– 3 – THE BENAUD ERA

‘He had an uncanny way of coming up with answers that gave a new dimension to lateral thinking. Benaud may just have been the finest captain the game has seen.’

— Ian Wooldridge

ALAN DAVIDSON

Alan Davidson and Richie Benaud each made it to first‑class cricket in the late 1940s. Their careers ran parallel until 1963, when Davo retired a year ahead of Richie. Davidson played 44 Tests, scoring 1328 runs and taking 186 wickets, and he was a match-winner as a hard-hitting batsman and leftarm fast bowler. Alan and Richie first met in a school game when Richie was 14. Their friendship lasted 70 years.

IT WAS ABOUT TWO years ago that Richie Benaud finally apologised for running me out in the second last over of the Tied Test. It had taken him more than 50 years and we chuckled about his belated remorse. It had probably worried him, though, because I was crestfallen that day.

I sat in the dressing-room as three wickets fell in that final over. The West Indies thought they had won. We thought they had won too, and I was kicking myself that a long partnership in which Richie and I very nearly won the day had been brought to an end in such a way.

Sir Donald Bradman saw me slumped in the corner, somewhat desolate. ‘Don’t be disappointed, Alan,’ he said. ‘Today you made history. This is the best thing that has ever happened to cricket.’ Initially, I didn’t know what he was on about. It took about 10 minutes for the fact to sink in that the match had been tied.

The Tied Test has been talked about ever since, but Richie was a bit like me … disappointed that we had squandered a winning chance. Yet the game defined his captaincy, really, as did a remarkable series, because he was determined at every turn to ‘have a go’, to be positive in all he did. He preferred honourable defeat in search of a winning chance to the interminable draws that had marked Test cricket through the 1950s.

That was an extraordinary match and an extraordinary series, made so by two captains of like mind who put the game of cricket before everything else. Frank Worrell captained the West Indies superbly and was with Richie all the way in trying to entertain.

We were in all sorts of trouble on that final afternoon, 6–92 chasing 233 when Richie joined me just before tea. As we went to tea, still 130-odd behind and only four wickets standing, Rich turned to me and said: ‘I think we should try to get them.’ I immediately agreed. Bradman buttonholed Richie at the gate; The Don agreed too.

So we went for it. For a while it was as if we were playing vigoro … tip and run. We took outrageous singles. By midway through the second-last over we had put on 134 and needed seven runs to win.

We agreed I should be at the batting end to face Wes Hall in the final over, but then Richie hit the ball to Joe Solomon close to the wicket and charged off for a single. Usain Bolt could not have made it and I didn’t even get close.

History has it that Rich, Wally Grout and Ian Meckiff were out in that final over to leave the match tied. Pandemonium reigned. But Richie was never going to die wondering. He knew the risk of losing and he knew we could have shut up shop to just save the game. But he went for the kill, as he always did, and we all loved him for it. After that game, we pulled tables together in the dining room and all sat around, Australians and West Indians beside each other in alternate places. We swapped yarns and laughed and enjoyed. Never had Test cricket had such camaraderie.

THERE WERE TWO GREAT influences in Richie’s cricketing life. One was his father Lou, a more than useful club legspinner whom I played against when I first played grade cricket in Sydney. Richie was always immaculately dressed on the cricket field. He held himself to all the standards of bearing and behaviour for which Lou was renowned. In those early days, he was like a carbon copy of Lou.

The other great influence was Keith Miller, the dashing all-rounder of the Invincibles — probably the best all-rounder Australia has ever had. Richie copied everything Miller did. The attitudes, the mannerisms, ultimately his captaincy and in most respects his cricket. Miller was an adventurer and so was Richie. It made Richie the captain he was … far and away the most astute I ever ran into.

I remember as clearly as if it were yesterday the first time I encountered him. He was 14, playing for a Sydney Combined High Schools team, and I was 15, playing for the Combined Northern High School team that encompassed Gosford, where I grew up, and all points north. It was the season after the war ended, life was pretty hard, and a lot of the kids were fairly shabbily dressed, a mixed bag of coloured shirts and shorts. Not Richie.

He faced up to my bowling already exuding the charisma of later days, blond and tall, and immaculate in creams that set him apart. Lou would have had it no other way. I bowled spin then and I remember bowling him a Chinaman … the best I ever bowled; maybe the only good one I ever bowled … and it looped and spun and caught Richie unawares. He jammed down on it and looked at me with that wide-eyed surprise that was singularly him.

We could never have known it then, but within four summers we had started our first-class careers together, and were together in NSW and Australian teams until we retired a few months apart some 14 summers later. In those early days we were the kids in the NSW team, and later the Australian team, and plenty of the Invincibles were still about. We soaked up everything they had to tell us — Miller, Morris, Lindwall and the rest — and we learned wonderful lessons.

Neil Harvey had been one of those Invincibles, but he was very young among them, more our age, and the three of us sort of teamed up when we made the Ashes tour of 1953. They called us the three musketeers … Benaud, Harvey and Davidson … because we did everything together. We would go to the theatre often, and there was a sandwich shop in Shaftesbury Avenue in London that we visited every night. The fellow who ran it got to know us and he would load up the sandwiches with meat and stuff until you could hardly get your mouth around it.

RICHIE HAD SOME WONDERFUL days as a bowler — especially in South Africa in 1957–58 and of course in the famous Old Trafford Test in 1961 — but the thing that impressed me most about him was his growth as a bowler, and the work he put into it. He did struggle early on, but after we were flogged in England in 1956 the Invincibles were gone and the apprentices were now the key to the team. We knew it was up to us.

Richie already was a hard worker, but he said to me as we looked forward to the next Ashes series: ‘You know, those English bowlers get in hundreds more overs than us through a county season. No wonder they’re so accurate. No wonder they bowl so well. We just don’t bowl enough.’

It had long worried Richie that while Doug Ring and Ian Johnson were still around he got a few overs here and there, but nowhere near enough bowling to develop as he wanted. So he organised a practice routine with me. We lived in Sydney’s western suburbs, so we met on the train, then rode the tram up to the SCG and vowed to bowl nonstop for two hours every Tuesday and Thursday before the rest of them got to practice. We practised until landing the ball accurately was like firing a rifle. It made a tremendous difference, and for both of us our latter years were by far our best.

AS A CAPTAIN, ASIDE from the great flair and adventure he brought to our cricket, Richie was a wonderful man manager. He could control things with a withering silence or a cold stare … he didn’t have to say much. It was a communication skill that he carried into his television commentary. He had a computer mind. He analysed players — teammates and opponents alike — as few players could, and he seemed to retain it all. He introduced Testeve team dinners where he called on opinions from everybody. He kept the information in his head and could always recall it as needed. But on the field there was no doubt about who was boss.

He was unflappable, in an era when banter during a game was just that. At Leeds in 1961, Freddie Trueman found a patch on the wicket that made him lethal, and in one spell took five wickets for one run. Richie got a ball that was simply unplayable, jagging a great distance to take his leg stump.

‘Beautiful ball, Freddie,’ Richie said as he walked past Trueman on the way to the rooms. ‘Aye,’ said Freddie, ‘should have been a No.3.’ In other words, wasted on you, Rich!

Through Richie’s time as captain there were real trials, never more than in our tour of India and Pakistan in 1959 – 60. In Lahore, we slept in army tents on the desert floor, with no more than a duckboard, straw mattress and blanket. In Karachi, Richie’s efforts to remove a Pakistani official from the dressing-room while we had a pre-match team talk resulted in the official returning with a couple of policemen, wanting to have our captain arrested. Sir Roden Cutler, the Australian high commissioner at the time, put paid to that. Then several members of the team were very ill with hepatitis, and at one stage we were virtually out of players, with our team manager Sam Loxton kitted up in case he needed to field. It was tough, but through it all Richie maintained a calm, steely purpose that allowed us to win both series.

I think the only time I ever saw Richie really irritated was during the 1961 tour of England, when his bent for public relations won him great favour with the press and our manager, Syd Webb — a conservative administrator more suited to an earlier time — didn’t like it. He reckoned Richie was straying into matters that were board concerns. I think Rich had ventured the opinion that the north of England was very cold at the start of a tour and we would have been better off if the south had been programmed first … and Syd ‘gagged’ him.

Richie was humiliated and never forgot it.

Nearly a decade later, Richie’s brother John, NSW captain and a fine international cricketer in his own right, also ran foul of Syd Webb, who remained a leading NSW administrator. Syd this time took umbrage at John wearing ripple-soled boots in Sheffield Shield matches. When John refused to dump his new shoes, he was suspended. When some key officials were less than forthright about the issue, Richie responded by handing back his life membership of the NSW Cricket Association.

I became president of the NSWCA the following year and did everything I could to get Richie to take back his life membership. I made sure John’s suspension was immediately ended — it was ridiculous in the first place — and I pleaded with Richie year after year to reverse his decision. He wouldn’t. He was fiercely loyal to his brother and to him it was a matter of principle.

I suspect, too, that the experience of the gag in England and the high-handed nature of cricket administration at that time led Richie to his ultimate support of the World Series Cricket breakaway when the revolution came in 1977. Today’s players who are making a fortune out of the game have a lot to thank Richie for, since his intervention at that time had much to do with the ultimate success of the World Series concept and the great modernisation it brought to the game.

It was crazy that players were treated the way they were by administrators who simply could not change with the times. We used to get two pounds a day for a Shield match and 50 pounds a day for a Test. For the second day’s play of the fifth Test against the West Indies in 1960–61 we had more than 90,000 people at the MCG, yet the match payments for the entire team totalled a paltry 600 pounds.

Richie could see change coming. We had some tough times through all of that. As president of the Cricket Association I was on one side and Richie was on the other, and I know Richie was hurt that he was put in a sort of purgatory by many cricket officials. Sir Donald Bradman, for instance, wouldn’t talk to him for a long time.

The battle did enormous damage to establishment cricket. NSW Cricket had to sell Cricket House in Sydney, and some units we had as well, just to pay the legal bills. In the end, we could all see the inevitability of what that revolution brought. Richie just saw it before most of us. Our friendship never wavered, though. Richie had been a huge part of my life since my teens. He remained that way for 70 years. He had an enormous influence on Australian cricket … and on the many people whose lives he touched. I was just one of them.

NEIL HARVEY

Neil Harvey first made the Australian Test team as a 19-year-old against India in 1948, scoring a century in his second Test. He toured with Don Bradman’s Invincibles later that year and was Australia’s premier batsman through the 1950s, finishing his career in 1963 with 6149 runs from 79 Tests. At the time, only Bradman among Australians had made more. Harvey made four Ashes tours and with Alan Davidson formed a friendship with Richie that lasted from their first Sheffield Shield game together until Richie’s death.

I WAS VICE-CAPTAIN OF Australia for four years under Richie Benaud. Many people thought I should have resented that. I didn’t. I had been vice-captain under Ian Craig before Richie was made captain. I probably felt a bit more aggrieved when Ian was made Australian captain, given that I was leading Victoria at the time and my experience went back to the Invincibles of 1948. I was the favoured candidate on both occasions as far as press and public were concerned, but I never got the job.

I was disappointed, of course. Being captain of Australia is an honour lots of players strive for and my great mate Sam Loxton had given up the captaincy of Victoria so that I could have a go at it. He was more disappointed than I ever was that both Craig and Benaud beat me to the top job.

When Ian Craig fell ill in 1958 and they gave the captaincy to Richie after we’d enjoyed a very successful tour of South Africa, I knew that it was the end of any captaincy ambition for me. I had expected to get it, I won’t deny that. But these things have a way of working out and the time I had as vice-captain to Richie was one of the best periods in my career.

I congratulated him when he got the job. We didn’t say much. I committed myself to supporting him, we embraced and we got on with it. Looking back, it was a wonderfully successful time. I determined I would be a good vice-captain and I think as a team we worked very well.

