‘I’d played a three-day game without anyone knowing my name.’
Andy Clarke
‘MOST commentators go all gooey and sentimental when a leg spinner comes on to bowl,’ wrote Rob Eastaway in What is a Googly?, an explainer of cricket’s terminology, ‘because for many years seeing a leg-spinner was as rare as spotting a black rhino.’
It is not a bad parallel. The global wild black rhino population saw a 96% decline between 1970 and 1993, from 65,000 to 2,300. Thanks to a well-organised conservation effort this has since risen to about 5,000.
Leg-spinners, like rhinos, had a tough time of it in the 1980s. Slow bowling in England itself became even more associated with containment. Televised Sunday League matches showed spinners, usually off-spinners, spearing the ball into middle-and-leg stumps. Flight disappeared. Even top-quality spinners like Middlesex and England’s John Emburey lost the ability to take first-class wickets for periods, such was their emphasis on keeping the run-rate down on a Sunday or whenever a knockout one-day competition was going on.
Yet this format of cricket cannot be blamed for the demise of leg spin in England, because Test captains were shunning it as early as the 1950s. One-day cricket, taking off in the 1960s, merely emphasised and reinforced a negative culture in bowling which had been developing for years. One would need a rhino’s hide to dare to bowl tossed-up leg spin in such a climate.
The rise of West Indies to become the undisputed best team in the world, usually relying on a four-man pace attack, made slow bowling in general look quaint. Leg spin in particular.
David Lemmon, biographer of Tich Freeman, calculated that in 1980 in English county cricket only ten men had bowled any leg breaks. Most of these were batsmen who occasionally had a twirl. Two of the others were Robin Hobbs and Pakistani Intikhab Alam. A year later even they were gone.
After Hobbs there were no frontline English leg-spinners left. No one to pass on the skills honed by Allan Steel, Bernard Bosanquet, Sydney Barnes, Tich Freeman and all the others.
More pitches favoured seam bowling, such as those Richard Hadlee and Clive Rice operated on to such effect for the successful Nottinghamshire side of the early 1980s. Further advances in fertilisers meant ever more verdant outfields and that the ball kept its shine for even longer than had been the case in the 1950s and 1960s.
Derbyshire’s Kim Barnett, best known as an England batsman, started his career as a promising leg-spinner. But he never got going, his best return being seven wickets in the 1980 season. He switched to occasional seam bowling.
The only glimpses most English fans got of leg spin were when foreign teams brought their own. Australia gave 38-year-old Bob Holland a debut in 1984. He played four matches in the 1985 Ashes series won by David Gower’s England, taking just six wickets at almost 80, but keeping the runs down. Queenslander Trevor Hohns was 34 when he made his bow in 1988. He did well in England in 1989, taking 11 wickets at 27.27 as Australia recaptured the Ashes.
Bill O’Reilly, who had a few years left in him, was still reeling in 1985 about the change in 1946 which had allowed a new ball every 55 overs. Even though it had been hugely amended, he reasoned that the lusher outfields meant even a less generous allowance for fast bowlers militated against leg spin. ‘Why even now, when the cricket world is crying out for spin bowling, is the new ball allowed after 85 six-ball overs?’ he asked.
Throughout this decade of the Big Bang in the City of London and big hair on TV shows such as Dynasty and Dallas there was one man who really set hearts aflutter. His name was Abdul Qadir. I have to admit a certain bias here. Qadir is my favourite cricketer. Making his Test debut as a 22-year-old in 1977 he swerved, spun and schemed his way to prominence as part of the brilliant Pakistan team marshalled by Imran Khan. Qadir bounded up to the wicket, his arms became a flurry and there, suddenly, appeared the most beautiful variety of balls, spinning this way and that. It was all so aesthetically pleasing.
His leg break turned sharply. His top spinner bit and bounced. His googlies (for he was said to have at least two varieties) surprised batsmen, especially those brought up in England. His flipper skidded.
If the early 20th century cliché had been to call leg-spin/ googly bowlers ‘merchants’, who liked to deceive, Qadir was the living proof that clichés only became clichés because they contain some truth. He admitted his whole approach was based on mis-selling. His energetic run-up and action were designed to bombard the senses before the ball had been released. He even, at the suggestion of Imran, grew a goatee beard prior to the 1982 tour of England to enhance his mystical image.
India’s batsmen, used to such a bowling style, were not fooled by Qadir. England’s were. Unlike other Pakistani greats of his era, such as Imran, Javed Miandad and Wasim Akram, Qadir never played in county cricket. He maintained a distance from the English game.
He ended up with 82 wickets against England at just under 25 apiece. That is only slightly worse than Shane Warne’s average. His overall average in Tests was more than 32. Qadir’s best year against England was 1987, when he took 7-96 in the first innings of the final Test at the Oval. ‘The diet of fast bowling (much of it short) and seam on which batsmen the world over now exist,’ wrote John Woodcock in The Times, ‘is no preparation for making light of Qadir’s wrist spin.’ He took 13-101 in the first match of the return series in Lahore a few months later. This included 9-56 in the first innings.
