A fault in my understanding of Woodcock

In three recent posts, I have looked

1. firstly at the death of John Woodcock, whose writings in the 1985 and 1986 Wisden Notes by the Editor pushed me into a long-standing obsession with old county cricket
2. secondly at the views I acquired from my initial reading in the early to middle 1990s,
3. thirdly at how these have evolved as I have read more about old county cricket in older Wisdens and The Times

My brother, from whom I acquired the original 1985 Wisden, has always been somewhat critical of what I said ever since I first became obsessed with Woodcock’s 1985 Notes by the Editor. However, it has only been in the past few years, especially since the COVID pandemic has restricted me to reading online from the SLV and newspapers.com websites, that I have listened at all to my brother’s criticism.

Starting at the earliest writings of Woodcock, it is striking that his Times criticisms of the declining amount of spin bowling, which can be read on the first post in this series, do not appear related to the most rapid declines in the amount of spin bowled. In 1955, seventeen spinners were amongst 27 takers of 100 or more wickets. Five spinners in Tony Lock, Johnny Wardle, George Tribe, Bruce Dooland, and Fred Titmus took over 150 wickets, with Lock, Wardle, Titmus and Tribe being the four top wicket-takers with over 175. Three seasons later in 1958, there were only five spinners — Lock, Jim Laker, Tribe, Brian Langford and Cecil Cook – amongst eighteen bowlers with 100 wickets. By 1962 there were only four spinners — Titmus with 136 wickets, Ray Illingworth with 117, Don Shepherd with 114 and Lock with 108 — amongst 23 bowlers who took 100 wickets. Three pace bowlers in Derek Shackleton, Fred Truman and Len Coldwell took at least fifteen more wickets than Titmus, and five more pacemen took more wickets than Illingworth. Nevertheless, 1962 issues of The Times and The Guardian contain zero lamentations about declining spin bowling, although an aware cricket historian could have easily seen the replacement of spin bowling by short-of-a-length seam as an important cause of rapidly deteriorating county finances. Contrariwise, the following year’s Times issues contained many such lamentations, two of which I attached to the first post in this series.

All this begs a question: why did The Times start lamenting declining spin bowling in 1963, and not 1962, 1961, 1960, 1959 or 1958? Those seasons already exhibited the same decline in spin bowling Woodcock lamented in 1963 and continuously for a third of a century afterwards. The answer, my brother and I concluded, was that declining spin bowling was not the true concern of Woodcock, Norman Preston, Evelyn Wellings and other English cricket writers of the era. Rather, English cricket writers of the last third of the twentieth century were concerned that England was not winning. During the Thatcher era, the prospects of England regaining supremacy in the cricket world appeared dimmer and dimmer with each passing year, while the ruling class was deeply nostalgic for the days when England did rule the roost. The ruling class viewed England beating non-white nations as the order dictated by natural law, and abundant spin bowling became seen as the missing ingredient. Declining spin bowling thus became an excuse to explain England’s failure to match the West Indies in the middle 1960s, and most international opponents in the 1980s and 1990s. In reality, after World War Two spin bowling was never decisive in actual England series victories over India, Pakistan or the West Indies. Nevertheless, under the above presumption that a greatly reduced quantity of spin bowling in England constituted the critical difference, it paid for Wisden writers to lament the decline in spin as much as possible, and to imagine — if not explicitly, — that ancient spin bowlers could have broken the West Indies’ apparent invincibility because no 1980s team was exposed to anything beyond third-class spin bowling, and that on pitches rigged against the spinner.

How my established views on English cricket developed, 1995-2019

In my previous post I noted how reading 1980s and 1990s Wisdens, most especially the Notes by the Editor in the 1985 Wisden, during the 1990s provided me with a clearly defined worldview that has both cultivated a deep attachment to old county cricket and continued to shape my perception of the history of the game.

Reading older Wisdens, alongside further reading of 1990s Wisdens, certainly did alter my views somewhat, if never deeply.

