the times | Thursday August 6 2020 1GM 65
Sport
established county player. Then, post
England cap, an offer from Surrey of
£750 for the 1971 season and an
enforced two-month layoff when he
declined that and moved to
Warwickshire.
Entry for his 1978 diary, May 1: “My
left foot takes size 11½; my right foot
size 11. The arch on my left foot has
fallen, but not my right. Both feet are
narrow in body but splay at the toes.
If you add that together, it can be
appreciated that any bootmaker has
troubles in creating the correct shape
to my feet and my strange, heavy
bowling action. Nobody has yet
completely succeeded.”
And yet some entries make you
realise that nothing has changed.
Thursday, June 1: “Sleep is elusive and
trying to sleep just irritating, so I’m
up early. The guts are turning over
violently, but I’d be more worried if
they weren’t. The nerves have
become part of my own ritual and if
they don’t make themselves known,
something must be wrong.”
No matter how much or little
England cricketers are paid, the gut-
wrenching feelings on the eve of a
series or a Test match do not
diminish.
The book is a gem. Ian Botham has
written a very touching foreword.
Each chapter of the biographical part
is named for a Bob Dylan song, of
course, Willis having added a third
name to his own in honour of the
singer-songwriter.
Willis’s own clear-eyed view on the
world is never better expressed than
in a short chapter called: “On hearing
the news.” How did he feel when told,
on a scale of one to ten, his cancer
was a nine? “It feels like you are
coming in on the hat-trick ball,” he
wrote.
It has been eight months since Bob
died. As luck would have it, his
daughter Katie gave birth to a son on
May 30, on what would have been
Bob’s 71st birthday. The name? Robert
George, of course. The Dylan bit
comes later.
6 Bob Willis: A Cricketer and a
Gentleman is published by Hodder and
Stoughton and all profits go to Prostate
Cancer UKB
ob Willis would have
enjoyed the irony. As an
arch-critic but also huge
supporter of the English
first-class game, and as a
Surrey player who flew the nest and
was sanctioned for his troubles, he
would have looked down on the scene
at the Kia Oval this week, with
players competing for the Bob Willis
Trophy, and smiled.
Out in the middle, where Surrey
were toiling against Middlesex — flat
pitch, sun shining, batsmen set — he
would have nodded and sympathised
with the bowlers. In the ground there
was no one watching, of course, and
he would have remembered that, too:
the days of grind in the County
Championship in front of few
spectators. High in the rafters of the
great stand opposite the old pavilion
was a small gathering, there to give
life to a book about his life.
There were old bowlers, of course
there were. Creaking bones, long
memories. John Lever, Essex and
England, told of Willis’s friendship
and being looked after on an early
England tour. Paul Allott, Lancashire
and England, recounted a first
meeting over real ale and then a last
squeeze of the hand minutes before
Willis died in December, aged 70.
Michael Holding had come from
Newmarket to pay tribute and also
support a cause.
Holding’s father (late in life) and
brother (not so late) died of prostate
cancer, as did Willis. One in eight
men will have the same disease
diagnosed before their time is done;
12,000 men die from it in the UK
every year. A book, then, to tell a tale
and raise a few quid — every penny
of profit will go to Prostate Cancer
UK. Specifically, the book will raise
much-needed funds for research to
improve testing and screening so that
early diagnosis can be better made.
By the time patients get to a
consultant oncologist, such as Lisa
Pickering, the news is usually grim.
Pickering, a Surrey CCC member,
got a jolt at the end of a long, tiring
day four years ago when she looked at
the notes and read out the name of
her next patient, Robert Willis.
“F***in’ ’ell,” she said to herself,
craning her neck upwards, “it’s
Bob Willis.”
The cancer was metastatic by then,
despite earlier PSA
(prostate-specific
antigen) tests that had
been normal and
despite assurances that
there was nothing to
worry about. The
delay in procuring an
accurate diagnosis is
why Willis’s widow,
Lauren, is so
committed to the
book doing well.
Hopefully they can
help reduce the
prevalence of delayed
diagnosis in future.
By the time Willis
saw Pickering, the
cancer had spread tothe bones. He was a wonderful
patient nonetheless, she said: he took
her to a Test match at the Oval; they
nattered about football, about Willis’s
passion for Manchester City and
Pickering’s claim to sporting fame —
her grandfather refereed the 1961 FA
Cup final in Tottenham Hotspur’s
Double-winning year — and they
compared notes on a preference for
Rafael Nadal over Roger Federer.