Richie was a man for his time. He was aggressive in his captaincy, prepared to gamble when the occasion warranted. He was also a wonderful diplomat off the field, with a real flair for public relations. It was a time when the game had ground down a bit and Richie was just the man to put a spark back in it.

The first time I ran into him was a game in Melbourne in 1950–51, back in the days when Sheffield Shield games were bigtime and if the NSW-Victoria match was played over Christmas it would draw 30,000 people. And I remember he got me out in one of the first games we played, caught in the deep as I was having a flay at everything. I don’t think Richie would ever have argued, though, that he had a flying start in first-class cricket.

He had a lot of potential and was clearly a worker who never stopped trying to improve his game. But he didn’t spin the ball much and a bit of perseverance was required early on to get him to the stage he eventually reached. He was at his best on firm, bouncy wickets. He worked hard at developing his flipper, which gave his bowling a much sharper edge. His accuracy and his ability to work batsmen out were his big pluses.

Batting against him, I always treated him with respect, though I was quick on my feet and I didn’t really have much trouble with spin bowlers generally. There was one occasion, however, that I remember taking to Richie. It was early 1957. I was captain of Victoria and we were playing NSW in Sydney.

Ian Craig was the NSW captain. He had just been appointed captain of Australia for a tour to New Zealand, and I was a bit upset about that. We had named Bill Lawry, a regular opening batsman, as our 12th man and were going with Colin McDonald and Len Maddocks as openers. We tossed and Craig sent us in. I returned to the dressing-room to be told that McDonald had been hit in the nets and was off to hospital with a broken nose.

Sam Loxton was our vice-captain and he knew exactly what to do. ‘Go and tell Craig what’s happened, and tell him we want to change the side,’ he said. That would allow us to put Lawry in and give us two openers. So I traipsed through the members’ bar to the NSW dressing-room, put my request to the NSW captain, and was flatly refused. My blood was boiling. I grabbed the pads and said to Maddocks: ‘Come on, Lennie, I’ll open with you.’ It was nearly five o’clock when I got out … for 209. Richie bore the brunt of that. He got a bit of stick.

As a captain, Richie was a trendsetter. He was the first to have regular team meetings. I think the only team meeting Bradman ever had in 1948 was on the boat on the way over, which was hardly the place to start analysing opponents. Richie began doing it regularly, discussing how we would bowl to certain players, how to handle certain bowlers. It is now a routine within Australian teams.

He also developed a different atmosphere within the team, celebrating successes and generally making it all a lot more lively. We certainly needed some life when he took over. The first Test of his captaincy was that dreadful Brisbane Ashes Test in 1958–59, when Trevor Bailey batted throughout the fourth day for practically nothing and England scored 106 runs in the day. Richie set about fixing all that, culminating in the wonderful series against the West Indies in 1960–61. He really set international cricket on a new path.

Richie had a very determined streak in the way he approached his cricket, and a stubborn streak as well. They were both on show on that famous day at Old Trafford in 1961 when he took six wickets to scuttle England, just when they looked like taking us to the cleaners. It was certainly the best I ever saw Rich bowl, and he was under some duress, too, from the bad shoulder that had forced him out of the Lord’s Test a month earlier.

We were in all sorts of trouble on that last day. England were 1–150 chasing 256 and Ted Dexter was in his 70s and belting us. The pressure was on. Richie and I put our heads together and I suggested it was time he tried to do something with the big hole in the pitch that Freddie Trueman had made while bowling during our long second innings. The hole was just outside the right-hand batsmen’s leg stump. Such a strategy involved bowling around the wicket, something Richie never did. It was an idea he had discussed with Ray Lindwall the previous evening.

He decided to give it a go. Dexter was out almost straightaway, then Peter May came in and was out second ball, bowled around his legs. Richie had found the middle of the hole Freddie had dug for him and the ball spun sharply, clipping May’s leg stump. It was so gentle May didn’t even realise he was out. I was fielding at leg slip. ‘Hey, Pete,’ I yelled. ‘You’re out.’ He looked at the square-leg umpire and, sure enough, up went the finger. Suddenly we were in with a chance. That’s where Richie’s stubborn streak took over. By the time he had six of them he thought he could do pretty much anything. They still needed 50-odd, Richie was looking at a seventh wicket, but I was getting jittery. The new ball was due.

‘Let’s take the new ball and finish it,’ I said to him. He kept going. I was fielding at cover point, the ball came to me and I threw it across the pitch for four overthrows. Not the right thing to do, perhaps, but I needed to make the point. Richie relented, brought Alan Davidson on with the new ball, and four balls later Brian Statham’s stump was out of the ground and we had won a great victory.

Way back in 1950, at that first game in Melbourne, I quickly hit it off with Richie and Davo. We were on opposite teams but at that time the game was more social. On the Sunday rest day I invited the pair of them home for lunch. We have been great mates ever since, right up to Richie’s passing.

I roomed with Rich on two tours. I got to know him as the total gentleman he was, loyal and generous, with an impish sense of humour that was so understated it was hard to get used to. In every way, a champion.

COLIN McDONALD

Colin McDonald made his Test debut in 1952, in the fifth Test against the West Indies, alongside Richie Benaud. He played a total of 192 first-class games in which he scored 11,375 runs, 3107 of them in Tests, before a wrist injury forced his retirement soon after the 1961 Ashes tour. He was noted for his resolute defiance against the fastest bowlers. In later years, Colin was an admired radio commentator with the ABC.

TO ESTABLISH MY CREDENTIALS as a past cricketer of some standing I often say to a questioner: ‘I debuted with Richie Benaud.’ I have never had anything other than a favourable reaction to these words. On my retirement some 47 personal Test matches later, and on our third tour by sea to England together, Richie was my captain and perhaps the greatest Australian Test-match captain ever. He was a man of the utmost integrity, a cricketing brain without peer, an excellent batsman, a wonderful fieldsman and the only ‘over the wrist’ spin bowler to not suffer by comparison with the great Shane Warne.

In my soon-to-be-published book, Taking Strike, I have selected my best Australian team since World War II. I excluded Don Bradman, whom I consider a pre-war player. The team is: Arthur Morris, Bill Lawry, Neil Harvey, Greg Chappell, Steve Waugh, Keith Miller, Adam Gilchrist, Richie Benaud (captain), Shane Warne, Dennis Lillee, Glenn McGrath, Ray Lindwall (12th man).

Australia has been blessed with the leadership qualities of its captains. Richie therefore is in exalted company when I place him at the top of a list that includes Lindsay Hassett, Steve Waugh, Mark Taylor and Allan Border among others.

Richie’s feats on the cricket fields of the world have been well documented, but it is not so well known that he suffered two serious injuries, both occurring in matches in which I was playing. I shall never forget either incident: the first occurred on the MCG in a state second XI match between Victoria and NSW in January 1949; the second in Sydney during a Test match against South Africa in 1952–53. I record them here as recounted in Taking Strike:

The NSW second XI captain, Brian Dwyer, was a medical doctor, as was the Victorian wicketkeeper, my brother Ian. They were both destined to play their part in a professional sense. Jack ‘Dasher’ Daniel was also to be involved in an unintended fashion. The scores were of no consequence in this account, suffice it to say that Richie, batting as a nightwatchman, survived the first day’s play and resumed for a brief stay on the second. On that morning I was fielding close in at point as Daniel, a fiery and accomplished bowler, delivered a bouncer at Richie, a ball he considered eminently suitable for hooking. Perhaps it was, but Richie missed.

Helmets were still 30 years off. I had given up hooking short, head-high deliveries because of this lack of protection. Not Richie. The ball hit him in the forehead above his right eye. My brother was first on the scene and I was not far behind. It was not necessary to be a doctor to know Richie had suffered a massive fracture. He had a hole, obviously the shape of a cricket ball, in his head. The horrible noise of bone splintering was equalled by the visual image.

All the fieldsmen rushed to the scene. By the time he had been carried from the ground all the swelling had completely obliterated the visual evidence. It was just a matter of getting him to hospital and having him X-rayed to find out the extent of the damage. The X-rays showed no fracture. My brother informed Brian Dwyer, in some detail, of the visual evidence and Dwyer made sure that Benaud would seek further X-ray examination in Sydney. Fortunately, that further examination revealed what many of us already knew. The thought of him walking around Sydney with an undetected hole in his head was unsettling. I have stated that Richie was the best captain I played under. It was a near thing that he had the opportunity.

I was a fellow fieldsman when Richie was struck at the SCG. By January 1953 we had both graduated to Test cricket. We were enjoying the pleasant experience of playing in the company of Lindsay Hassett, Arthur Morris, Keith Miller, Neil Harvey, Ray Lindwall and Bill Johnston, ‘Invincibles’ all. The occasion was the first day’s play of the third Test against South Africa and the series was square at one-all. The unheralded and underestimated South Africans were becoming embarrassingly competent and confronting. They had won the toss and even though batting on a greenish, lively pitch, Jackie McGlew and Johnny Waite had advanced the South African cause by seeing off the initial fast and penetrating overs delivered by Lindwall and Miller. Indeed, the first wicket to fall resulted from a run-out.

Hassett, the Australian captain, had decided that it was time for a change of pace and brought Bill Johnston into the attack. Richie Benaud, never anything but highly enthusiastic in the field, perceived an opportunity and moved from his position in the gully, closer and closer to Waite: a slower spinning delivery might find the edge of Waite’s bat and a catch result. Richie had not counted on a shorter, much faster delivery from Johnston — one good batsmen pounce upon and square cut, often to the boundary. Waite was an extremely good batsman and executed the perfect response to such a delivery. From point-blank range, the ball flew straight into Richie’s mouth.

I was fielding nearby at point, and again witnessed the result. Richie asserted that he instinctively spat the 27 pieces of fractured denture into a handkerchief. Some missed, as I have a vivid memory of flying teeth. It was not the most pleasant sight, but it remains vivid as the years pass. Richie recovered quite well, but he was lucky. The ball was travelling much faster than the Daniel bouncer. A fractured cheekbone, jaw or skull would have been far worse. He actually batted on the third day, but understandably did not trouble the scorers.

I will remember Richie with admiration and affection for the rest of my days.

Oh, and I only ever hit one six on the MCG. I hit Richie over the long-on fence.

PETER THOMSON

It can be argued that the distinguished Peter Thomson is Australian golf’s parallel to Richie Benaud. Friends for more than 50 years, the pair were gentlemen of the games they played — albeit robust competitors. There is also the mutual territory of journalism, with both having written extensively on their chosen sports. Here, Thomson recalls the first time he saw Richie Benaud in action in England, during the second day of the Australians’ game against Hampshire on Richie’s second Ashes tour. What the great golfer does not mention is that just three days earlier at Hoylake, he had won his third straight British Open. He would win two more, in 1958 and 1965.

MY FIRST SIGHT OF Richie on tour was in early July, 1956. I was a guest of Fred Thatcher, president of Hampshire County Cricket Club, and the Australian team, who were under the captaincy of Keith Miller that day. Regular captain Ian Johnson must have given himself the game off. The match was being played at Southampton, between Test matches.

I was honoured to be the only ‘outsider’ allowed in the Australian dressing-room. This occurred after Australia finished their first innings and before Hampshire began their reply. Keith addressed the team in no uncertain terms, admonishing them to ‘get the bastards out so we can get back to London’. His social agenda loomed large in his life!

As my memory has it, Richie bowled and bowled. In my mind, too much, but then he was young and obeying orders, so I was told by Bill Dowling, the Australian team manager. It was not the most memorable of matches, and finished in a draw, but it was my first glimpse of Richie’s talent and I was treated to a feast.