‘Back to Grass Roots’ by David Green in the 2001 Wisden demonstrated that covered pitches were/are sufficiently rigged against the spin bowler that it is by no means certain that older spinners would have done any better than the exceedingly poor records of English spinners of the late 1990s. Green’s solitary concession was that he hinted that if spinners were able to use flighty trajectories – forbidden because of abundant limited-overs cricket – they might have been less unsuccessful. Later, reading from The Times in the State Library of Victoria, the Baillieu Library at Melbourne University and the Mathieson Library at Monash University would frequently show that pitches I had assumed favourable to batting because Wisden said nothing about them were actually highly favourable to the spin, and also pace, bowlers who obtained large numbers of wickets thereon.

As I collected 1950s and 1960s Wisdens during the 2000s, I made a more critical discovery: how declines in spin bowling were as pronounced and consistent in the years before one-day cricket became dominant as afterwards, and not something began by one-day cricket. 1960s Wisdens under Woodcock’s predecessor Norman Preston were equally alarmed at the declining number of spin bowlers as 1980s and 1990s issues. Most revealing is how Preston demonstrated that short-sighted changes aimed to make cricket more attractive – most especially the standard 75-yard (68.58-metre) boundary introduced in 1957 – actually made the game more defensive. This is because, as Bob Wyatt predicted before their introduction, they provided equal incentive for bowlers to bowl defensively as for batsmen to attack. Even then, cricket history showed attacking bowling as the prerequisite for attracting the requisite crowds for first-class cricket to pay its way. Preston also said that the lush green outfields which writers like Mike Selvey were so critical of in 1980s and 1990s Wisdens were well established by 1963. Dennis Compton in his 1968 ‘Batsmen Must Hit the Ball Again’ showed that the negative bowling so deplored by Woodcock in the 1980s was already dominant in the 1960s. This made it clear to me that English cricket administrators inadvertently accelerated declining attendances through hasty changes that encouraged crowd-repelling short-of-a-length medium pace bowlers and did not encourage crowd-attracting attacking spinners. These historical facts were omitted not only from Wisdens under the editorship of John Woodcock, Graeme Wright and Matthew Engel, but also from Wisden-published cricket histories which I read during the 1990s. In fact, the assumption of Vic Marks’ The Wisden Illustrated History of Cricket, which was as critical as the 1985 Wisden Notes by the Editor in cementing my views on old county cricket, was that negative bowling as a trend only began after one-day cricket started. So early as the 1956 and 1957 Wisdens – when English bowling was at its strongest during the twentieth century – there was concern about negative bowling with packed leg-side fields and bowling far outside leg stump. It became clear to me that English administrators were making mistakes even before one-day cricket was introduced. It was also clear to me that:

1. short-of-a-length medium pace became dominant in part because it was the easiest form of bowling to master
2. spin bowling declined because it was the most difficult form of bowling to master
3. social changes after the war, especially reduced leisure time and increased taxes, made it much more difficult for young Englishmen, Australians and New Zealanders to acquire the time needed to learn to bowl attacking spin really well

My next significant read was Derek Birley’s A Social History of English Cricket, in the middle 2010s at Latrobe Library and at the Baillieu. A Social History of English Cricket demonstrated that apart from the years immediately following the two World Wars county cricket’s financial position was always precarious. For instance the Northamptonshire and Gloucestershire county clubs would have almost certainly folded had first-class cricket continued into the 1915 season, rather than being halted by World War One. One can hint from the 1915 Wisden which I had read as my final 1894 to 1991 peacetime acquisitionthat several other clubs – particularly Worcestershire, Derbyshire and Somerset – would also have folded in the next few seasons. However, this failed to alter my perception radically, because:

1. the relative financial prosperity of county cricket after World War I and World War II agrees well with the theory that fast bowlers repel crowds and spin bowlers attract them, as fast bowling was unusually weak in both postwar periods
2. the financial decline of county cricket during the first half of the 1910s occurred during a period when England was stronger in fast and fast-medium bowling than at any point subsequently until the 1950s
3. county clubs had previously departed from first-class cricket
• Cambridgeshire in the late 1860s and 1870s
• Hampshire, Somerset and Derbyshire in the 1880s

The belief system that Woodcock (and Evelyn Wellings) gave me

In my previous post to commemorate the passing of former Wisden editor John Woodcock I noted how his aggressive criticism of contemporary English and Australian cricket in the 1985 and 1986 Wisden Notes by the Editor led me into a longstanding obsession with old county cricket.