Sports talk, not cancer.
The book is more sport than
cancer, too, thankfully: part
biographical; part Willis in his own
words; part tributes from friends and
colleagues; and part reflections on the
great games in which he played, not
least the miracle of Headingley ’81. If
audiobooks are your thing, you will
even hear Willis in his own words —
Sky’s archive has been raided,
fruitfully — slaughtering some poor
batsman or umpire in his inimitable
way: “Upstairs to the third umpire, we
go. He’ll be sure to get it wrong!”
Willis is in good
company with James
Anderson and Stuart
Broad as England’s
fourth-highest
wicket-taker in Test
cricket, but the book
sketches a different
world to the one our
modern champions
inhabit: starting salary
at Surrey, for the 1969
season, £12.50 per
week; living and
working in Crystal
Palace in the winter of
1970 only to be
abruptly summoned to
an Ashes tour, before
he had become anWillis book is witty, wise –
and for a very good cause
A book to raise money
for Prostate Cancer UK
gives touching insight
into former fast bowler,
says Mike Atherton
The book contains reflections from Willis on some of the great days in his careerCHRIS COLE/TIMES NEWSPAPERS LTD“
If audiobooks are your
thing, you will even hear
Willis slaughtering some
poor batsman
a glorious strike through extra cover off
the back foot.
And if that was not annoying enough,
he also suffered the indignity of being
the first bowler called for a no-ball by
the third umpire off a TV monitor
under the experimental rule being used
in this series.
Nor would his mood have been
helped by the day’s best piece of
bowling from the James Anderson End
of the ground coming not from himself
but from Chris Woakes, whose lines
and lengths were as sharp as a new suit
during a spell of 8-2-14-1.
According to CricViz’s data, Woakes
hit the “channel” on and outside off
stump with 73 per cent of his deliveries,
while Broad and Jofra Archer recorded
figures in the 60s. Anderson was down
at 51 per cent.
Anderson’s summer has yet to take
off in the way it has for Broad or
Woakes. While they have taken wickets
for fun, his return stands at five wickets
at 36.40 each.
Maybe Anderson senses both men
breathing down his neck — Woakes the
man with the peerless record in English
conditions, Broad the one who is
relentlessly closing the gap on his
record wickets haul for England.
After the West Indies series,
Anderson said: “There is a very good
chance [Broad] will get more wickets
than me if he carries on like this.”
Perhaps he no longer feels in control as
much as he once did.Come to Pakistan before
2022, implores board chief
Elizabeth Ammon
The chief executive of the Pakistan
Cricket Board has urged England to
send a touring team to Pakistan before
their scheduled tour in 2022.
International cricket has started
making a slow return to the country
after nearly a decade of exile following
a terrorist attack on the Sri Lanka Test
team in Lahore in 2009. England have
not toured Pakistan since 2005.
Since 2017, Sri Lanka, West Indies,
Zimbabwe and Bangladesh have all had
limited-overs or Test tours to the coun-
try and Wasim Khan wants the bigger
Test nations to agree to coming back,
insisting Pakistan is safe.
“England are due to tour in 2022 and
we’d love to have them coming over
well before then for a shorter tour,”
Khan, 49, said. “It is something we’ll
speak to the ECB about.”
Pakistan and West Indies have been
highly praised for agreeing to come to
the UK and living within the — some-
times mentally draining — biosecure
environment to help cricket get back up
and running and help the ECB save
their lucrative broadcast contracts.
It is hoped that in recognition of the
favour, England will agree to recipro-
cate as soon as is feasible.
Chris Silverwood, the England head
coach, said he would be “very happy” to
tour Pakistan, that any security issues
are being handled and that, having
never been to Pakistan, he would “love
to visit the country”.
It is hugely important for Pakistan’s
financial situation that the bigger Test
nations agree to tour the country over
the next couple of years because the
chances of them resuming playing
bilateral series against the powerhouse
India are very slim.
“It’s a question I get asked more than
any other from fans: ‘Can India and
Pakistan play again?’ ” Khan said. “It’s
going to be difficult, I would say, whilst
the current government is in place in
India.”GARETH COPLEY/GETTY IMAGES