Such was my enjoyment of that first day, it will remain forever crystal clear in my mind. In the years that followed, my wife Mary and I spent many happy hours in the company of Daphne and Richie, who were the quintessential ‘ideal couple’. We have always been so fond of them and together with Daph, shall always cherish the memory of Rich.

GORDON RORKE

Gordon Rorke was a tearaway fast bowler who made his Test debut in Richie Benaud’s first series as captain, against England in 1958–59. He was the subject of much controversy, triggering a change in the no-ball rule to counter bowlers who dragged their back foot. Gordon was blindingly fast, and though his bowling was legal according to the law of the time, batsmen complained that because of his ‘drag’ he was too close to them by the time he let the ball go. He played only four Tests. His progress as an international bowler was stymied by serious illness, contracted on a difficult tour of Pakistan and India.

KANPUR, SITUATED ON THE banks of the Ganges in northern India, holds some pretty grim memories for me. It was the scene of our second Test against India on the tour Richie Benaud led in 1959–60. The city was known as Cawnpore in those days and it was where I was waylaid with amoebic dysentery and hepatitis. I was the first of a string of players to fall ill on that tour. We toured Pakistan and India and the team won both series, overcoming conditions that were, to say the least, pretty dreadful. I ended up in a leprosy hospital, with dirt floors, and the team doctor told me years later he did not think I would survive. Thankfully, he was wrong.

I played the Test in Kanpur … some of it, anyway. But I was not feeling well, and I managed only three first-innings overs when we bowled. By the time we were batting out the fourth innings I was bedridden back in our hotel, feeling very washed out.

India had an off-spin bowler named Jasubhai Patel, who was sending them down at medium pace on a newly laid pitch that was like plasticine. He’d taken 9–69 in our first innings, and was on his way to becoming the first Indian bowler to take 14 wickets in a Test. I don’t know what I was thinking, but on the last day I had it in my mind that I had to bat in an attempt to save the match, and I somehow got myself out of bed and down to the ground. When the ninth wicket fell we still needed 120 runs to win, and apart from me there wasn’t a person on earth who would have considered my batting capable of providing any help at all.

Richie, of course, was our captain and he was horrified when I turned up. He organised a taxi and sent me straight back to the hotel. As soon as the game was over he came back to my room and lay on the bed next to me. He stayed there for hours, just reading a book, keeping an eye on me, keeping me company. I have never forgotten the empathy he showed me that day. It was the way he was so often with the players of his teams. He truly cared.

My health just got worse. They shipped me off to a leprosy hospital — the only hospital available apparently — until the Salvation Army captain who ran the hospital got me out and took me back to his home. I had a bed there until he ushered me out of it in great haste. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘but my wife’s having a baby, and she is having it in this room.’

I was shipped off home not long after that. The team ultimately was so ravaged by illness that by the end of their eight Tests (three in Pakistan and five in India) they were struggling for players. It was a measure of Richie’s coolness under pressure that he was able to manage all of that, and still have the team perform the way they did. We won 2–0 in Pakistan and beat the Indians 2–1.

I read not long ago how the great American golfer Arnold Palmer revolutionised his sport, just by the strength of his personality. Golf had always been regarded as fairly elite, a bit above the crowd, until Palmer brought a more relaxed approach, a friendly bent for public relations that won over the masses. If Palmer revolutionised golf in that way, Richie certainly revolutionised cricket. I was fortunate to play in the Ashes series of 1958–59, when Richie took over the Australian team. Immediately, attitudes changed. Richie was demonstrative in the way he congratulated us for our successes. His shirt was unbuttoned, he had a huge grin on his face and there was much backslapping. But, importantly, he rarely said anything when a mistake was made, or somebody failed. He knew they knew, and reasoned there was no need to make it worse by rubbing it in.

I made it into that series for the fourth Test as a late replacement for Ian Meckiff. The Cricket Association secretary Alan Barnes rang to tell me only the day before the game that I was in, and it was a matter of getting to Adelaide in great haste. No time to be measured for blazers and such.

Richie rang me soon after. He told me he would bring one of his old blazers and jumpers for me to wear. He also made the moment special, by underlining the importance of it. ‘Your life will never be the same now,’ he said. Representing Australia at cricket does change a lot of things.

I bowled a lot of overs and did well in that fourth Test, which we won. We won the last Test as well, when I was the fourth fast bowler in the team, alongside Ray Lindwall, Alan Davidson and Ian Meckiff. The English press stirred up a lot of trouble on that tour, particularly in regards to Meckiff and myself. They wrote of suspect actions and ‘dragging’, and generally objected to the pace attack we mounted. Our bowling put England under a lot of pressure. The press reaction put our team under a lot of pressure as well.

But Richie Benaud never let pressure worry him or anybody connected with the team. He was calm and cool about it all. He never mentioned any of it to me as far as I can recall. In the end, the criticism only added to the motivation. Richie had a wonderful way of managing all those things and of looking after his players above all else. He was a great cricketer, but he was an extraordinary captain.

NEIL MARKS

Neil Marks, aka ‘Harpo’ and ‘Marksy’, has been a positive force in and around the Australian cricket scene for more than 50 years. His own career of bright promise as a talented left-handed batsman was cut cruelly short in the early 1960s by a rare and serious congenital heart defect. Scorer of a century in his first two Sheffield Shield matches, he seemed destined for a glittering career. Instead he fought for his life but came through, against the odds, thanks to delicate surgery performed at the Mayo Clinic in the US. Doctors were amazed at his sporting achievements, one likening him to a ‘nine-cylinder motor that had been running on six cylinders’. Neil’s first-class career ended abruptly, but his love for the game never did and he went on to score more than 11,000 career runs for his beloved Northern District in Sydney grade cricket. Along the way, he became a renowned storyteller and raconteur in the cricket community. His five books contain some of the funniest and most poignant stories ever written about Australian sport.

WHEN, AS A KID, I first became aware of him, he was ‘Ben-ode’. That’s how the commentators and many others around cricket wrestled with his name. Quickly, they got the pronunciation right, but by the time I was playing, the name had moved on again via the parlance of the dressing-room and he had become ‘Benord’ or ‘B’nord’. He remains that to me and many others in the cricket world, although Ian Chappell always made it a plural, calling him ‘Benords’.

It was in 1947 or 1948 that my father, Alec, managed a NSW Cricket Association team of young players of potential on a country tour. Included on a trek that lasted two or three weeks was R. Benaud of Cumberland. Already a sports-fanatic youngster by then, I remember asking Dad when he got home who out of the team he reckoned might play for Australia. He came up with a few names: Richie and Graeme Hole, who both went on to play for Australia, were among them, as was John Kershaw, a player of great natural ability who never realised how good he was.

My oldest memory of seeing Richie goes back to when he was playing for Cumberland with his father Lou, who also bowled leg-spin. I remember Jim Sullivan, the old groundsman up at Waitara Oval, telling me he reckoned Lou was the better bowler of the two — not an unreasonable view at that stage considering that Richie was still learning the leg-spin art. When he came into the spotlight, Richie was a great batsman who could bowl a bit. In the years that followed, he got better and better as a leg-spinner, while perhaps his batting faded a little. I always thought his ‘toppy’ was his best ball, though on a wicket giving some support he could really turn his leg break. He had two wrong ’uns — one of them disguised and the other that didn’t turn as much and was pickable by all (except Pommy batsmen). And he could bowl a good flipper.

Years after that first sighting, I went away with Richie on a trip to the bush with one of Jack Chegwyn’s touring teams. We were playing at Parkes. They were a pretty fair country side and scored around 200, then had us five for about 50, at which point Alan Davidson and B’nord got together and saved the day. However, the main entertainment came in the locals’ innings. It centred around Gordon Rorke, who could be the fastest bowler in the world, although you never quite knew where he was going to bowl ’em. On this day he was all over the place and Richie took him off early and put himself into the attack. After a couple of deliveries, the batsman went whack and the ball flew up in the air.

Rorkey tore in from out near the fence, but ran too far and the ball went over his head. Soon afterwards, the same bloke got onto another one but this time Rorkey, still out on the boundary, lined it up … and the ball donged him on the head and ricocheted over the fence for six!

‘Sorry B’nord,’ said Gordon at the end of the over.

‘Rorkey, I didn’t mind you misjudging the catch,’ Richie replied, his bottom lip making an appearance. ‘And I didn’t even mind you knocking that second one over for six. But what I am dirty about is that it hit you on the head and wore all the shine off the ball!’

After the final wicket had fallen, Cheggy came into the dressing-room, beaming. ‘Thanks, fellas — well played,’ he said. ‘It was a good game, most enjoyable.’

And Rorkey chipped in, ‘Thank you, Cheggy, for inviting me. I’ve had a terrific trip!’

B’nord glanced across from the bench with one of those dry looks of his. ‘You must be easily pleased, Rorkey,’ he quipped. Then he paused …

‘You must be easily pleased.’

Then there was the day when we (Northern District) were playing Cumberland on their home track and we knocked them over for 72. Jim Burke, our captain, said, ‘We’ll get the runs as quick as we can and then I’ll close and we can stick ’em back in.’

I came in at No. 4 that day, joining Burkey in the middle. We were just a few runs short of the 73 needed. With the scoreboard on 72, I nudged one for a single and immediately Jimmy turned to Richie and said, ‘That’ll do us, B’nord — you have a go.’

‘Are you closing, Burkey?’ Richie asked.

‘Yep.’

But there was a problem. The kids on the scoreboard had got it wrong. As we walked off, our scorer, Bob Fraser, was yelling out, ‘Go back! Go back! You haven’t got ’em yet.’ Their scorer, Ernie Gould, was shouting, ‘It’s a tie! It’s a tie!’

Burkey had to go to Richie and say, ‘I think I’ve made a mistake here, B’nord.’ ‘No you haven’t,’ Richie replied. ‘It’s a tie. This is what cricket is all about! It’s perfect. We’ve both got points.’

‘No, your board was wrong,’ Burkey responded.

‘It’s not our board,’ chipped in Cumberland player Wilf Ewens. ‘It belongs to Parramatta Council.’

B’nord strung Burkey along for about five minutes, as the banter among the players continued and Jim got dirtier and dirtier. Eventually, Richie let him off the hook with a smile and we went back out there to get the extra run we needed. That done, as we walked from the field, B’nord turned to Burkey and with tongue firmly in cheek asked, ‘Have you checked with the scorer?’

There was a fair bit of cross-pollination between baseball and cricket in the late 1950s and early 1960s. One season, B’nord suggested we should organise a cricketers’ baseball team and play three or four games. Freddy Bennett, a good cricketer who had coached baseball at a senior level and who would go on to become chairman of the Australian Cricket Board, agreed to manage the team and guide us.

Before our first game, coach Bennett was giving us our signs. ‘My signal for a steal will be if I touch my cap on the second pitched ball after the pitcher has thrown a ball,’ he explained. ‘My signal for a hit run with a man on third, I’ll do so and so …’

Freddy obviously thought it was the World Series. On and on he went, until eyes glazed over.

Finally, B’nord stopped him. ‘Freddy, Freddy,’ he said. ‘How about this … for a hit and run, you take your cap off, throw it on the ground and jump up and down on it. For a steal, drop your daks and …’

Freddy got the message. ‘All right, you blokes,’ he said. ‘Do what you want to.’

Again, it was that dry Benaud humour. But underlying it all was an abundantly generous spirit and a willingness to help out whenever he could. I had experience of this during the 1960–61 season, not long before I got sick.

‘What are you doing tomorrow night?’ he asked out of the blue one day. ‘Would you like to come over to dinner?’