What I want to discuss here is the belief system I have inherited from reading those Notes. Today, indeed, I will admit that my reaction, essentially amounting to

“Hey! This is something I did not know!”

and based on the notion that what was written was plain fact that the editors had directly observed – was too rapid and even thoughtless.

 More than that, my speeches mouthing 1980s Wisdens’ Notes By the Editor (alongside other comments) actually went far beyond what Woodcock or other Wisden writers like Evelyn Maitland Wellings said. The most memorable example of this was when in the 1990s I said that:

“if the 1985 Australians would not have finished in the first four in the [1985] County Championship, they [the 1985 Australians] would have finished last in the 1956 County Championship” [1956 being the year when Jim Laker achieved his record-breaking performances against the Australians]

The quote above reflects my assumption that standards in 1956 – when Jim Laker took 46 wickets in five Tests – were at least in spin bowling so much superior to 1985 that no 1985 team, not even Lloyd’s all-conquering West Indians, would have had the smallest chance of defeating the English spin bowlers of 1956. Don Bradman in the 1986 Wisden, and Ashley Mallett a dozen years later, both implicitly said that at all events on the pitches of 1956, Jim Laker and Tony Lock would definitely have defeated Lloyd’s West Indians. (What they actually said was that on pitches favourable to spin at the SCG, the Windies had failed against far less skilled spin bowlers than Laker, Lock or many other pre-1970 spinners were).

I would say loudly to those around me:

“it would take years for any 1980s team to adapt to the genuine tweaking spinners that existed in the 1950s. Laker and Lock would have demolished the West Indies’ invincibility”

Beyond the emotive rants and mouthings, I might summarise in point form what Woodcock told me, reinforced by other articles like the late Jack Bannister’s ‘Don’t Blame the Ball’ from the 1991 Wisden:

1. standards of cricket in England and Australia were much higher before one-day cricket became dominant
2. one-day cricket destroyed the extremely skilled batting technique that older batsmen were required to develop
3. modern [1980s and 1990s] players would be hopeless if they had had to play against older bowlers on uncovered pitches
4. modern bowlers would never bowl the exceptionally skilled old batsmen out, even with the best possible luck
   
1. I frequently said that Herbert Sutcliffe on his 1931 form would if he played upon 1990 pitches have been either “run out” or “not out” in every innings he batted in
   
5. many old batsmen would on 1980s and 1990s pitches consistently gain far higher batting averages than Don Bradman’s 1938 record average of 115.62
6. some older English bowlers would have done far better than any modern ones
1. for instance I frequently said that the Harold Larwood of 1928 and the Brian Statham of 1959 would have averaged under 20 in 1990, and that Bill Bowes would surely have averaged under 26
7. that spin bowlers were what attracted crowds and that this was evident from the figures
8. that radical reforms were needed – regardless of how commercially unviable they were – to restore the amount of spin bowling and increase attendances at first-class games

Although I have modified these views over time, the emotional attachment to the idea of a sport with vastly more spin bowling has never disappeared for a variety of reasons.

Spencer does a “Hayward”

Although I have become more sceptical of the attitudes and motives of the Politically Incorrect Guides in recent years – seeing that they are at large a mouthpiece for the super-rich as the radical Trotskyist Left were saying before the first PIG was printed in 2004 – I still occasionally think about them and their perspective as a counterweight to the other side of politics.

Robert Spencer is an author I have had some respect for because of his revelations about the violent doctrines and history of Islam – something which I knew of from the Koran as a child but which was obscured until I read Spencer by books I read as a young adult in the late 1990s on the Satanic Verses affair. Spencer shows that Islam teaches extremes of violence and intolerance towards non-Muslims, which can be seen in the Sa^cudi monarchy whose fanatical Islam made them the best possible allies for the super-rich against revolution and even any non-elite political power.

Given Spencer’s focus on Islam, I was slightly surprised to discover that last year he had written a book on a topic the PIGs and their allies had previously addressed: ranking American presidents. Titled Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster, Spencer rates in one book all the presidents from Washington to Trump. When I looked at the book on Google Books, I was not able to get all the ratings, but I did get them online from Loren Rosson – to whom I give many thanks – at The Busybody.

