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.