I went and we had a long talk about my run of outs that season. We discussed possible solutions and he came up with a few suggestions. I remember, too, a baseball trip to Lithgow with him and Kevin ‘Crazy’ Cantwell that showed how unaffected Richie was by status. He just happened to be Australia’s cricket captain; I was pretty much a nothing, just a young bloke doing his best. Anyhow, B’nord picked Crazy and me up in his little car and we headed off to Lithgow. It was bloody freezing once we got into the Blue Mountains and when we finally arrived and walked into the dressing-room someone called out, ‘B’nord, you look like you’ve been to Antarctica.’

‘Oh, it was the trip up,’ he said offhandedly. ‘Marksy had the window down the whole time.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I said to him.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You wanted it open.’

I can only wonder how many other Australian captains would not have demanded that the window be closed.

Fragments of memory of the remarkable B’nord will stay with me. There was a comment he made after his first season as a television commentator, how he was convinced that the important thing about TV broadcasting was not what you said, but what you didn’t say. And there were enjoyable golf days and how he was determined to stay on his single-figure handicap (he played off nine for a time). B’nord loved his golf.

As a cricket captain, he was exceptional, very, very clever. He also benefited, undoubtedly, from the advice Neil Harvey gave him as vice-captain. If Harv made a suggestion, it would always be done. The B’nord I will remember is a modest, decent and dryly funny man. He was fundamentally reserved, but a leader. He had a deep bond of loyalty to the game and to his fellow cricketers.

He never sought the limelight, but he lived with it and handled it supremely well through his years as cricketer and broadcaster. When the end of play came for him in 2015, his quiet departure epitomised the man. Not for B’nord would there be the fanfare of a state funeral.

He would not have wanted all that fuss.

SIR GARFIELD SOBERS

Sir Garfield Sobers is popularly accepted as the greatest all-rounder cricket has known. A spectacular batsman who scored 8032 Test runs, he also could bowl left‑arm medium-fast, left-arm orthodox spin and left-arm wrist‑spin to great effect, making him a unique player. He took 235 wickets in his 93 Tests for the West Indies over 20 years, 1954 to 1974.

AS CAPTAIN OF AUSTRALIA through that remarkable Tied Test summer of 1960–61, Richie Benaud had an amazing capacity to get on with people. Personally, I found him to be a fierce competitor, but a charming and intelligent man. We all considered him a friend, then and certainly in the years that followed.

I had three seasons with South Australia in the Sheffield Shield competition after that tour, so I had the chance to see a bit of Richie in Australian domestic cricket, and whenever he came to Adelaide for Test matches. A good example of his easygoing relationship with those he played against, and his concern for his players, was a discussion he had with me prior to the fourth Test against Ted Dexter’s English team in 1962–63.

‘Sobey,’ he said, ‘I wonder if you might have a word with Normie O’Neill. He’s finding it hard to get runs and he’s down in the dumps.’

‘Sure,’ I said.

I sat down with Normie and we had a long chat about batting and all the things that can get in your head to make it hard. Norm was a nervous type who took things very seriously. He’d had a good series against us two years before, hitting a brilliant 181 in the first Test and getting two or three half-centuries. But he had scored hardly any runs in the first three Ashes Tests.

It seemed to me that the pressure was getting to him. He was pushing and prodding, or doing silly things trying to hit himself back to form. Normie was normally an aggressive player, and when he tightened up he struggled. The crux of what I told him was just to play his shots, to play his natural game.

It seemed to work. He turned the corner brilliantly to get a hundred in that Test match, and he thanked me for my input. He might more especially have thanked Richie, since it was Richie’s understanding of Norm’s problem, and his insights into how I might help, that did the trick. Ironically, Norm’s century kept him in the side and might well have cost my South Australian teammate Ian McLachlan selection — but I enjoyed helping in that way. To me, it was a further example of the bond that had been built between the teams who had played in that wonderful series that began with the Tied Test. There was a unique spirit in that series, and Richie Benaud had a particular talent for making it so. Richie and our captain, Frank Worrell, were just marvellous people, and between them over that summer they turned cricket on its head.

Sir Donald Bradman had challenged them at the start of the series to mount a sort of rescue mission, because he was genuinely worried that Test cricket was dying. ‘It doesn’t matter who wins but make the game attractive,’ he told them, and that was the way it was played. The two teams mixed so well we were like family. We stayed in the same hotels, we had drinks together, and many of us became lifelong friends.

My first encounter with Richie was on the 1955 Australian tour of the West Indies, when I was a very young man, new to Test cricket, and Richie was still finding his way as a Test player. I did not get to know him on that tour really, but I certainly did when the 1960–61 series unfolded in Australia. I found Richie to be a great sportsman.

He was always friendly and polite. When I played for South Australia and came up against Richie in Shield cricket he would welcome me to the wicket with a ‘Morning Sobey, how are we today?’ He would look at me, but not really look at me. You knew that however nice he might be, he would still do whatever he could to get your wicket. He was not a great turner of the ball — not like Shane Warne and others — but he was very accurate and he would keep at you, and he gave very little away.

Richie, of course, was a big part of the Brisbane Tied Test, which will always remain to me the greatest game in which I played. When Wes Hall started the final over, Australia needed just six runs to win with three wickets in hand and we looked like we were gone. Frank Worrell said to Wes, ‘No matter what, don’t bowl a bouncer because we don’t want Richie hitting a six.’

After Richie and Wally Grout managed a leg bye from the first ball, which got Richie on strike, Wes tore in and let fly the fastest bouncer you’ve ever seen. Richie indeed tried to hit a six, but succeeded only in getting a top edge and was caught behind. Wes was delirious with delight and ran to Frank, who was none too pleased.

‘I said no bouncers,’ Frank said. ‘What if he had hit a six?’

Poor Wes was a bit deflated.

Two run-outs closed it out. Joe Solomon threw down the wicket from side on to run out Ian Meckiff for the final wicket. I was fielding at leg slip hoping the ball wouldn’t come to me, because the tension was stifling. The scores were level, although none of us knew that. Some of us thought we had won, some of us thought they had won. A tie had never happened before and such a result just didn’t occur to us. But it was somehow fitting. Both sides had given everything for a win, when either of us could have closed it up to avoid defeat. It was the way that series was played.

I was grateful to be there and to meet some great men. Richie was one of them. So was Alan Davidson, whom I found to be a great bowler and a lovely person. Richie had him tabbed, though. If Davo was getting wickets, you couldn’t get the ball off him, but if he had gone for a few fours he seemed to develop strange ailments that needed some time in the field.

Richie never fell for it. ‘One more over, Al,’ he would say, and Davo would keep plugging away. It was always a good example of Richie’s motivational skills and the understanding he had of the people he played with and against.

It is only a year or two since Richie and Daphne were in Barbados, and we had a wonderful lunch … half-a-dozen of us from that marvellous series. As we talked and laughed and remembered, it only emphasised again just how special those days were. And nobody ever was in any doubt of the part Richie played in all of that.

FRANK MISSON

Genial Frank Misson was a fine fast bowler who played his cricket vigorously and with a sense of enjoyment, representing NSW from 1959 to 1964 and Australia in five Tests — three during the ‘Calypso Summer’ of 1960–61 and two on the 1961 Ashes tour. It was his NSW teammate, Warren Saunders, who came up with Frank’s nickname — one of the most creative in sport — during practice one day at the SCG No. 2. Dispatching players to various nets, a ground official, Mick Burt, called his name loudly as ‘Frank MY-SON’, to the glee of fellow players. Saunders instantly tagged him ‘Strepta’, as in streptomycin, an antibiotic of the time. Among his mates from that period — of whom he has many — he would be Strepta forevermore.

IT WAS IN THE season of 1958–59 that — as an unsophisticated 20-year-old, not long out of school — I was first picked for NSW. It was a Sheffield Shield game in Perth. Richie was our captain and I was totally in awe of the whole experience. It was hot over there in the west, as it can be, and before long in Western Australia’s first innings I cramped up really badly — in my legs and my hands. I went across to Richie.

‘Mr Benaud, I can’t bowl,’ I said, and I explained my dilemma.

‘We’ll fix that,’ he answered.

Richie called the drinks man onto the field, and asked him to bring a couple of salt tablets. Well, they fixed me, all right — pretty much straightaway — and I thought, Gee, this guy knows something!

Well, of course, Richie knew plenty. But it’s worth putting on the record that a few years later I did him a favour, via an event that took place early in the 1962–63 season, something which neither of us ever forgot. Our first Shield game of that season was against Queensland in Brisbane. Back then, we didn’t play on Sundays. Guys would generally play golf or go to the movies on the Sunday, but on this occasion we met in the breakfast room and Richie announced there was the option of a trip to the Gold Coast, to spend the day at what was then the hotel of choice down there: Lennons at Broadbeach, near Surfers Paradise.

Lennons had a nice pool and grass surrounds, and as a keen swimmer from Coogee this arrangement suited me just fine. Four or five of us went down for a lazy day beside the pool. It was typically warm Queensland weather, with a hot sun beating down, and for Richie, always a sun-lover, it was perfect. He was drifting on a li-lo soaking up the rays and I was not far away, poolside, reading the Sunday paper. All of a sudden, I looked up and Richie’s off the li-lo … and going down. I thought, That’s a bit unusual.…

I knew Richie didn’t like to get his hair wet. He came up spluttering for a few seconds and then he was heading towards the bottom again. He’s in trouble here! I jumped in and grabbed him and got him to the side of the pool. He clambered out and said to me, ‘That’s the first and last time I’m ever going for a swim!’

Richie told me later that in his younger days, when his dad Lou was a teacher in NSW country towns, he had never learned to swim. The story of the Australian cricket captain in trouble at the bottom of Lennons’ pool never got out publicly, although I could envisage the headlines: ‘Teammate Saves Aussie Captain’. Richie and I used to joke about it in the years that followed. In more recent times, when I was trustee of Wylie’s Baths at Coogee, I’d sometimes see Daphne and Richie on their morning walk and I’d sing out, ‘C’mon in, Rich, the water’s beautiful!’

His answer was always roughly along the lines of: ‘No way, you bugger.’

Early on the Ashes tour of 1961, I chanced to be batting with Richie in a match at Hove, against Ted Dexter’s Sussex side, when the strange sea fog the locals call a ‘fret’ came in and covered the ground to the extent that you couldn’t see the other end of the pitch. Then the wind came and blew it away, and we got going again. I was at the non-striker’s end and Richie hadn’t scored as yet. On the first or second ball he faced after the resumption, he went for a huge cover drive and missed by a mile, but the ball deviated off the pitch to the bloke at first slip, who caught it. There was a muffled appeal. I knew Richie hadn’t hit it and turned and walked back to the crease, where the ump gave a quiet, ‘Not out.’

Then I turned around and saw that he was halfway to the pavilion. What’s going on here? I thought. I ran over to him and said, ‘Rich, you didn’t get within a bull’s roar of that. The umpire has said not out.’

He stood there for a moment, then said, ‘Aw, bugger it, I can’t come back now. And he walked off. I spoke to him about it later and he answered with words to the effect: ‘I’m very proud to be Australia’s captain and the last thing I want on this tour is to have some sort of controversy where the Australian captain walks and then comes back. I thought in the circumstances it was best to keep going.’

I sort of understood. The first Test was coming up and the responsibility of the captaincy was no doubt weighing heavy. Not too many would have done what he did that day; for me, it was an occasion that said a lot about him as a captain … and as a man. Adding to the moment, it was his second duck of the game. He told me later it was the first ‘pair’ of his career.