Unlike Hayward, Spencer goes all the way back to the first presidents, but in the interests of making a one-to-one comparison of writers I will only compare with Stephen Hayward’s original The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents: From Wilson to Obama. Rosson himself gave his own assessment, which as he says is with some conspicuous exceptions similar to those of Spencer.

President	Hayward rating	Spencer rating	Rosson rating
Thomas Woodrow Wilson	F	0	0
Warren Gamaliel Harding	B+	9	9
Calvin Coolidge	A+	10	8
Herbert Hoover	C-	0	5
Frenklin Delano Roosevelt	F	1	3
Harry S. Truman	C+	6	8
Dwight David Eisenhower	C+	6	8
John Fitzgerald Kennedy	C-	5	6
Lyndon Baines Johnson	F	1	3
Richard Milhous Nixon	C+	2	4
Gerald Rudolph Ford	C+	5	6
James Earl Carter	F	0	7
Ronald Wilson Reagan	A-	9	6
George Herbert Walker Bush	B	2	5
William Jefferson Clinton	F	0	7
George Walker Bush	B+	1	1
Barack Hussein Obama	F	0	3
Donald John Trump		10	2

Those presidents coloured in light purple – Richard Nixon and the two Bushes – are the biggest differences between Hayward and Spencer. I am well aware that conservatives like Spencer and Thomas Woods (The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History) view Nixon as neither a strong president nor sufficiently right-wing.

Initially my Google search was not able to see how Spencer actually views Nixon and why in Spencer’s opinion Nixon was “very damaging for America”. However, a second look showed that Nixon is disliked by Spencer because he opened negotiations with Máo Zédōng. Máo Zédōng is viewed by many on the American right as the worst mass murderer in history – Paul Kengor says Máo murdered seven times more people than Hitler. Stephen Hayward said very little about Nixon’s opening to Máo’s China, merely noting

“Nixon’s opening to Communist China gave rise to the ultimate cliché of counterintuitive politics: “Only Nixon could go to China.””

whilst saying that Brezhnev’s Russia was engaging in a “massive arms build-up throughout the 1970s”, a time when Stalinist Russia’s crisis was clearly evident to those who looked. The Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe would quite likely have collapsed regardless of who was in power in the White House and Capitol, unless they consistently purged would-be reformers over many decades like Kim Il Sung or embraced major economic reforms as China and Vietnam did. Neither policy was feasible in a continent with a long history of working class struggle even during the repressive Stalinist years – a history which the Stalinist nations who did survive lacked.

I am also aware that the Bushes have been heavily criticised by conservatives like Brion McClanahan (9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America) for circumscribing personal liberty, for instance via the Patriot Act. It is difficult to argue about the Bushes, who had little concern for personal freedom, nor for merely protecting Americans against terrorism. If Bush junior had been so concerned, his first step would have been abolishing diplomatic relations with Sa^cudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and banning entry by their citizens or people with Sa^cudi, Qatari or UAE passport stamps, not by invading states opposed to al-Qa^cida like Iraq. However, powerful ties with the authoritarian monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council are in the vested interest of the super-rich – the only group whom the major US parties represent – since their theological opposition to socialism means they are the most reliable ally for fighting a war against the interests of the majority. That the Gulf monarchies are the major supporters of global terrorism is immaterial. Any assessment of Bush junior’s real relationship to freedom should take this into account.

With Bush senior, had he left Hussein alone, Iraq would almost certainly have fought a war with Sa^cudi Arabia that would have weakened both regimes and dramatically weakened the threat of global terrorism. (Pat Buchanan in Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War argued in a perfectly analogous manner that the best way to fight both Nazism and Stalinism was to let them fight each other). Again, the PIGs I have read never say this about Iraq, and these omissions need to be considered when studying such books.

Farewell to the man who made my obsession

In my teens, reading the 1985 Wisden, after a period of just looking at the statistics of the county and Test matches, I had a look at the Notes By the Editor.

Knowing little about sport, and nothing about cricket history, I was surprised and taken by what I read. What the Notes By the Editor said, plainly, was that one-day cricket had dramatically lowered the standards of play in England. This contradicted previous assumptions that standards would consistently rise due to improved technology. The 1986 Wisden, which I did not read until a couple of years later, reached identical conclusions regarding the 1985 Australian team’s standard of cricket, whilst admitting that England had barely improved.

