WG Grace: Bowler

If the Leviathan had never scored a run, he would still be one of the greatest cricketers of all-time.

The beard and the cap… and the ball

During the final Test of the Summer, TMS had a debate about WG’s bowling. Michael Vaughan said that he hadn’t known the great man bowled as well as batted. And he’s right, his bowling is not often mentioned, yet he remains one of the ten greatest wicket-takers in history. I wrote about it in Bat, Ball & Field, and thought it would be worth putting here, too.

WG, next over that end, please…

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‘The batsman, seeing an enormous man rush up to the wickets with both elbows out, great black beard blowing on each side of him and a huge yellow cap on the top of a dark, swarthy face expects something more than the gentle, lobbed-up ball that does come; he cannot believe that this baby-looking bowling is really the great man’s.’

Those words came from a Lancashire amateur called Allan Steel, and they are a vivid description of facing the bowling of the Leviathan himself, William Gilbert Grace.

You know WG Grace. Everybody knows WG Grace. The beard and the cap. The paintings and the statues. Staring out from the Coleman’s Mustard advert that became a piece of gift-shop kitsch. The face of God in Monty Python’s The Life Of Brian. A century after his death, he remains more recognisable than most of the current England team, the emblematic symbol of cricket. The most famous man in Victorian Britain and its empire created an image long before anyone knew what an image was, and it perseveres.

Grace’s fame is not the empty contemporary kind. He conceived the modern game: he imagined and then played it, and then, by the force of what he did and who he was, dragged it along with him into its new golden age. No-one else will be as important to cricket. No-one else can be. He scored the first triple century, England’s first Test match century, was the first man to score 100 first-class hundreds. He is still the fifth-highest first-class run scorer of all–time. As Bernard Darwin, the grandson of Charles wrote after he’d made 224 not out as an eighteen year old for England against Surrey at the Oval: ‘He was no longer climbing the ladder, he had got to the top, although he was destined to add a few more rungs to it, dizzy rungs utterly beyond anyone else’s reach.’

He became ‘The Champion’ at eighteen, and he stayed that way, at least until Bradman – but then how would the Don have fared on the wickets Grace had to bat on?

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Yet they had no real idea of who he was, what he became, how he did what he did. The opinions of him, dripping with metropolitan prejudice, still have the power to shock. Darwin, he of the ‘dizzy rungs’, also wrote that Grace was ‘simple-minded’. MCC’s official history, published – astonishingly - in 1987, contended that WG had, ‘a simple, even puerile, mind’. Even John Arlott, the most empathetic and poetic of men, called him ‘rustic’, and that was the view of him, the Gloucester bumpkin with a high squeaky voice and its Bristolian burr, a naive giant, a cricketing savant.

And it’s true that Grace was no intellectual. It took him an age to qualify as a doctor, and you probably wouldn’t have wanted him treating you once he had. He wasn’t particularly sophisticated, he was dreadful with money and he was a notorious glutton, but he was also a visionary, a strange kind of genius.

As his biographer Richard Tomlinson wrote in Amazing Grace: The Man Who Was WG: ‘Grace had a deeply analytical, creative mind, as is instantly plain from his own writing on cricket, as distinct from the turgid, ghostwritten prose that fills out most of his two, often unreliable, memoirs. It helps to think of him, just a little, as one of the great Victorian inventors.’

The Victorian inventor analogy is lovely. There’s something of the steampunk about Grace, the past and the future rolled into one. ‘There was a prevailing idea that as long as a bowler was straight, the batsman could do nothing against him,’ WG wrote. ‘That idea I determined to test.’

And he did. When Fuller Pilch, the greatest batsman of his age, was taken to watch the man who had succeeded him he saw right away that Grace was attacking deliveries that the players of Pilch’s era would try only to keep out. It was a psychological shift as much as a physical one, although Grace’s supreme gifts made the physical easier for him. In his early years he was an athlete: the famous 224 at the Oval had been interrupted overnight by a trip to the Crystal Palace athletics track, where he won the quarter-mile hurdles in his pink running knickerbockers.

Grace would be a big man now, and by Victorian standards he was a giant, so tall that it was uncomfortable for him to crouch with his bat in the block-hole. Instead he stood upright, hovering the bat above the ground, his reflexes fast enough to drop it down on the deadly shooters that were the bane of a batsman’s life. He was unafraid to hit the ball in the air, to challenge the fielders. His brutal back cut, the bat dropped on the short ball from powerful shoulders, became his signature shot. A month after his 224, he returned to the Oval to play for the Gentlemen of the South against the Players, where, in poor light, he took apart two of the best bowlers in England, Ned Willsher and James Lillywhite Jr, hitting so fiercely he broke his favourite bat. It was stunning, futuristic play that tore apart the status quo, that made cricket question itself.