The tour climaxed two months later, when we won the fourth Test at Manchester to retain the Ashes. The final day was one of Richie’s greatest, as he took 6–70 in England’s second innings, his leg-spin wizardry bowling us to victory, but there was a little-known happening in the Aussie dressing-room that also played a part in the victory. England had won the third Test at Leeds by eight wickets, levelling the series, and the pressure was really on. In our room at Old Trafford, Richie drew the attention of the players to a newspaper cutting he’d pinned on a wall — it was a story written by the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s Phil Tresidder, who happened to be one of Richie’s best mates in the press. Phil’s article suggested in strong terms that the Australians had dropped their bundle after the third Test defeat and were a dispirited lot. My suspicion to this day remains that the story was something of a ploy, reflecting Richie’s shrewd thinking. In later years, I asked both Richie and Phil whether my suspicions had foundation. Neither denied it outright, making me think I am probably on the money.

He could be hard on the field. When the Englishmen, captained by Ted Dexter, were out here in 1962–63, there was something of a psychological battle in progress between Richie and ‘Lord Ted’. In the MCC v NSW match, I split the webbing in my left hand fielding a hard-hit cut shot and I had to go off so the resident team medico, ‘Doc’ Anderson, could stitch me up. Back on the field, Richie put me at mid-wicket, with Dexter batting. The wicket was taking some turn and before long Dexter got down the pitch to him and thumped a ball which was heading over the top of me … but possibly reachable. A quick flash came to mind: Should I take it two-handed and possibly split the webbing again or go for it one-handed?

I opted for the latter and … bang! … it stuck. Beauty! Almost instantly, Richie wheeled around and said, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

‘Look, Rich,’ I spluttered. ‘I didn’t want to split the webbing again.’

He wasn’t convinced. ‘That was a real show-off act!’ he said. I defended myself — and that was the end of it. I suspect that his stern response had a lot to do with the fact the England captain was the batsman involved.

Richie’s objective when he was bowling was always to get wickets, but he’d really get pissed off if he gave away more than two runs in an eight-ball over. He was a tight bowler. On the tour of England he used to put me at square-leg or backward square. He knew I had a good arm and he would deliberately drop one short, which the batsman would often drag around in my direction. It was all part of a ruse to set batsmen up for the flipper, which would be short again but which would hit and spit. When he got it right, the ball often skidded through for an lbw. He had a lot of success on that tour with the flipper.

One thing that always amazed me about Richie was the way he handled the public speaking part of being captain. The first week of an Ashes tour was a big one — keeping with tradition, there was the first practice at Lord’s, followed by a black-tie dinner that night and other events following. Invariably at these big functions, the Poms would roll out one of the most prestigious after-dinner speakers in the land, to which Richie had to respond. He always did so impressively, with an Aussie touch. When the 40-year anniversary of the Tied Test was celebrated in Brisbane in December 2000, there were a couple of occasions when Richie spoke. I took particular notice … you could have heard a pin drop. He had the gatherings enthralled; it was a skill he’d honed over a long period of time.

My final deliveries here concern two matches from Richie’s final season in big cricket: 1963–64. The first involves the arrival in Australia that summer of a 19-year-old South African lefthand batsman named Graeme Pollock, who would, of course, go on to perform some wonderful deeds.

In NSW’s game against the South Africans in Sydney, before the first Test, I was bowling when Pollock came to the wicket. Richie came up to me for a serious talk. The bottom lip was out. ‘I’ve got mail from South Africa that he’s susceptible to a ball cutting away, on or outside the off stump,’ he said. ‘Try hitting that line.’

So I did, and three balls later Pollock was 12 not out after hitting three magnificent cover drives to the fence. After delivering the third ball and watching it scream to the boundary, I followed through. Richie was fielding in slips.

‘Are you sure that mail was right?’ I asked him.

‘I don’t think it is,’ he muttered wryly. Quickly, we learned that to have any hope of keeping Pollock sort of quiet, you had to bowl at his pads, try to cramp him.

A couple of months later came the only time I ever saw Richie being thrashed by a batsman. It also happened at the SCG, this time in a Shield game when South Australia’s Les Favell really took to him. Les and Richie knew each other from way back, from Green Shield days in Sydney, and on this occasion Favell, an audacious batsman with a cavalier approach, pounded him all over the ground. It was ‘Favelli’ at his devilmay- care best, but rather than taking himself off, Richie kept bowling.

Afterwards, I was talking to Alan Davidson and I asked him why Richie had persevered even though he was being pummelled. ‘That’s the worst beating I’ve ever seen him take,’ I said.

‘Oh well,’ said Davo, ‘it was Favelli.’

In other words, they were just a couple of old mates having a crack at each other. Richie wasn’t going to back away. Neither was Les. They really enjoyed the contest and the crowd got their money’s worth, all right …

Richie always liked that.

BRIAN CORRIGAN

Dr Brian Corrigan is a sports medicine pioneer in Australia. He was medical officer for the Australian Olympic team over two decades from 1968 and had long involvement with soccer, rugby league and cricket. He was the medical officer on Richie’s 1961 Ashes tour and in the early days of World Series Cricket. Corrigan also served as chairman of the Drugs in Sport committee of the Australian Sports Commission and as chairman of the Australian Sports Drug Agency. He was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1999.

MANY THINGS MADE RICHIE Benaud the special sportsman he was. He was a great communicator and a wonderful captain. He had a very sharp mind and was the sort of person who got on with everybody, especially all the people with whom he played cricket. But to me one thing that really stood out was his courage.

You hear all sorts of heroic stories about footballers and boxers and the like who compete when they are hurting. But I know more than most just how much pain Richie had to overcome, more or less throughout his career, to achieve the things he did. The leg-spin that Richie bowled put enormous strain on the body. It took a lot of skin off his fingers and it sorely tested his right shoulder.

The best example, but certainly not the only example, was Australia’s 1961 tour of England that Richie led, when he mounted a superb bowling spell to win the Manchester Test and retain the Ashes. I was the team doctor on that tour and I don’t think I’m breaking any doctor-patient confidentiality when I state the obvious: the damage to his shoulder as he faced up to that game was such that he should not have been playing, let alone trying to let leg-spinners rip. Yet he bowled 32 overs and took 6–70 in the England second innings to win the game. The pain must have been excruciating.

Richie had done the damage in the first game of the tour, against Worcestershire. I think it was Tom Graveney he was bowling to, but he ripped a wrong ’un that also ripped his shoulder, doing a lot of damage underneath the rotator cuff — an unusual injury that makes the shoulder very painful. He missed some cricket, of course, including the Lord’s Test, but he also insisted on bowling through a lot of games when he should not have. He didn’t bowl very well under such a handicap, at least not until he got to Manchester for that crucial fourth Test, when he bowled the spell of his life. The Old Trafford result was just reward for a lot of courage.

It wasn’t the only time he battled on in pain. Richie spent a lot of his career nursing a spinning finger that was worn and bloodied. I remember one club game at Mosman Oval during his final season, when he dug his finger into the ground going for a catch and broke it. The fact that he was playing a club game the week before a Test was remarkable enough — you wouldn’t see modern players committing themselves like that — but the lengths he went to so that the finger injury was manageable when he played his final Tests against South Africa was another thing.

He stayed up all night after the Mosman match, holding a cricket ball and working the hand so that, broken finger or not, everything else worked well enough to let him return to the field of play as quickly as possible. He bowled 57 eight-ball overs in his farewell Test, 49 of them in the first innings, in which he took four wickets.

It was a privilege to be around Richie and the Australian cricketers of that time. It seemed to me that from the very first ball of Richie’s captaincy a certain magic took over the team. They worked hard at being very good, but they also worked at enjoying themselves. The atmosphere was wonderful. Richie could take a joke, too.

One thing he did like to do as soon as the seatbelt light went off in an aircraft was to have a cool glass of wine. He was not a particularly good flyer and the wine no doubt was a settler. Before one of those big trips I wrote a letter to Qantas suggesting that Richie should not be offered alcohol on the flight. The letter, of course, was read as doctor’s orders.

Richie, predictably, asked for the wine as soon as the flight was underway. The hostie apologised … no wine. Richie waited a while and asked again. Same result … ‘Sorry sir, we can’t give you any.’ Eventually, the frustration was too much and Richie demanded to see the captain. The pilot explained, with profuse apology, that he had been instructed not to allow Richie any drink ‘on doctor’s orders’.

‘The doctor’s name would not by any chance be Corrigan, would it?’ Richie enquired.

Great mirth all round. Richie got his wine. And I don’t think he ever got me back. We remained friends in all the years that followed. He was simply a great man.

TED DEXTER

‘Lord Ted’ Dexter was the total aggressor as a cricketer: a batsman of extraordinary power and an imaginative captain who played 62 Tests between 1958 and 1968. He and Richie were like minds and the dynamics of their early rivalry grew into lifelong friendship.

BACK IN THE EARLY ’60s, news did not travel so fast as it does today. For instance, there was no television coverage in Britain of the great Australia v West Indies series, including the Tied Test. It was only later on that I saw some grainy footage of Wes Hall at full tilt, with the keeper leaping to take the ball way above his head … and still going up! But somewhere in the background the name of Richie Benaud was starting to gain resonance — perhaps no more than the odd murmur to start with but growing perceptibly.

Fast-forward to the 1962 season in England, with the normal press coverage, as always, skewed towards the coming MCC tour to Australia. One of the stranger strands of news centred round the reappearance of David Sheppard (by now Reverend David Sheppard) on the county scene. Not only was he taking a summer’s sabbatical for some rest and recuperation from parish duties, it was soon clear that he had an eye on a tour place — and indeed the captaincy.

The most likely candidate for the top job was Colin Cowdrey and the distant outsider of three was Edward Dexter, if only because he had been entrusted with a tour to India, Pakistan and Ceylon in 1961, and had emerged with at least a modicum of credit.

Which is where the Richie Benaud factor came into play. Richie’s reputation as a forceful and dynamic captain had gained a momentum of its own. Added to that was a sense that his public relations expertise was a formidable part of his leadership.

Note the initials MCC ahead of ‘tour’ in a previous paragraph. The Marylebone Cricket Club had not entirely relinquished its world administrative role at this time. Teams selected to play overseas were expected to represent the very best traditions of the great club and indeed of the nation. The MCC committee had a strong say in selection.

Thus, whatever the counter-arguments might have been, the surprise announcement was made that it was the outsider, Edward Dexter, who was selected to face up to the Richie Benaud-led Australians in 1962–63. So I really have Richie to thank for this sudden elevation from the ranks — a definite legup for the Dexter career image. But I knew that it was up to me to face Richie down whenever the opportunity arose.

I wonder whether either Cowdrey or Sheppard would have accepted an invitation to join Richie in one-on-one discussions and commentary after each day’s play in the Tests. I doubt that any pair of captains in modern cricket would agree to such public proximity on a daily basis. But it was at Richie’s invitation and to say ‘no’ would have given him the edge he wanted. The net result was that we played a drawn series, with much good cricket on both sides, and began a friendship that was to last a lifetime.

It was Richie more than anyone who helped me establish a system of cricket rankings in the 1980s. Many other journalists and broadcasters were unwilling to give credence to a new (and infinitely better) statistical measurement of performance — perhaps because they disliked a sponsor’s name attached, giving the rankings a mildly commercial element.

Richie Benaud, the cricketer and communicator par excellence, was more far-sighted and he lived, like me, to see the confirmation of the rankings principle when it was adopted by the ICC and became the official standard of comparative ability and achievement.

In recent years, we shared an appreciation for the health benefits of time spent in the south of France. We were welcome visitors to his sunny flat in Beaulieu and vice versa to our apartment in Nice. To say that we were sparing on the delights of vin rosé would be less than truthful.

The only area where Richie and I never quite saw eye to eye was over golf. I always asked him about his game and was given blow-by-blow accounts of his latest swing instruction, equipment, etc, etc. He never once enquired the same of me. Perhaps he feared the same in return. Ah, well! Nobody is perfect!

