemoaned a ‘widespread prejudice’ in the media that this style of bowling had to be inaccurate. It was ‘taken for granted that a leg-spinner is a heavy gamble because he cannot control the ball with real accuracy’. Marriott for one had belied this prejudice, as did Hobbs.
There is a suggestion that Trevor Bailey, a superb defensive batsman who had saved England on many occasions, used Hobbs too much in a containing role in his early days at Essex. Mike Brearley, after his time as Middlesex and England captain, wrote,
Hobbs always claimed that his captain wanted him to bowl like a slow left-armer. The result was that Hobbs lost his ability to spin the ball sharply and became exactly what his captain wanted; he even drifted the ball in, like the left-armer. But this may, in fact, have been his best chance of building a career, and surviving in a form of county cricket which already included one-day matches. Possibly, too, Essex were never in his formative years powerful enough as a side to be able to afford a potential match-winner who was also quixotic and experimental.
Hobbs was certainly tight. His economy rate for England was 2.23. He regards Brearley’s analysis as ‘spot-on’. During his early days, Essex had a seam-heavy attack which decided Bailey’s tactics. Bailey had been a pupil of Father Marriott at Dulwich College. Perhaps Marriott’s perception of leg spin at its best being quick and relatively flightless had influenced him.
Bailey wrote that he had been ‘weaned’ on leg spin and had tried it himself as a boy, ‘much to the joy’ of Marriott. ‘My action was graceful, almost poetic,’ he recalled, ‘but there was a minor weakness, my inability to turn the ball because my fingers were too small, but I would dearly have loved to have been able to bowl them well.’ Bailey subscribed to Marriott’s ideas, agreeing that the googly was ‘less important than the top spinner’, with its lower risk and more subtle deception.
Hobbs’s first-class career was a very good one. He became the last English leg-spinner to take more than 1,000 wickets, ending up with 1,099 at 27.09.
‘I didn’t spin the ball very much in first-class cricket,’ he says. ‘I was fairly accurate. As the years went on there were four main leg-spinners in the county game: Intikhab Alam for Surrey, Mushtaq Mohammad, Harry Latchman and myself. So there were four people there who probably bowled upwards of 500 or 600 overs a year. But nowadays the game’s changed. Unless you are very, very good – I mean exceptionally good – as a spin bowler, you’ve got to have something else, to be a batsman or a bloody fine fielder.’
Harry Latchman, who turned out for Middlesex and Nottinghamshire from 1965 to 1976, was a stocky, flighty, Jamaican-born bowler, who took almost 500 first-class wickets. He was a popular player who later coached at Merchant Taylors’ School. The writer Rob Steen watched him as a boy. ‘For those entranced by tales of Sonny Ramadhin but too young to have seen his artistry in the flesh, here was a suitably roly-polyish substitute,’ he remembered. ‘To a nine-year-old, leg spin seemed the most exotic form of athletic alchemy, and in the Summer of Love it was almost as rare as a head unadorned by flowers.’
As the 1960s moved into the 1970s, glam rock replacing flower power at the top of the charts, Edward Heath’s Conservatives taking over 10 Downing Street from Harold Wilson’s Labour, another young man was picked out as a future star.
The name Warwick Tidy is splendidly old-fashioned. It brings to mind Warwick Armstrong, the huge leg-spinning captain of the 1921 Australian touring team. It also evokes the name of the side Birmingham-born Tidy played for: Warwickshire. Neither was the reason for his mother’s choice of name. She was a fan of the novelist Warwick Deeping, whose best-selling works in the 1920s and 1930s attempted to evoke the simpler delights of the Edwardian era. Given Tidy’s career choice, this tribute to a creator of nostalgia was entirely apposite.
He made his debut for Warwickshire in 1970, aged just 17, when the Edgbaston pitch was at its flattest and the team needed something, anything, different to help take wickets on it. Warwickshire were a team of stars, including England batsmen M.J.K. Smith and Dennis Amiss and the West Indian pair of off-spinner Lance Gibbs and batsman Rohan Kanhai.
‘Funnily enough I really didn’t find it intimidating at all,’ says Tidy. ‘It may sound bloody stupid, but I just turned up, ran in and bowled. There were some people there who were very good to me, who took me under their wing. Nobody took the piss or made my life difficult, even though I was playing with some of the greatest players of the time.
‘M.J.K. Smith was the best captain I’ve ever played under. He was so relaxed he calmed you down. He would come up to you two overs before a spell and say, “All right, Warwick, fancy a roll?” It was funny and it set me at ease. M.J.K. was a subtle captain.’ The 1970 season was a good one for Tidy. He took 48 wickets for the first team at 31.12.
