Section:GDN 1N PaGe:45 Edition Date:190830 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 29/8/2019 19:28 cYanmaGentaYellowb
Friday 30 Aug ust 2019 The Guardian •
45I
t’s rare a sporting moment makes you shake.
Last Sunday, while Ben Stokes was carving
Australia to all parts of Headingley , I was in a
park watching on my phone. As Nathan Lyon
failed to collect the ball cleanly as Jack Leach
wandered about in no man’s land I realised I had
lost control of my body. The screen was all over
the place.
It might have happened before but I’m rarely holding
both sides of my TV at those critical moments. My
scream of terror was too loud for the sunbathers. I think
everyone just thought I was that park’s weird guy on the
bench. There’s always one.
Leach’s explanation of becoming an instant cult hero
is pretty perfect. “It’s probably because I look like a
village cricketer out there in my glasses, the bald head
and maybe people think: ‘ That could be me!’ All the
others look pretty professional.”
You can imagine his spectacles and grubby cloth being
valued at thousands by a big-haired expert on the 2119
series of the Antiques Roadshow standing next to the
cryogenically thawed head of Fiona Bruce. “So lucky
you’ve got both! Yes these belonged to a man called
Jack Leach, who played something called Test cricket- an old version of the 10-ball challenge we have today.
Unbelievably he managed to achieve something sporting
despite wearing these things called glasses. You’ll
remember they were phased out late in the 21st century.”
Since Leach’s exploits, there have been interviews
with his optometrist and various lists have done the
rounds of bespectacled sports stars – always featuring
the hapless ones that fi t the narrative, with Eddie the
Eagle at the top. One man who rarely reaches that list is
Hughie Teape. Yet for some unknown reason the high
hurdler is etched in my memory. Big glasses, and an Eric
Young sized headband – he always seemed to be in lane
one while Colin Jackson and Tony Jarrett fought it out in
the middle for the medals. My 10-year-old brain couldn’t
quite compute that coming last in an Olympic fi nal is an
extraordinary achievement. He was just the slow guy on
the end who couldn’t see very well.
From birth we are conditioned to see glasses as the
preserve of the brainy but physically weak. In fi lm it’s
always a lensed asthmatic who is the fi rst to get picked
off by the enemy – whether it’s the fi rst world war, or an
alien invasion. He’s the bumbling evil hacker in Jurassic
Park who loses his specs in the storm and can’t see the
sweet little dinosaur turning into a colourful killer.
And the nerdy bit may actually be true. A study
by Edinburgh University showed participants who
wore glasses were approximately 30% more likely to
be intelligent – a point perhaps proved by my perfect
eyesight’s complete inability to understand the report.
The alternative study into the correlation between
sporting weakness and short sightedness doesn’t seem
to have been done. And with good reason. Edwin Moses
hurdled passed everyone for years. Martina Navratilova
and Billie Jean King dominated tennis. Daniel Vettori is
one of New Zealand’s greatest cricketers.
And I am not here waving a fl ag for slight visual
impairment. As a BBC local radio reporter I once had an
eye test as part of a story I can only presume was about
eye tests. After identifying the tiny mix of consonants
and vowels from a quarter of a mile away, the optician
announced I had “better than 20-20 vision” and that I
could be a fi ghter pilot if I so wished. No lover of fl ying or
war, it wasn’t the path for me but being able to see things
clearly was not the thing that stopped me becoming a
professional sportsman.
Apparently 20/10 vision is better than 20/20. Either
way, Leach has neither, and bizarrely that is partly why
his partnership with Stokes was so glorious.
In Stokes and Leach you have the two ends of the
sporting spectrum – the super human and the human.
The biological optimum and the guy who looks like
a competition winner. Clearly this does Leach a
huge disservice but if we analyse why we love sport,
appreciating both of these fi gures is a huge part of it.
No amount of net sessions, press-ups or protein
shakes would give any of us the ability of Stokes.
Combining that eye, that strength
and that indefatigable will to carry on
even when he’s shattered takes him
beyond normal comparisons.
Meanwhile the narrative for Leach- however incorrect – is that he is you
and me, trudging about in ill-fi tting
gear he’s borrowed from a mate,
cleaning his steamed-up glasses. He
joins that list of unlikely looking spin
bowlers – Panesar, Tufnell, Such.
We’ve all had that debate about
how good we could have become at
spin bowling if that’s all we’d done
since we were 10 – forget clarinet
lessons and GCSE geography, I’m
perfecting the arm ball. Chances are
most of us would be nowhere nearer a
central contract and considerably further away from any
other achievement. But Leach gives us that ludicrous
fake spark of hope that at some point in another life we
too could have fl icked that single off our hips.
The truth is far less interesting. The most natural,
mercurial talents work hard and the most “normal” have
natural talent. But Leach is a star who doesn’t look like
a star. How glorious that in between the Ireland game
and his recall at Lord’s he went back and played for his
local side, Taunton Deane – and came on as third change.
Every interview makes him more lik able.
It will be someone else’s time at Old Traff ord but for
now – in a week whe n there has been lots to mourn as a
sports lover – let’s revel in one of us taking almost centre
stage, however poor their eyesight and however much
better than us they really are.
The
narrative
for Leach
is that he is
you and me,
trudging
about in
ill-fi tting
gear he’s
borrowed
from a mateEye-opener
Likable Leach gives
us fake hope we
could have been like
him in another life
Max Rushden
Football
Shelvey reveals
he came close to
joining West Ham
Page 52 Boxing
Campbell insists
he has tools to
beat Lomachenko
Page 47 Jack Leach
and Billie Jean
King confound
the theory that
glasses are for
losers
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