MARK REASON

OPINION: Last week the alchemist Brendon Bracewell came to Rathkeale College, a charmed place for cricket, with a speed gun. He wanted to turn base metal into gold. Somewhere out there in New Zealand is the once and future king, the boy who will become myth, a fast bowler to haunt the dreams of batsmen.

Yes, it’s romantic stuff, but that’s the nature of cricket. No sport has so wide a gap between the reality and the perception. Fast bowling is bloody hard work. It is also a thing of shimmering beauty.

The great divide between hard yakka and that menacing state of grace is why the great fast bowlers of history – a line from Harold Larwood through Michael Holding and Richard Hadlee to the present day – now seem immortals.

Larwood, the English bowler from between the wars, came out of the Nottingham pits to terrorise the world. He was timed at over 160kmh. Duncan Hamilton writes in his wonderful biography that a few overs of Larwood at his fastest were like a public stoning.

Asked about the secret of fast bowling Larwood said: “Practise and then practise again. Too many cricketers don’t practise hard or long enough.” The mythical secrets were a childhood spent walking 16 kilometres a day, a barrel of beer and a slice of Red Leicester at lunch and a pinch of snuff out of the left trouser pocket before he bowled.

Larwood was like “the slaughterman in the abattoir” and “keeper George Duckworth used to put raw strips of beef in his gloves to soften the blow of the ball. George Brown wore a woman’s padded cloche hat for protection and No11 Horace Hazell walked to the crease humming Nearer my God to Thee.

The Aussies sang about Larwood: “Oh, they’d be a lot calmer, In Ned Kelly’s armour, When Larwood the wrecker begins.” Years later Bruce Edgar got his mother to sew up a chest pad and he made his own thigh pad with extra foam in order to face the West Indies bowlers.

Edgar said: “The challenge was beating the fear factor so you could focus on playing as opposed to being scared.” Even Don Bradman was accused of being “yellow” as on and on through history galloped the horsemen of the fast bowling Apocalypse.

Lillee and Thomson ran in like War and Death, Wasim Akram and Imran Khan and Waqar Younis gave out nothing but pain with their crushing reverse swing. But above them all stand the great West Indies bowlers who dominated world cricket from the late 1970s through to the 1990s.

They are immortalised in the film Fire in Babylon. Watch it if you can – not for the rather tedious retrospective abasement of liberal post-colonial guilt, but for the sheer thrill of watching these men tear the souls out of the cowering batsmen.

Colin Croft remembers: “We were called terrorists.” And so they were, but not before the Windies had been battered and humiliated by Thomson and Lillee in Australia and by the racist chorus of the crowds.

Greg Chappell, the Australian captain at the time, said: “Fast bowlers all through history have been the difference between a good side and a great side. Thomson and Lillee are great bowlers.”

So they were, and so were Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Colin Croft, Joel Garner, Ian Bishop, Malcolm Marshall, Courtney Walsh, Curtly Ambrose, Patrick Patterson, Winston Benjamin and Wayne Daniel. That’s a complete team of terror.

Holding was known as “whispering death” because, like Larwood, he had the softest of approaches to the wicket. Roberts just looked mean. He said: “I am a warrior. Never show emotion so nobody knows what to expect.”

Roberts was also tagged the hitman. “I didn’t go out to hit people, just that a lot of people got hit.” Like Colin Cowdrey, Sadiq Mohammed, Majid Khan, all of whom suffered stress fractures of the cheek bone.

It is also worth remembering that the West Indies became the fittest team the world has known. As Hadlee said: “The success of any fast bowler depends on an efficient technique, superb fitness, wonderful skills and a big heart to dig deep in trying conditions when the batsman is dominant.”

I look at that list and I wonder. New Zealand has produced Hadlee and Shane Bond (sadly only 17 tests) in recent years, but who is next? Why hasn’t the Maori or Pacific community produced a great New Zealand fast bowler? Their explosive power is evident in the All Blacks.

Is it cultural? Do those communities turn to baseball and softball in the summer months? Is it that cricket lacked money until recent years? Is it declining numbers, a lack of opportunity in schools and a legacy of the exclusive colonial past?

I don’t know, but somewhere out there must be a great fast bowler. Somewhere out there must be a boy who wants to set fire to the world.

– © Fairfax NZ News