That thread ran through his life, all the way to his final innings in July 1914 at Grove Park, when he was sixty-six years old and the captain of Eltham seconds. His beard grey, limping from injury or maybe just his years, he went in with the score at 31-5 and made 69 not out, beating his age by three runs, the magical timing, gimlet eye and fathomless hunger still there, even when so much else was gone.

And yet, and yet… If WG Grace had never picked up a bat, if he had not wasted a single brain cell on the art, he would still go down as one of the great bowlers of his or any other age. He lies tenth on the all-time list of first-class wicket takers. The numbers alone are astonishing: 870 matches, 124,831 deliveries, 2,809 wickets at 18.14, five wickets in an innings 240 times, ten wickets in a match 64 times, but all of this is so often a mere addendum to what he did with the bat.

The truth is that there was a deep synchronicity between the two. Grace the batsman arrived in 1864, just as overarm bowling became encoded in the Laws. He was the perfect player to combat this new form of attack. But Grace the bowler was trapped by the same events, caught in amber like an unlucky fly. He learned his game in the roundarm era, and he would bowl roundarm for his whole career, becoming more and more anachronistic until he was – literally – a bowler from another century.

The notice of his death published in the Manchester Guardian on 25 October 1915 read:

‘As a bowler in his later years he looked rather ponderous; his leisurely amble up to the wicket and slow round-arm delivery often excited merriment, but the simple-looking ball which he delivered - a slow good-length one with a slight break, generally from the leg side - was by no means easy to judge. And perhaps his success was partly due to the fact that most of the batsmen felt that he knew a bit more than the best of them. He held to the old-fashioned theory that length and straightness were the secret of good bowling, and that one of the greatest mistakes a bowler could make was to try to 'break' too much.’

Grace said that as a young player he ‘did a great deal’ to master bowling, although conceded, ‘perhaps not giving it the thoughtful attention I bestowed upon batting.’ But as the Guardian’s paragraph implied, it was his deep understanding of the psychology of batting that offered him an edge. As he bestrode Victorian cricket, opponents knew that they weren’t facing just any old bowler. This was Grace, the dominant, bullish king of the game, who crowds flocked to see, who cowed umpires with a stare, who did pretty much as he pleased. It was the same cult that would come to surround Shane Warne, another master of the game’s greater depths. ‘Take stock of your enemy and attempt to outwit him,’ was Grace’s advice, and Warne’s too.

He had a good slower ball, and he exploited his apparent lack of threat. His bowling, unlike his batting, went under-reported, damned by faint praise. But there was another reason that Grace was keen to underplay his skill with the ball. Bowlers were the serfs of the game, often professionals engaged in a labourer’s trade. Grace, the game’s best-paid amateur, wanted to be seen as a batsman, the preserve of the gentleman, especially in his early years when he encountered the prejudice and snobbery of London’s cricketing establishment.

He became the first man to do the ‘double’ of a thousand runs and a hundred wickets in a season. In 1875, a year that he regarded as a disappointment with the bat despite making his landmark fiftieth first-class hundred, he took 194 wickets at an average of 12.94. By then, his waistline was expanding as rapidly as his reputation, and his glory years as a bowler were coming to an end.

He was not yet thirty, but his weight was approaching fifteen stone, and it would rise by at least another stone in the next decade. There was a certain darkness to this binge-eating, underpinned by insecurity and fuelled by his early angst over not being accepted. He advised his schoolboy followers to eat in moderation while gorging himself on heavy fuel. He was held up as a teetotaller, but often drank whiskey during the lunch break. Like lots of insecure men, he had a bluff, bullying streak to him that he used to deflect attention.

His approach to the crease, never fluent thing, became a piece of theatre as he grew larger and less mobile. Grace would ‘scuffle’ up to the wicket, elbows jutting out, and his feet splayed, the left planted wide on the return crease to allow his belly room, his right arm swung level with his head, the ball lobbed out with some of his what he called his ‘leg tweek’.

Grace knew enough to create as much noise as he could around his lobs. As they made their way down the wicket, doubt and fear came with them. The worst thing a batsman could do was to start thinking about the shot he was going to play, and he gave them the time to do just that. He set odd fields, often placing his brother EM directly in the batsman’s eyeline. And there was the great sway of personality, having his way by sheer force of will (and the weight of his presence cannot be underestimated – a batsman called James Southerton once hit a ball hard into the ground at the Oval and when Grace caught it on the first bounce, walked off and refused to return. The scorebook listed him as ‘retired thinking he was out’).

Though he slowly ate himself out of a job, the Doctor’s roundarms were an exercise in power, a lesson in the game’s oddness and the many ways it could be played. Grace the cricketer was intimately at home in that terrain. He dominated cricket’s landscape, and its mindscape, too.

Bat, Ball & Field is out now in hardback, paperback and audiobook. You know the drill…