The sound of leather on Brian Close

A new book jogs memories of a man known for almost insane degrees of cricketing bravery, who called his life 'a complete farce...'

Brian Close… he don’t bruise easily

Imagine if, when England begin their first innings in Multan, instead of Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett walking out to open the batting, the selectors opt for Jonathan Trott and Alastair Cook. Even that pair, at the ages of 43 and 39 (40 on Christmas Day for Cookie) would not be as extraordinary a revival as the partnership of Brian Close and John Edrich in Manchester in the far-off and freaky summer of 1976, when, at a combined age of 84 they were selected to face Michael Holding, Andy Roberts and Wayne Daniel on a pitch Close would describe as “the worst I experienced in Test cricket... The faster the West Indies bowled the worse it got because the balls broke through the surface of the wicket. They exploded and flew at you.”

Close’s innings that day went down in infamy. Against bowling that the Almanack thundered “was frequently too wild and hostile to be acceptable,” he lasted for almost three hours, making 20 from 108 deliveries. It was mad, heroic, futile, dangerous. He was 45 years old and afterwards was dropped for the final time, bringing an end to a Test career that had begun 27 years earlier – 27 years! – as England’s youngest player at 18 years and 149 days. He appeared just 22 times across that span, an avatar of soured potential.

In Manchester he looked every day of those 45 years and then some; bald, lined, weathered, helmetless, yet with a juddering modernity he batted in a pair of St Peter mitts, the flash new kind of glove that was sweeping across a changing game. Close’s shimmering promise had calcified into gnarled professionalism and apparently insane courage, and if that was all he had left then he gave it, and more.

It led to one of the great cricket jokes from Eric Morecambe: ‘you always know it’s summer when you hear the sound of leather on Brian Close,’ and to one of the cricketing autobiographies I’d begun to read, I Don’t Bruise Easily, published in 1978. It took its place alongside The Barry Richards Story and a books-on-tape version of Fred Trueman’s tell-all Ball of Fire as a canonical piece of my formative years. Richards was aloof, disenchanted, his true feelings softened by the prose of his ghost, a young Martin Tyler en route to a career as a football commentator. Fred Trueman read his own book, and it was, for a youthful innocent like me, a hair-curling recitation of the appalling traducements of ‘t’fastest bowler that ever drew breath’. The line I remember most was about Fred’s wife and his long absences on tour: “she must have known I’d had the odd bird.” Fred managed to deliver this sentiment with a bruised self-forgiveness that has stayed with me down the years.

The canonical pair pictured today…

Close’s book was a kind of combination of the other two, co-written with Fred’s sparring partner in the TMS Box, Don Mosey: ‘I Don’t Bruise Easily’ is a mixture of pain and pleasure, of disappointment and delight, of sorrow and success,’ Mosey wrote. ‘To his critics, Close may be the most spectacular failure of his age – but he is a failure who was undefeated as England captain, and a failure acknowledged as the shrewdest cricketing brain of his era.’

The back jacket went further: ‘pursued by controversy, dogged by misfortune… a man who could comment after a disastrous Somerset game, ‘that’s the story of my life. A complete farce.’ Brian Close was probably the first cricketer I’d read about who hadn’t ridden some sort of endless upwards curve – even Barry Richards, denied international cricket by the sporting boycott, just carried on being godlike for whoever he played for.

Close was a revered figure at Somerset, where he had mentored Viv Richards and Ian Botham as they took their first steps – and Richards had been palpably concerned for his club captain at Old Trafford (that concern was duly dismissed in words for four letters by Close). Quite a few years later, I went to one of the theatre show tours that Botham and Richards had embarked upon, where Close was the subject of lots of anecdotes, mainly about his ability to drive at high speeds while simultaneously reading the Racing Post and rolling cigarettes.

Botham then told a ludicrous story about a long day at Taunton when he had dropped an easy catch early on. Close came up to him and said, ‘I could have caught that in the cheeks of my arse.’ Whoever the batter was (I can’t remember now) they went on to bat almost all day, until, exasperated by his bowlers, the captain brought himself on to show them how it was done.

Close had a habit of wearing plimsolls in the field if he didn’t think he’d be bowling, and he’d changed into a pair after tea. He ran up in his plimsolls and sent down a delivery that the batter managed to top edge straight up in the air. As Close went for the catch his plimsoll slipped in the dust and he fell flat on his face, the ball descending into the small of his back, whereupon he reached around and grabbed it triumphantly.

‘There,’ he said to Botham, ‘told you…’

There was much hilarity in the Guildford Civic Hall, and it didn’t occur to me until some time afterwards that this story was of course complete nonsense, honed over years of telling. But both it and the length of time that Richards and Botham spent talking about Brian Close spoke of his influence on the game and on their lives.

I don’t expect the yarn appears in a new book, One Hell Of A Life, by Stephen Chalke, which I’m about to review. ‘The man himself is quite the most fascinating character in post-war English cricket,’ Chalke says in his introduction. The title comes from Close, who could see the power in his story even as he lamented a life lived ‘as a series of cock-ups’.

As he slides further into history he will always be held as an icon of almost foolhardy courage, in no small part because of that day in Manchester. Three hours on a nightmare pitch, helmetless against Holding, Roberts and Daniel, with no restriction on short pitched bowling and at 45 years of age… yeah, it’s fair to say that Brian Close had a hell of a life.