BRIAN BOOTH

Brian Booth played 29 Tests for Australia. An elegant strokemaker and known to his mates as ‘Sam’, he captained the team in two Tests during the 1965–66 Ashes series in Australia. A strong mutual respect existed between Richie Benaud and Brian Booth, reflected in the Benaud family’s request that Brian lead the service at Richie’s private funeral.

IN ALL, I PLAYED 11 Tests with Richie Benaud and for eight of those he was our captain. I played first-class cricket with him for nearly a decade, all of it in the same side. It was a successful period, mainly because we had Richie Benaud and Alan Davidson in our team at both Test and Sheffield Shield level. They were the difference between NSW and the other states, and also between Australia and everybody else.

As a cricketer, Richie was a wonderful all-rounder. As a captain, he established an attitude within his teams that changed the game. But to me his real success was as a person — as a man capable of understanding the people around him, of caring about their welfare, and of ensuring that they were all comfortable in the roles they had to fill.

I played my first Shield game in the 1954–55 season, as a fill-in for injured players; I was dropped after my first game, but was recalled as a late replacement for the NSW game against Len Hutton’s MCC touring side. ‘Late replacement’ hardly covers it, really. I was already at work, teaching at Hurlstone Agricultural High School, when the call came. By the time I caught a train to the city and then dashed to the ground, the match was half an hour old and NSW were three wickets down. I scored 74 not out, which suggested some sort of a future for me.

I played six out of seven NSW matches in the next season, but my record was modest. Keith Miller was captain for most games, and with men of the calibre of Jim Burke, Sid Carroll, Bob Simpson, Ian Craig, Bill Watson, Alan Davidson and Richie in the team, I did not really feel part of it.

It all changed in the match against Victoria at the SCG, when Miller was injured and Richie replaced him as captain. Before the game, Richie sidled up to me and said, ‘Sam, I want you to go out there today and score a century for me.’ To me, that was a career-changing vote of confidence. I fell 87 runs short of the ton, but that didn’t seem to matter. Here was my captain telling me I had the ability to make such a score, and that I could handle the responsibility that came with being a top-six batsman. From that point, I felt part of the team.

I can recall many examples like that where Richie seemed to read people’s minds, to know what they were feeling and what was needed to lift their confidence. He could also make a strong point in the most inoffensive way. In the NSW match against Ted Dexter’s MCC side in 1962–63, I went in at No. 4, after Bob Simpson and Norman O’Neill had each scored centuries, and the score was 2–250. By tea, I had hit a careful 20 not out.

‘Brian, I don’t mind you taking time over your innings so long as you go on and make a good score,’ Richie said to me at the break. ‘But if you use up a lot of overs and don’t get a good score you make the task of following batsmen that much harder.’ In other words: ‘Play for the team, not yourself. Get on with it, or get out!’

It was all part of Richie’s modus operandi — keep it interesting, look for a declaration, chase a result.

For those of us who shared our time in cricket with him, memories of Richie came flooding back in the weeks and months after he died. There was the second Test against England at the MCG in 1962–63, for instance, a Test England won handsomely. When the scores were tied and England still had seven second-innings wickets standing, Richie threw me the ball. ‘I’m going to give you the privilege of bringing this Test match to a close,’ he said. And so I got to bowl in a Test against England.

Colin Cowdrey was the batsman on strike, a half-century already under his belt. My first ball was medium-pace of respectable length. Colin played defensively, looked up and said with that gentlemanly air of his, ‘Well bowled, Brian.’ Second ball was pretty much the same. This time Colin stroked it effortlessly to the boundary for the winning runs. My Test match bowling analysis against England thereafter remained at two balls for four runs. But I had bowled in an Ashes Test, thanks to Richie. The fourth Test of the 1963–64 series against South Africa provided a great example of just how commanding Richie could be, with a minimum of fuss. Peter Burge had been run out just prior to lunch and soon after he returned to the dressing-room a discussion with Norman O’Neill, the other batsman, ensued. It was friendly enough to start with, but it slowly became more robust.

Richie rose to his feet, pulled on his blazer and announced to all and sundry, ‘I’m going down to lunch and when I come back I don’t want to hear any more about that run-out.’ Silence. A ceasefire was immediately called. Everybody pulled on their blazers and followed Richie. No more was said. Richie was in his final season and by this time had handed the Test captaincy to Bob Simpson, but his aura and his command remained intact. He had made a clear point about the danger of a team defeating itself from within.

Retaining the Ashes on the 1961 tour of England was perhaps Richie’s pièce de résistance, and it was no fluke. From the very start, he was meticulous in the way he planned it, and when he finally clinched that series — almost single-handedly through his 6–70 in the fourth Test — it was a brilliant piece of imaginative cricket.

We were the last team to travel to England by boat, and the long sea voyage could be both a trial and a benefit. Richie made the most of it. He appointed Graham McKenzie and myself to conduct calisthenics for the team every day, and with Neil Harvey and the third selector Colin McDonald he spent time planning every detail. He made it clear to us from our first team meeting that we were there to win, but that we would do so playing attacking cricket.

The fourth Test brought my first Test selection. Richie said to me at the nets the day before the game: ‘Congratulations, Brian, you are in the team for tomorrow. How does it feel to be playing your first Test?’

I replied that it was an honour, but I would try to treat it as just another game of cricket.

Richie looked at me quizzically. ‘I wish you well with that philosophy,’ he said.

I was soon to find out that Test cricket, especially against England, was not just another game of cricket. This was especially true of the game I immediately found myself in. It was the most remarkable match I ever played in — we did not look like getting out of it until after tea on the last day, when Richie turned on his magic ‘round the wicket’ spell that won the game.

I scored 46 in our first innings and only nine in our second as we battled for runs. I was feeling pretty down. Richie sat down beside me and said in his quiet, deliberate way: ‘Disappointed? Forty-six in the first innings and nine in the second is 55 runs. If all our batsmen had contributed in this way we would not be in the trouble that we are at present.’ I was encouraged by that. History has it that Davo and Graham McKenzie put on 98 for the last wicket, and that Richie turned the game Australia’s way on the last afternoon when all seemed lost. I was standing nearby when he had the critical conversation with vice-captain Neil Harvey where they resolved there was no hope of saving that game … we had to try to win it.

When we played Western Australia in Sydney early in the 1963–64 season, WA scored 420 batting first, then Richie declared the NSW first innings at 1–425 after Bob Simpson had scored 247 and Grahame Thomas 127. After Western Australia batted again we were left to chase 262 in less than four hours to win. Richie asked me during the lunch break on the final day whether I would like to open the batting in our second innings. I told him I was easy, that I didn’t mind where I batted. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you don’t open you might not get a bat at all, and if we are going to win the Shield we can’t do it on just two people’s performances.’ I finished up 169 not out, and we got the runs we needed for the loss of only one wicket. I got his point on both counts.

Richie’s last first-class game for NSW was against South Australia in Adelaide that season. He had a great farewell, scoring 76 and 120 not out, and taking five wickets in a game that we eventually won by six runs after Simmo declared our second innings at 5–390, setting them 321 to win. It was my very great pleasure to bat with Richie in his final innings, in which we compiled an unbroken partnership of 221, and as we left the field I told Richie what a privilege it had been to bat with him that day. I had much to thank him for — his mateship, his captaincy and the many lessons that he had taught me about the game, especially the spirit in which you should play the game and the value of teamwork.

When Richie died in April 2015, Daphne and the Benaud family asked me to conduct the service at his cremation. It was a private and moving occasion. I said there that Richie had touched and enriched my life — and the lives of countless others — in more ways than he would have known.

His legacy will endure.

IAN MECKIFF

Ian Meckiff played 18 Tests for Australia between 1957 and 1963, taking 45 wickets. A left-armer of good pace, he was particularly effective against England in 1958–59, taking 6–38 to scuttle England for 87 in their second innings of the second Test. His success created a storm among the visiting journalists, who accused him of throwing. Ian’s career ended in the first Test against South Africa in 1963– 64, at the Gabba, when umpire Col Egar called him four times for throwing in his first over. Richie declined to bowl him again, and Ian retired at the end of the game. Claims of conspiracy were rampant — that Ian had been set up as a public relations scapegoat — but the Victorian accepted his fate with good grace and remained firm friends with both the umpire and his captain.

THE FIRST TIME I shared a cricket field with Richie Benaud was a Sheffield Shield game in Melbourne over Christmas in 1956, and the match finished in the competition’s first ever tie. Seven of us on the field that day — Richie, Alan Davidson and Norm O’Neill from NSW and Neil Harvey, Colin McDonald, Lindsay Kline and myself from Victoria — were at the Gabba four years later, involved in the first Test match tie as well. I have always looked upon that as an amazing historical coincidence, more so for me because I took the final wicket to tie the Shield game, and I was last man out in the dramatic final over in Brisbane.

Shield games between NSW and Victoria were no holds barred in those days, but my first impressions of Richie set him apart from most of the other players. I was very young and I remember him being very welcoming to young players coming through, no matter which side they were on. And he was always good-humoured.

I scored 55 in our first innings of that first game — top scored, actually — but my batting was never especially commanding, and I got most of my runs with spooning shots that just managed to get over the fieldsmen’s heads. Richie told me with a smile that I had ‘the best nine-iron shots in the business’. By modern standards, it would perhaps be considered a sledge, worthy of glares and stares and sharp words in response. In those days, it was pleasant banter. We both laughed.

I made the Australian team not long after, first for a short trip to New Zealand and then for a Test series in South Africa. Ian Craig was made captain for both tours, somewhat controversially, but Richie and Neil Harvey were looked upon as senior players and to newcomers in the team like Lindsay Kline, Bob Simpson, Wally Grout and myself they were great mentors.

Richie had first made the Test side in 1951–52, but it was at about the time of my arrival that he really started to dominate. Most of the established men of the early 1950s — Keith Miller, Lindsay Hassett, Arthur Morris, Bill Johnston and the like — had retired and Richie, Neil Harvey and Alan Davidson became the core of the team. Neil was my Victorian captain at the time and I knew how much he knew about cricket, but when he teamed up with Richie they were unbeatable as a leadership team. Neil helped Richie a lot, a fact Richie always acknowledged.

Richie assumed the captaincy in 1958–59, the season Peter May’s England team came to Australia. Much has been said about how adventurous he was, and how he inspired attacking cricket, and that is certainly true. But I always thought a real key to that series was the resentment felt by men like Benaud and Harvey, Jim Burke and Colin McDonald, who had been on the 1956 tour of England and felt dudded. Off-spinner Jim Laker took 19 wickets to rout Australia in the Manchester Test of that series, on a disgraceful pitch that the Australians considered had been deliberately prepared to make them fail.

Richie was always wary of pitches in foreign fields. When we went to India and Pakistan in 1959–60 we had to play two Tests on mats. They promised us a turf wicket for the first Test in Dacca, but Richie had been misled about pitches often enough and accepted their assurance with a ‘We’ll see.’ When we got there the ‘pitch’ was a yellow strip of hard-baked mud. We would be playing on a mat, so Richie sent 12th man Lindsay Kline to the ground at 9am every morning to ensure that the mat was laid tight, without ripples to help their seam bowlers.

That was a hard tour. I think the PM, Bob Menzies, had cooked it up as diplomatic fare for still-emerging nations. When we played at Karachi, again on a mat, the American president Dwight Eisenhower turned up. He was also on a diplomatic mission. We had slugged away all morning without taking a wicket, but as soon as the president arrived three fell quickly. He was only scheduled to stay a couple of hours, but when Richie met him he asked him if he could stay a bit longer, given the difference his appearance had made to our wicket haul.

We played eight Tests on that tour — three against Pakistan and five against India — and by the end of it we had only 12 fit players. A few had returned to Australia, ill with hepatitis. I had roomed with Lindsay Kline and relied on him as my morning wake-up call. By the last Test against India he was on his way home too, and it was only a late call from Gavin Stevens that got me out of bed. I dressed hurriedly and raced to the ground, but I was still about an hour late.