More importantly, these Notes By the Editor led me to an obsession with finding out why one-day cricket was introduced, and what old cricketers could do that 1980s and 1990s cricketers could not. Very quickly, via Vic Marks’ 1988 Wisden Illustrated History of Cricket, I discovered that before one-day cricket had been introduced, first-class cricket was consistently losing money due to declining attendances. I also noticed – without quantitative study – an apparent strong inverse correlation between fast bowling strength and first-class cricket attendances, alongside strong direct correlation between abundance of attacking spin bowling and first-class cricket attendances. I immediately concluded that declining spin bowling and increasing pace bowling was what drove the dramatic attendance declines that led to the introduction of limited-overs cricket. This led me to an immediate interest in reading about those old English spin bowlers who dominate(d) the list of leading first-class wicket-takers – A.P. Freeman, Tom Goddard, Charlie Parker, Colin Blythe, Hedley Verity, Wilfred Rhodes – and even about faster bowlers who took large numbers of wickets. By the middle 1990s, I was frequently telling my school mates that one-day cricket was terrible for the game, although many said:

“Test cricket (expletive) [is bad]”

“One-day cricket (expletive) [is good]”

Today has seen the death of the man who wrote those Notes – John Woodcock – at age ninety-five.

John Woodcock, editor of Wisden from 1981 to 1986, died yesterday at ninety-five. Woodcock’s 1985 and 1986 Notes drove me into a lasting obsession with old county cricket because he said standards were much higher before the 1960s.

The 1986 Wisden was Woodcock’s last as editor. However, I first heard of Woodcock in the late 1990s out of school when his The Times One Hundred Greatest Cricketers appeared in the 1998 Wisden. The very first thing I noticed about Woodcock’s Hundred (as I knew it via Wisden) was that extremely few of the top first-class wicket-takers were included and that apart from Rhodes, Derek Underwood, and Jim Laker, there were virtually no English spin bowlers on the list. Of the thirteen bowlers with over 2,500 first class wickets, only three were included, and all these – Wilfrid Rhodes, George Hirst and W.G. Grace – were outstanding batsmen as well as bowlers. In fact, Grace’s 1871 season rivals Herbert Sutcliffe’s 1931 performance as the best batting performance over a full English season, and only Richard Hadlee’s 1984 and 1987 seasons rival Hirst’s all-round record from 1903 to 1906.

The lack of English spin bowlers on Woodcock’s list did somewhat alter on my thinking, as did an article in the 2000 Wisden about the problems of English pitches, which demonstrated just how unfairly rigged against spin bowling covered pitches were. It implied that no old English spin bowler would on modern covered pitches surpass the poor performances of what English spinners remained in 1999.

Discovering that Woodcock was the author of those 1985 and 1986 Notes has recently led me study his history as a Times editor, often anonymously, with the striking revelation that his lamentations about the decline of spin bowling in England began in the 1960s:

This article, written anonymously by Woodcock (at least that is what I read) from 1963 laments the decline of spin bowling before one-day cricket would accelerate it

The complaints about English cricket here after a 1—3 loss to the West Indies in 1963 do have a strong ring of being the direct predecessor of what I read as a teenager in the 1985 Wisden, and subsequently in almost every other 1980s and 1990s issue:

This article was written in the Times (I have heard by the late John Woodcock) after the close of the 1963 season, and laments the direction of English cricket due to the decline in spin bowling

Similar complaints were made again in the Times after the West Indies again defeated England in the 1966 Test series. Although the West Indies again won 3—1, the 1967 Wisden said they were a weaker team than in 1963, implying that England had also become worse:

Another Times article apparently written by the late John Woodcock – though not under his name – lamenting the trends of English cricket, especially less spin bowling, as far back as the 1960s.

Recent conversations with my brother have suggested alternative explanations for what Woodcock and many other English cricket writers wrote in the last third of the twentieth century, but would need another post to discuss. My attachment to old county cricket, even if my opinions are not as simple as when I first discovered the 1985 Wisden Notes by the Editor three decades ago, remains extremely strong because of the extremely detailed statistics.