Shane Warne wrote that cricket owed ‘a great debt’ to Qadir for keeping leg spin going. ‘I like to think I have played a part in making it fashionable again, but I hope people don’t forget the part played by Qadir in the history of cricket.’
Qadir was the culmination, in English cricket’s imagination, of the idea that leg spin was exotic and foreign. He was part of a succession of effective Indian and Pakistani leg-spinners. Bhagwat Chandrasekhar of India, one arm withered by childhood polio, bowled an assortment of brisk leg breaks and top spinners. He took 16 wickets in three Tests against England in 1967, the series in which Robin Hobbs made his debut. He helped India win their first Test in England in 1971.
Chandrasekhar followed Vinoo Mankad in the 1940s and 1950s and Subhashchandra Pandharinath Gupte, known as ‘Fergie’, who worked his wiles in the early 1950s. Intikhab Alam and Mushtaq Mohammad bowled leg breaks for Pakistan to good effect in the 1960s and 1970s. Both appeared in county cricket, playing for Surrey and Northamptonshire respectively.
In January 1988 a little moustachioed, bespectacled leg-spinner, Narendra Hirwani, took the sensational figures of 16-136 in his Test debut at Madras, on a pitch of dubious quality. This beat the record of 16-137 taken by Australian swing bowler Bob Massie in his first Test at Lord’s in 1972. Hirwani’s feat came just a few weeks after Qadir’s great successes against England. Leg spin was not a lost cause. If only someone in England would take it up.
Finally, after years of fatalism, there came a response. English cricket’s answer to Qadir, Hirwani, Chandrasekhar and the rest was not a figure wrapped in hackneyed ideas of eastern exoticism. He was an insurance underwriter from Brighton.
Andy Clarke had been knocking around the Sussex league scene for several years by the time the county seriously started taking notice of him during the mid-to-late-1980s. In fact it shaped his whole outlook and style.
Clarke, born in 1961, began as a fast bowler but turned to leg spin when a coach noticed him trying it while warming up for an under-14s festival and suggested he took it up. A teacher had told Clarrie Grimmett the same thing at the start of his long apprenticeship in New Zealand about 70 years earlier. ‘I took a wicket with my first ball,’ says Clarke. ‘We won the trophy and I never bowled anything other than leg spin after that.’
Clarke played for Brighton Schools and Sussex under-15s. No more representative honours came for another six years. In 1978 he entered the Spin for England competition, one of the occasional initiatives when the first-class game looks around for talent in form of an open contest. Clarke, the only leg-spinner on view that day at Old Trafford, made it to the last six, but was disheartened to be the one boy not approached by a county afterwards. Some of the comments about his style irked him. ‘Too expensive’ said one observer. ‘Need a googly’ said another. ‘Need to be a top-order batsman’ added a third.
Clarke played once for the Sussex second XI, aged 19, in 1981, but batted number 11 and did not bowl. ‘When the travel expenses were handed out after the game,’ he says, ‘I can remember my envelope had a question mark instead of my name. So I’d played a three-day game without anyone knowing my name.’
Clarke started doing well for Preston Nomads in the Sussex League. Survival for a leg-spinner in the early 1980s involved adapting. ‘I had to teach myself to bowl in a way that would allow me to bowl a lot of overs in a cricket league overrun with medium pacers,’ he says. ‘It was obvious from very early on that the “one or two bad balls an over” were going to limit my contribution to a league full of good-quality club players and ex-pros. So I started practising bowling more variations but with less genuine side spin on the ball, therefore becoming more accurate and more of a viable option to the club captain. It was not long before I went from bowling four or five overs in situations where the game was already won or lost, to bowling the sixth over on a Saturday and bowling all the way through.’
Clarke says he requested a proper trial with Sussex, but received no reply. MCC said he was too old to join the Lord’s ground staff. So Clarke continued in league cricket. ‘I was one of the leading wicket-takers and it was demoralising to see so many spinners from outside the county being given trials. Even if I was not good enough, I wanted to be given the opportunity to see for myself and would not give up hope until I was given that chance.’
In 1987 Jim Parks, the former England and Sussex wicketkeeper-batsman, by then the club’s temporary second XI coach, recommended another look at Clarke. He played a few matches and took wickets. Clarke says this ‘embarrassed’ Sussex into offering him a contract.
At the same time, Qadir was reaching his peak on the international scene. ‘Abdul Qadir certainly influenced my decision to change to bowling leg breaks in the early stages of my cricketing life,’ says Clarke. ‘I don’t think he influenced Sussex at all. I think it was just the number of wickets I was taking consistently in the Sussex League.’