Nobody had missed me in the foyer as they headed for the bus. Nobody had missed me in the dressing-room. When the players took the field the ball was left on the turf for me to bowl the first over. It just sat there until it dawned on our captain that he had only 10 players. When I did arrive, Richie was surprisingly light on admonishment. ‘Meckiff, you can bowl,’ he said. And bowl … and bowl … and bowl. He kept me on for the rest of the session. I played in the Australian team on and off for seven seasons. There was pressure along the way, given the way the English press attacked me over my action when I took wickets against them in 1958–59. Throwing was a bit of a cause célèbre at the time, with a string of players in a number of countries under pressure. I was one of them.

Richie never stopped supporting me through that period. He told me that he had no problem with my action. His responsibility, he reckoned, was to keep the team focused, working together, and he would have defended any of us against outside attack. But when my situation came to a head in the Brisbane Test against South Africa in 1963 the trends were pretty clear. After I had been called the third time, he came to me and said, ‘I think we’ve got a problem.’

I told him I sort of knew that. ‘Just get through the over, finish as you want,’ he said.

Richie wore some flak afterwards for not bowling me from the other end and testing the second umpire. But he had his principles. An umpire had made a call and he was not going to question that. I think we all knew the die had been cast anyway. The dramas of that afternoon in no way affected my relationship with him. Whenever I bumped into him in later years he was always on for a chat. We had a big lunch in Melbourne for the 50th anniversary of the Tied Test and I asked him down for that. He gave a wonderful talk.

Richie was a man who knew what players needed. He also knew what the public wanted. I think his experience as a journalist was a big part of that. It was reflected for years after his cricket finished in his role as a commentator, where that deft combination of knowledge, appropriate silence and a quirky sense of humour made him the best there’s ever been.

BARRY JARMAN

Barry Jarman represented Australia between 1957 and 1969. For much of that time he was understudy to Wally Grout, but he did play 19 Tests and captained Australia in the Headingley Test of the 1968 Ashes series. Jarman appeared in 94 first-class matches for South Australia from 1955 to 1969, made three Ashes tours and played Tests against England, India, Pakistan, South Africa and the West Indies. He later became an ICC match referee.

IT’S A WHILE AGO now, but there was a time when Richie and I dabbled in horse racing. We did have some modest success, but it is also fair to say that we had some rotten luck. It started in the early 1960s when Jack ‘Slinger’ Nitschke, who had been a handy cricketer for South Australia about the time of Bradman and played a couple of Tests, set us up with the lease of a gelding. Richie, Norm O’Neill, Ray Steele, who had been the treasurer on our 1961 Ashes tour, and myself had asked Slinger what he could find for us, because Slinger was a top breeder and he knew about these things.

‘Geez,’ he said. ‘Pity you didn’t ask me a week ago. I had a beauty.’

The beauty we missed out on was a filly called Proud Miss, who won 10 races in a row and finished up favourite for the Golden Slipper and ran second. That was our first bit of bad luck. Never mind, we finished up with a gelding called Sleep Walker, trained by Colin Hayes, who won a Coorong maiden handicap at Tailem Bend and an improvers at Balaklava before breaking down. While we had a lot of fun picking up the Coorong trophy, Richie was certainly never going to get rich on it. A fiver each way was about his limit.

Richie might not have been the most lavish punter but he loved the races, and when we worked out Sleep Walker wasn’t going to set the world alight we started looking for something else. A bit later we got hold of a stayer we called Trent Bridge. We ran it in a meeting at Gawler and thought it ran a reasonable fourth. But when the jockey got off it he told us it was no good and suggested we send it back to the owner in Perth. So we did. That was our second piece of bad luck.

In Perth the following year for a Sheffield Shield game, I looked through the paper for some form and found Trent Bridge was the top weight in the main race of the day. Further enquiry suggested not only was it a good thing, but that since we’d sent it home it had won seven races and was rated the best stayer seen in Perth for ages. We also discovered that when it had come fourth at Gawler, so offending our jockey, the secondplaced horse was Galilee, who went on to win the Caulfield- Melbourne Cup double in 1966. When Richie found out he just grunted. Never did use a lot of words.

We had a dabble, too, during the 1964 Ashes tour. I was reserve wicketkeeper on that tour and Richie was there as a journalist, having retired from first-class cricket earlier that year. The leading Victorian jockey Ron Hutchinson was riding in England at the time and he organised a lease for us of a thing called Pall-Mallann, which was by the sire Pall Mall, owned by the Queen. Richie had to be recorded as the official owner, because we cricketers on tour could hardly be seen to be racing horses on the side.

Now we had a bit of fun with Pall-Mallann. We raced it in green-and-gold silks that I’d brought from home, because they were the colours we always used and because they were the colours of Woodville, my Adelaide cricket club. We thought they were lucky and they were. Pall-Mallann won a race at Newmarket, which was pretty good, but unfortunately we were playing Yorkshire at Bradford at the time. The race was at 2.30 and Normie O’Neill was next in, so we sent a message out to Brian Booth and Peter Burge, as I remember it, not to get out before then, so that Normie could hear the race. When Pall-Mallann duly won there was a great hullabaloo from the dressing-room, which confused the crowd and the bowling side, but was great fun for us. Of greater moment was the disaster that befell Richie Benaud. He had promised to put a bet on for the trainer, Sid Dale, but forgot. Rich faced a difficult negotiation to placate poor Sid.

Flushed with success, we then decided to have a go at leasing a greyhound. It was called Social Mac and its owner was Colin Cowdrey, a great English Test batsman for more than 20 years, who liked the dogs and the races. Colin’s second wife, in fact, was a horse trainer who later on won a Caulfield Cup with a 66–1 long shot, helped considerably by an Irish jockey who knocked half the field out of the way in running, but managed to salve the pain of a hefty suspension with the fruits of victory. Anyway, Social Mac won a race at Catford in London and Richie was delighted, as we all were. We felt our racing adventures had been well worth the punt, as it were.

On the cricket field, our luck had always been similarly fickle, coming and going in erratic fashion. There was the time, for instance, when Richie and I were batting at Edinburgh in a match against Scotland in 1961. It had drizzled rain all day, as it often did, but we played anyway and we were going along nicely when Richie lofted one into the outfield. We had crossed as the ball headed for the rope, and when we saw it jump over the rope we stopped mid-pitch for a chat. Somebody threw the ball back, the keeper broke the wicket, and we were informed with great glee that Richie had run himself out.

Then there was the matter of the lucky tie. When I started as a kid with South Australia, it sort of got to me that the heavyweights in the team, like Ian McLachlan and John Lill, would always come to the game in their old school ties, as was the way of it with the lads of colleges like St Peter’s and Prince Alfred. My old school was Thebarton Technical High School, which was not quite so highbrow, but I figured if I could get a tie from there I would be part of the crowd. So I went to the school and asked the principal for a tie. He got me to talk to the boys and then sold me a tie for seven shillings and sixpence.

I took that tie to England and when we were in big trouble in the Old Trafford Test, nine down in our second innings and only about 150 to the good, I took the tie and hung it around a light hanging down in the dressing-room and said, ‘That’ll change our luck.’ Straightaway Davo hit a six, and he and Garth McKenzie put on 98 for the last wicket. That allowed Richie to work his magic in England’s second innings, taking six wickets. England were all out for 201 and we won by 54. Richie grabbed hold of me at the end of the game and said I was never to come to another match on tour without hanging the old Thebby Tech tie with due ceremony. It was lucky, he said.

Mind you, Richie and I were due some good luck. Aside from the racehorses, we had some shocking luck — or at least I did — right at the start of my career, when we were on tour in New Zealand in 1957. During our final game in Auckland, Richie was batting at practice and I was to be the next batsman in the nets. They called ‘last two’ (meaning Richie would receive two more deliveries), and I bent down to grab my bat just as Richie decided to finish his net with a flourish against our left-arm spinner Lindsay Kline. He smashed the ball straight to where I was getting ready to have a hit, Lindsay yelled ‘look out’ and I lifted my head just in time to see the ball about two feet in front of my right eye. The result was four facial fractures, several days in hospital and for Peter Burge the new experience of wicketkeeping in a first-class match. Richie was devastated and came to see me in hospital each night after the day’s play. And when I got home he wrote me a lovely letter in which he promised never to bat in the nets again when I was in the vicinity.

Richie was a great captain and a fine man. I had a mate, John ‘Squizzy’ Taylor, who was a budding leg-spinner, and early on — I must have been about 20 — I took him to the Adelaide Oval on the morning of a Shield match against NSW and asked Richie if he could have a look at him. It must have been not much more than 15 minutes before the game, but Richie came out to the nets and watched Squizzy for about 10 minutes. Then he spoke with him and generally made him feel very important and much more enlightened about the mysteries of leg-spin. Richie was that sort of bloke.

I consider myself very lucky to have known him.

NARI CONTRACTOR

Australia played Test matches in India on two tours during Richie’s career, in 1956–57 and 1959–60. One man who appeared in both these series was Nari Contractor, who scored 108 in the third Test at Bombay (now Mumbai) in the first week of 1960 and then went on to captain his country in 12 Tests. The two men who dismissed Nari most often (six times) in Tests were the West Indies’ Wes Hall and … Richie Benaud.

WHEN ONE TALKS ABOUT the great all-rounders in the game, Richie Benaud can’t be too far down the list headed by Sir Garfield Sobers.

I am not going by statistics. Mere figures don’t do justice to Richie’s batting, bowling, quicksilver fielding, astute captaincy and overall flair. I saw all these qualities from the field of play over three Test matches in the 1959-60 season at home.

However, the first time I saw Richie play was on the Ian Johnson-led Australia tour of India in 1956–57. They landed in the subcontinent after their disappointing 1956 Ashes series — matches in which Benaud did not exactly set the Thames on fire with his leg-spin bowling.

I played in the last Test of the 1956–57 series, in Calcutta, and while Richie took a number of wickets, there wasn’t anything in his performance to suggest that he would go on to become a great all-rounder. I say this even though he trapped me leg before wicket for 22 in the first innings. I thought he bowled far too many loose balls and some of our batsmen played rash shots. But we were aware that Keith Miller, among others, felt he was a star in the making.

When Richie returned to India in 1959–60 as captain and the side’s premier all-rounder, he was an absolutely different cup of tea. His accuracy had developed manifold, his faster one was really quick. We had thought our leg-spinner, Subhash Gupte, was uniquely accurate but Richie was now equally spot on. He was also remarkably consistent for a wrist-spinner. Great bowler that he was, Gupte could be brilliant one day and benevolent to the opposition the very next.

Richie must have worked endlessly to perfect his art. This labour, I am sure, was the reason he was now a completely different bowler from the one I saw in 1956–57. He could bowl the ball that he wanted to bowl in whatever situation he found himself in, and he kept getting wickets. Of course, he was always a very good fielder — we in India had all read about his stunning catch in the gully to dismiss Colin Cowdrey at Lord’s in 1956.

Many years later, I read about the advice Richie got from Bill O’Reilly, which I’m sure was pivotal to his future success. In 1953, on Richie’s first tour to England, O’Reilly told him to concentrate on a ‘fiercely spinning leg break’. O’Reilly added that it would take him four years to see the results. Was Richie’s performance on the 1959–60 tour to India a result of that advice? It could well be, but let’s not forget that he had to be good enough and dedicated enough to successfully implement O’Reilly’s instruction.

I believe the same advice was passed on to Shane Warne when he approached Richie for some tips in the early 1990s. Of course, as Richie was glad to report, Warne took only two years to reap the rewards.

