Bob Willis - Bob Willis: A Cricketer and a Gentleman

Bob Willis

A Cricketer and a Gentleman

Bob Willis and Mike Dickson

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright beneficiary of the Estate of Bob Willis 2020

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A CIP catalogue record for this title

is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN 978 1 529 34134 8

eBook ISBN 978 1 529 34135 5

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

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50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

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This book is dedicated to those whose lives

have been devastated by prostate cancer.

Contents

Its all over. And it is one of the most fantastic

victories ever known in Test cricket history.

Richie Benaud, Headingley, 1981

Foreword

By Sir Ian Botham

Not a day goes by when I do not think of Bob Willis, someone so central not just to my career, but to my whole life. I think of Bob the cricketer, the fellow commentator and pundit, the wine lover, music fan and enthusiast for so many of the finer things in life. Most of all, however, I think of Bob the man, and the enduring friendship that was to be a constant through almost all my adult years.

Among the vast store of memories, one that stands out above most others is when I first properly met him, just prior to my Test debut in 1977 at Trent Bridge as a twenty-one-year-old. Never one to be overcome with nerves, I was nonetheless slightly anxious. I was walking out to our net session the day before when I felt this big hand on my shoulder, belonging to someone I barely knew.

Just relax and enjoy it. Youre going to be fine, Bob told me.

As the day, and the match, progressed he went out of his way to make me feel comfortable. Him being a senior player, it left quite an impression. This sort of thing gets passed down the generations, and I resolved that when I got some kind of seniority I would try and behave in the same way to the new lads coming into the team.

Almost exactly forty years later, to the day, I was delighted to see Bob had been named by the ICC in the all-time England Test team, as voted by the fans to mark the 1,000th match being played.

Make no mistake, Bob was one of the very finest bowlers and that rarity, a genuine English quick. He used his height well and had real pace if there was any bounce in the wicket he would extract it. I used to stand in the slips to him and very quickly I recognised that you needed to position yourself a couple of extra steps back. He was different from those other great England bowlers, Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad, in that he was a bang-it-in-the-wicket fast bowler. While he had that monster run-up for a lot of his career, it was also noticeable that he could be quick off fewer paces as well.

We would play 60 Tests together and take 476 wickets between us over a seven-year period. I loved opening the bowling with Bob. You could never complain when you had someone like that bowling at the other end. It is worth remembering that he would have taken even more wickets had there been neutral umpires for his whole career, especially as he played so many Tests in Australia, although we could all claim to have suffered a bit through that.

The fact that he played at a high level for so long was a testament to what a fighter he was, and not just in the sense that you knew he was always up for the battle. Bob was a bit wary of his own body and, because of the pounding his knees took on his approach to the crease, he often had to play through pain. I used to refer to his knees as Spaghetti Junction, as there were that many lines criss-crossing them, thanks to his operations. The surgical techniques were not as sophisticated at the time: it was more get the carving knife out and off we go. It is often forgotten that he nearly died because of a thrombosis caused by one of the operations.

His batting was brave, too. It gave hours of amusement watching him, and whenever he got to 20 it felt like a hundred. It was not elegant, but lacked nothing in determination.

Of course, to me he was much more than a bowling partner, and often he served as a mentor and big-brother figure. If I had a problem, on or off the field, we could sit down with a bottle of wine and talk it through. I did not lack self-confidence, whereas Bob was maybe a bit the other way, so we were quite good for each other like that. We could talk about the game or about our lives away from it, the good and the bad. I trusted him and he was always there.

In these pages the many dimensions of Bobs character emerge, some of them less obvious to people who did not really know him. He was a relatively shy person by nature, and did not suffer fools. Some might have thought he was opinionated or miserable, but he was not like that at all and had this wonderful dry humour.

He also had a great sense of curiosity and was always up for organising things or doing something new. On one tour of Pakistan he decided not to take the team bus to the ground but instead rode as a pillion passenger on one of the police motorbikes. There he was, towering over the driver, a good yard taller. When he got to the ground, his hair was like a giant cobweb and the police rider was grinning from ear to ear.

That was another thing about Bob: he was great with ordinary people and had no airs and graces. Although he could count lots of famous friends from the world of cricket and way beyond that, he was always interested in people and their lives, whatever they did. I recall us driving up north around the time of the miners strike and being held up at a roadblock we had to wait for an extra half-hour while Bob talked to everyone because he wanted to find out what was going on.

He was a lot of fun to be around. In our playing days, we had our regular watering holes to relax in all round the country, whether it was pints of Timothy Taylors at The Junction in Otley during Headingley matches, or the Number 15 wine bar in Manchester for Old Trafford games. Wherever we were in the world, if Bob Dylan was playing within a 300-mile radius, I would get dragged along.

After our playing days were over and we worked on television together, there were rounds of golf at Wentworth or Sunningdale unlike his bowling action, nobody ever copied Bobs swing followed by some very long lunches. On tour for Sky, there was the simple pleasure of playing cards during rain delays, or exploring what the local wine producers had to offer. He knew his stuff about a lot of subjects and had a proper knowledge of wine.

The thing he knew more about than anything, though, was cricket. Not just the technical side of the game he was also well ahead of his time with his ideas about how it should be run. He would write these papers and get me to read them to see what I thought about his vision for four-day cricket, different divisions or other matters. I felt it was a great shame that the authorities did not listen to him enough, because usually what he came up with was pretty sound.

Just as he was irreplaceable as a player, he was unique as a commentator and pundit on TV. Some may have thought he was negative, but I knew how much he cared, and how proud as punch he was when England did well. The Verdict became his niche, and it built up a large cult following, with lots of people I know making sure they recorded it if they could not see it live. Players would watch it, and doubtless some of them would be hoping that it was not their number coming up that night. It was born out of his passion for the game.