Growing up on a farm near The Belfry golf course, he and his brother spent most of their free time playing sport. Wrist spin came early and easily. ‘I think I was about eight or nine,’ says Tidy. ‘I just started to bowl out of the back of my hand. But when I started all I bowled was googlies. I passed my 11-plus and went to grammar school. The sports teacher asked if I could bowl a leg break too and I answered that of course I did. He told me that bowling googlies all the time was no use and that I should focus on leg breaks, with the googly as a variety ball. That was good advice.’
Tidy’s talent was noticeable and he played for two years for Warwickshire’s under-15s. He had little coaching, relying on his ebullience and natural ability. Tidy left school after his O Levels and signed forms with Warwickshire. Following his excellent first year, the situation at Edgbaston became more difficult, as serious doubts entered his mind for the first time.
He started receiving advice, most of it not as good as that passed on by his sports teacher at school. ‘It was well meant. Stuff like “speed up” or “slow down”. When you are 17 or 18 you are very impressionable. You only think many years later, “Why did I listen to that?”
‘At that age it’s difficult to tell people to piss off and leave you alone. I never tell people what to do in that way when I’m coaching. You’ve got to work with what you’ve got and nurture it gently and softly. If it’s not bust, why fix it?’
In 1971 Tidy took 23 wickets at 40.69. His success in 1970 had been based on pushing the ball through at a skiddy pace, using revolutions on the ball to achieve dip through the air, rather than tossing it up. Like Walter Robins in the 1930s, when told to slow down, he became confused about his best method. Warwickshire won the County Championship in 1972, but Tidy played in just one match. His only appearances in 1973 and 1974 were against Oxford and Cambridge universities. At the end of 1974 he was sacked, aged 22.
Tidy did not try to join another county, earning more in his other jobs than he had on the Warwickshire staff. There was talk of a move to Hampshire after he played a couple of matches on a social tour to Alderney, home of the cricket writer John Arlott, who came from Basingstoke and recommended a look at him. It never happened.
‘I was speaking to Richie Benaud in the nets one day,’ says Tidy. ‘He said the best wrist-spinners didn’t mature until later.’ Warwickshire were not so patient.
Tidy worked as a rep for the medical technology firm Smith & Nephew then started at a building society, eventually becoming manager. He moved to Devon, working for several years as a financial adviser, and now runs his own gardening business, where his friendly, outgoing nature is valued.
After his sacking by Warwickshire, Tidy told a local newspaper he would do ‘exactly the same thing again and bowl in the same way, but I’d block off my ears to some of the advice I was given’.
‘The advice was meant in good faith,’ he says with more than 40 years of hindsight. ‘It wasn’t meant to screw me up, but you have to be very careful with leg-spinners. Even now it really hacks me off that there’s a lot of negative talk about wrist-spinners. People say they are very inaccurate. I say, “Think of Shane Warne.” A wrist-spinner is going to take wickets. It just gets to me at times when people say it’s a bit of a luxury.’
By the time Tidy played, first-class pitches were being covered outside the hours of play. This precluded the sticky wickets which had once benefited off-spinners. Leg spin offered a way to coax some life out of even the deadest pitches, but most counties hardly considered the idea. The gradually acquired habit of containment at the expense of adventure had become ingrained.
‘Before the end of uncovered wet wickets we had a growth of what I used to describe as “phantom seamers” – medium-paced bowling, short of a wicket-taking length, whose aim was to cut down scoring rates,’ says Bob Barber. ‘They hoped that the seam of the ball on hitting the wicket would cause the ball to deviate in some way unknown to the batsman or themselves and so put doubt in a batsman’s mind. Batsmen wanted to be on the retained list in August so they took few risks.
‘I’m not convinced that covered wickets brought opportunities for wrist spin, although they might have if leadership on and off the field had been positive and if sport had, as part of the entertainment business, concerned itself more with entertaining and not just winning.’
Australian Kerry O’Keeffe played for Somerset in 1971 and 1972, taking 96 wickets. Hobbs retired in 1975, a year after Tidy, but Glamorgan tempted him back in to the game in 1979, before he finally hung up his boots in 1981.
‘Hobbs would have been a typical county spinner if he had been born 60 years earlier,’ wrote Christopher Martin-Jenkins. ‘As it happened he was for much of his career unique.’
Hobbs continued to turn out for club sides and Old England for many years. ‘I started bowling leg spin at seven and played up until 68 years old,’ he says. ‘I look back on my career and I’m very content.’ Will any future English leg-spinner get the chance to emulate his achievements?