In the first Test at Delhi in December 1959, after enjoying figures of 3–0 in the first innings, Richie emerged as our tormentor-in-chief in the second innings. My opening partner, Pankaj Roy, was on 99, when Richie noticed his discomfort against the left-arm spinner Lindsay Kline. He stationed himself at short-leg, where Pankaj was caught off the very next ball.

As much as he fostered team spirit in his own side, Richie was always willing to appreciate the efforts of the opposition. I remember the Australian team’s applause near the pavilion after Jasu Patel and Polly Umrigar (4–27) bowled us to victory in the Kanpur Test. Jasu had followed up his 9–69 in the first innings with 5–55 in the second and Polly took 4–27 as we won against Australia for the first time. Richie and his teammates came to our dressing-room to congratulate us. There was that genuineness about it and no ‘put-ons’ just for the camera. ‘There was not the slightest doubt within our team that we had been beaten by a better side and it was a matter now of organising ourselves for the next game,’ he wrote later in his autobiography, and I know from having been there that he meant every word of that.

That was the first and last time we won a Test in that series. And while we may have beaten the Australians in Kanpur, it shouldn’t be forgotten that they bowled us out cheaply on the first day. Richie started it all by getting the first two wickets of the innings — Polly Umrigar and myself before lunch. From 38 for no wicket, we slumped to 152 all out.

Richie was invariably very polite and endearing to the opposition after play. If you asked him a question, you could be assured of an honest view, which was a different response from that of other opposition captains we encountered. There was no issue-ducking where Richie was concerned.

We kept in touch after 1959–60 through New Year’s cards and letters. I met him in person for the last time near the commentary box at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai during the India v Australia World Cup match in 1996. I loved his commentary and summaries. He was always precise in his observations and to the point, he never praised anyone without merit and he did not indulge in unwarranted criticism. He played with a straight bat. In his passing, Australian and world cricket lost an icon. And I lost a friend.

BOB SIMPSON

Bob Simpson was one of a number of young cricketers who followed Richie into the NSW and Australian teams of the 1950s. He would also succeed Richie as Test captain. He played 52 Tests between 1957 and 1968, and then returned in 1977–78, at age 41, to lead Australia at home against India and on a West Indies tour after many of the country’s best cricketers joined World Series Cricket. Bob coached the Australian team with much success from 1986 to 1996.

I WAS 17 YEARS old when I first played Sheffield Shield cricket with Richie Benaud. It was NSW versus Queensland at the Gabba in November 1953. I’d played a couple of Shield games the previous season when the Test players were away, but this was my ‘debut’ with the full-strength team. It was also my first experience of Keith Miller as NSW captain.

Queensland won the toss and batted on what was a dry pitch. Ray Lindwall and Jack Clark, a right-arm fast-medium bowler from the Paddington club, opened the bowling. Then, after just five overs of pretty uneventful cricket, Keith suddenly brought Richie into the attack.

‘But Nugget, the ball’s still new,’ said Richie.

‘Don’t worry about that, it’ll soon be old,’ Keith shot back. ‘Just think about the field you want.’

The look on Richie’s face betrayed the fact that he wasn’t convinced, so Keith added, ‘It’s all right. It’ll spin like a top for an hour. We’ve got a great chance to bowl ’em out.’

It took no time at all for Richie to prove that Keith had read the wicket exactly right, and soon my captain was walking over to me with the ball in his hand. ‘Your turn to bowl, young Bobby,’ he said.

Somewhat shocked, but delighted, I got through my first three overs. But then Keith walked over and enquired, ‘Why am I yet to see your excellent wrong ’un?’

‘I seem to have lost it for the time being,’ I replied.

‘In that case,’ he said dismissively, ‘you can piss off until you find it.’

So it was sadly back to first slip for me, from where I saw Richie take five wickets before lunch.

Richie was a good bowler in those days, but a fair way from the great leg-spinner he’d become. The turning point, I’m sure, came in South Africa in 1957–58. I can still picture him at the Wanderers Ground in Johannesburg on that tour, bowling in the nets for hours on end, trying to land his spinners on a handkerchief he’d positioned on a good length. Richie would bowl 10 or 12 deliveries and then a local schoolboy would duck into the net, gather up the balls and returned them to him so he could aim at that handkerchief again.

For the rest of his career Richie was renowned for his accuracy. He turned himself into a magnificent bowler. His strength was his length, which was relentless. I imagine there are very few wrist-spinners in the history of Test cricket who have conceded fewer runs per over.

He was quicker than most leg-spinners, with a good arm ball and a good flipper, which sometimes made it hard for me at first slip because I liked to stand as close as possible to the batsman on the basis that it is better to drop a catch than for the ball to not carry. Occasionally, when a batsman slashed at his quicker one, the ball struck me hard in the chest and I had to grab the rebound. I remember catching Garry Sobers off Richie’s bowling in this way during the second Test of the 1960–61 series.

Of course, Richie — as our captain and, with Alan Davidson, the leader of our bowling attack — was pivotal to the Australian team’s success during the ‘Benaud era’, but he was not a one-man band. The team was full of famous names — Davo, Neil Harvey, Norm O’Neill, Colin McDonald, Jimmy Burke, Bill Lawry, Ian Meckiff, to name a few. Two of the unsung heroes, who both had big influences on Richie, were Ian Craig and Wally Grout.

Ian was our captain in South Africa. He’d been a controversial choice ahead of Harv and Richie, but he did a superb job. Ian was a very astute on-field skipper and a great public speaker; each of us felt very proud to be a member of a team led by him. He was very encouraging of all the players in our squad, as Richie would be after him. Both men genuinely cared about how the team was travelling, and nothing was too much trouble for them. A lot of people think the revival of the Australian team of the late 1950s came about under Richie, but that’s not strictly true. Ian Craig was in charge when we stunned South Africa 3–0, and Richie then built on what his predecessor had started. They were both good and kind men, and great leaders.

The best wrap I can give for Wally Grout is to say that I can remember all the catches he dropped. There were very, very few. Wally was a masterful wicketkeeper, especially up to the stumps, and he had this amazing ability to make difficult catches look easy, which often masked his skill. When you watch the film of the crucial catch he took off Richie’s bowling to dismiss Ted Dexter on the last day at Old Trafford in 1961 it looks pretty simple — until you take into account the fact that the pitch was turning, Richie was bowling around the wicket, it was his quicker one and it wasn’t really pitched short enough for Dexter to cut. Wally gloved it with no fuss, threw it a few yards in the air and Dexter, the dangerman, was on his way. It could only have helped Richie’s self-confidence — which was already strong — to have such a genius behind the stumps.

Wally gave enormous support to Ian and Richie as captain, and he was the same with me when I replaced Richie during the series against South Africa in Australia in 1963–64. The circumstances of my taking over as skipper were a little unusual in that we knew Richie was retiring at the end of the season but then he broke a finger in a grade game and had to miss the second Test. Initially, I was appointed as a ‘caretaker’ captain but then Richie suggested that because he was giving it away it would be best if I stayed in charge, with him continuing as a senior player. I must admit that at first I wasn’t sure this was going to work: one, because I thought I’d stress about whether I was giving him a fair go; and two, because it can be hard to back your own instincts when your former boss is right behind you. I thought it would be like a student taking over while the teacher sat in the front row. But Richie was brilliant, very helpful and always happy to share his knowledge without ever forcing it upon me. As a bowler-captain, he’d had the happy knack of neither over-bowling nor under-bowling himself; now, as a former captain, he always seemed to know the right time to offer an opinion. And he was as enthusiastic as ever.

Though he never said anything to me, I will always think that Richie played a part in my appointment as Australian captain. He was close to Sir Donald Bradman, who was hugely influential in those days, and he was also a man of firm opinions. In this regard, he was just like Keith Miller. If Richie had genuinely thought I wasn’t up to the job, he would have said so.

Richie was also, beyond question, a man of courage. I saw that many times on the cricket field, and I saw it again after he retired, when he covered Australia’s 1965 tour of the West Indies as a journalist. Moving from the field of the play to the press box is not always easy — suddenly you are placed in a position where you have to pass judgment on former teammates. But Richie was always fair in his criticisms. I can’t recall a time when a story written by him upset me or anyone in the Australian dressing-room.

In the Caribbean, he wrote some articles, supported by his own photographs, that questioned the legality of the bowling action of the West Indies’ paceman Charlie Griffith. For Richie, reporting the facts as he saw them was a matter of principle, and I thought he showed plenty of guts in running with the story. I know it put him offside with the local fans and pressmen, and he was also criticised by some powerful people in West Indies cricket, including Sir Frank Worrell. But the game needed people of conviction like Richie to highlight that there was something happening on the field that needed fixing. Gradually from this point, the problem of throwing disappeared from international cricket, at least for a couple of generations.

On a personal level, I appreciated the fact that he never put me in a difficult situation by discussing the articles with me or tipping me off that they were going to appear. A comment from the Australian captain might have added to the story but he never sought it. We were, at the time, in the middle of a Test. Even at a stressful time like this, he was as considerate as ever.

SAGA OF THE BOOTS

Richie Benaud always took great pride in his shoes. Gucci was a favoured provider and from his days as a young man, whatever the brand, he always kept them polished to a military shine. Of course, this — and the fact he liked to place them so he could slip straight into them after he’d showered and changed at the end of a day’s play — proved something of an invitation to irreverent teammates.

For years, Richie sought a confession from the miscreants who nailed his shoes to the floor at the end of a Test at the SCG back in the early 1960s. He challenged Frank Misson only a few years ago, to ‘nail the blame’ as he put it. Misson allowed only that he was an accomplice, and that blame might more justifiably be sheeted to a lanky Victorian of jovial disposition. As the stories were told after Richie’s passing, Bill Lawry finally owned up:

We’ve heard a lot about how Richie thought before he spoke … he did everything in slow motion. Well, that’s wonderful when he’s broadcasting or writing for the papers, but not so wonderful when you’re at the end of the game waiting for the bus and Richie would always be last.

I must admit at the time I was making a few runs — it was not the sort of thing you’d do if you were out of form — but there was some building going on at the SCG, so I picked up a hammer and two three-inch nails while Richie was having his shower and I nailed his shoes to the floor.

All my teammates, courageous as they were, ran off. And Richie comes out, puts on his underpants … his shirt, his tie and everything … checks the Brylcreem and the lips … has a bit of a walk around [in his socks]. Finally, he’s dressed and he puts his feet into his shoes … and he can’t move.

And he turns around and says, ‘Bloody Frank Misson!’

It was not the only time Richie’s shoes became the target when teammates were getting mischievous, and practical jokers were looking for a laugh. Alan Davidson recounts a tale from the 1961 Ashes tour, when Richie was being Richie:

Richie had seen a picture of Bradman at the toss at Lord’s in 1948, and Bradman was not in cricket boots, but wore a pair of fancy brogues. It so impressed Richie he took himself off to Simpsons of Piccadilly and paid 40 pounds, huge money in those days, for a pair of brogues, just so that he could wear them at the toss as Bradman had done. Richie decided to give them their first hit-out at Lord’s, as I remember it, in a match against the MCC. They sat on the dressing-room floor as Richie went through his painstaking dress routine, ready to be slipped into …

Now, here’s where another great mystery has grown surrounding Richie’s shoes. Davo recalls them getting the nail-to-the-floor treatment, too, although his fingered villains, Lawry and Misson, will own up to one nailing scandal, and one only, and that was in Sydney. But as Davo tells it, whatever happened to those fancy brogues triggered remorse in Richie’s teammates … once the laughter had ceased, of course. He continues:

Richie said nothing. Just put on his cricket boots and went out to toss. The shoes were wrecked, so we raided the team fund to buy him a new pair. He was undoubtedly furious, but he never let on. It was an age when we always knew when fun was fun and when respect within your team, and for the opposition, was genuine and seen to be genuine.