In 1988 Clarke made his County Championship debut. Instantly observers started calling him a ‘roller’, a criticism of the lack of turn he had actually cultivated to ensure he could hold his place in league cricket. ‘What I had learned to do was bowl in a way that is now recognised as a form of bowling that most countries, counties, or IPL or Big Bash teams have in their squads to open or bowl at the “death”,’ says Clarke. ‘I was constantly told I needed to spin the ball more and needed a genuine googly to be successful, that I wouldn’t get good players out unless I had the “normal” leg-spinner’s variations. The fact that there are so many successful spin bowlers these days that use the crease and bowl top spinners or sliders as a variation proves beyond doubt that spinners play a bigger role these days without the need for a “miracle ball” Warne or Murali could bowl.’
Clarke had a promising first season for Sussex, taking 44 first-class wickets at 37.50. Unsurprisingly, given he had developed his style for league cricket, he took 17 one-day wickets at 15.70. Yet his time at Sussex was not to be a happy one. ‘I think being 26 years old and straight out of club cricket meant I never really had the grounding and the discipline that I would have had if I’d been a 17-year-old and learning the ropes in the “normal” way,’ he says. ‘So here I was going straight in to the first team, without completing the apprenticeship and hard yards the senior players had gone through.’ Some colleagues resented what they ironically thought had been an easy journey, he claims.
The team was struggling. ‘I didn’t have anyone to advise or help me because I didn’t fit in with the cliques of three or four players in the dressing room,’ Clarke adds. ‘There were several occasions where I’d sit in the opposition dressing room at the end of a day’s play just to avoid the situations – bullying some would call it – in an unhappy Sussex dressing room.’
Clarke says he was humiliated on several occasions. Once he was informed he was not in the starting XI only after he had walked through the Long Room on to the turf at Lord’s. He was told to lose weight and was ignored in the dressing room after dropping a catch, the kind of treatment Kevin Pietersen has complained of by England bowlers in his recent autobiography.
Clarke’s second first-class season, 1989, was a strange one. The bowling opportunities dried up, but his nine wickets cost only 24.66 each. He was feeling seriously undervalued, having given up his job in insurance to play. He was paid £7 a day, compared with the £40 his normal work provided.
‘I have a wife and a mortgage but I played last season for peanuts because I was so thrilled at getting the chance to do something I had always dreamed of doing,’ Clarke said in an interview in The Cricketer. ‘I thought I had done enough to be treated better by Sussex. By offering me such a low wage – the bare TCCB [Test and County Cricket Board] minimum – they are looking on me as they would a 19-year-old.’ Sussex said the salary structure, based on seniority and experience, was strictly controlled and they could not make allowances for individual players.
The future England bowler Ian Salisbury, a more classical leg-spinner with his wristy delivery and googly as variation, was by now on the Sussex books. He and Clarke spent a day being coached by Richie Benaud. ‘He said about three words to me all day and that was about the dinner,’ says Clarke. ‘Because Ian Salisbury was an orthodox leggie he spent more time with him than me. I’m not saying he wasn’t right in thinking Salisbury was better. I was as different to him as an off-spinner would be, and it was just a mistake to compare us.’
Clarke likens his style to that of India’s Anil Kumble, who once admitted he did not turn the ball away from the righthander but managed to take 619 Test wickets with his quick-through-the-air variations. ‘Because I didn’t spin the ball sideways as much as others I needed to be more accurate and I used to bowl top spinners a lot, particularly in one-day cricket – a slow top spinner which sometimes bounced a bit. Another variation was a slider, which was my most effective delivery and if the direct referral system they use now for LBWs on TV had been available, I’d have been more successful. I think that it was a mistake trying to change me into a conventional leggie.’
Sussex, who had picked Clarke for his success in league cricket, found his unusualness, not just as a leg-spinner but as a non-conventional leg-spinner, too much. He played the second half of the 1989 season and all of 1990 in the second XI. In his final second XI match he took 7-39. But at the end of the 1990 season Sussex decided instead to go with Salisbury. ‘I remember being sacked by Norman Gifford, who was the coach at Sussex at the time,’ he recalls. ‘He said, “Clarky, you couldn’t f***ing turn it on a corrugated roof,” and “Good batters won’t get out to you.” At that point I turned and walked out of his office.’
Clarke coached in South Africa and, after recovering from a serious car accident in 1991, played for Buckinghamshire while working as a teacher. He played some second XI matches for Derbyshire in a vain attempt to return to the first-class scene. After that he turned out for Norfolk and Buckinghamshire again, playing on until 2009, when he was 47. He took almost 3,500 wickets in total for all sides.
His Sussex career was short and bittersweet. ‘My best memory was bowling a maiden to Viv Richards in a one-day game,’ says Clarke, who now lives in Scotland. ‘He was the best on the planet and a hero of mine.’ Most English leg-spinners of the 1980s would not have asked for more than that.