SPIRO: The day I faced up to 'Typhoon' Frank Tyson

Frank ‘Typhoon’ Tyson has died. He was aged 85, a good innings for a fast bowler who put his body through the agonies of contortions and exertions in his quest to be, in the opinion of Richie Benaud, “the fastest bowler I ever saw”.

Tyson got his ‘Typhoon’ nick-name from his astonishing display of frighteningly fast bowling during the third Ashes Test in 1954 at Melbourne when he took 7-27 in the second innings. He was facing a strong Australian batting line-up that was literally overwhelmed and terrified by the sheer pace and hostility of his deliveries.

In a final, unbroken 51-ball spell, after taking 1-11 in his opening onslaught, Tyson demolished the Australian top, middle and bottom order by taking 6-16, arguably one of the greatest spells of fast bowling in the history of Test cricket.

Martin Williamson, on ESPN Cricinfo, argues: “There can have been fewer faster spells in history than Tyson’s in that innings. He skittled the opposition, and bowling downwind off a shorter run was literally as fast as a typhoon.”

Hence, ‘Typhoon’ Tyson.

Tyson burst on to the cricket scene in 1953 when he took two wickets in his first four balls for Northamptonshire against the visiting Australian side.

When Tyson was off on his long 38-yard run-up, the Northants keeper, the immaculate Keith Andrew, sometimes stood 72 yards behind the stumps. Tyson was once credited with hitting the sight screen from a delivery that bounced once only before achieving lift-off from a pacy Old Trafford pitch.

The only time I have seen something like this was on a green, bouncy Basin Reserve pitch in the 1960s when the alleged thrower Gary Bartlett, New Zealand’s fastest ever, did the same thing. The pace needed to achieve this sort of frightening, rocket-take-off carry was awesome.

Tyson’s record of 76 wickets in 17 Tests at an average of 18.56 has not been bettered by any bowler (taking more than 20 wickets) since him.

But by the time of the 1958-59 Ashes series in Australia, Tyson had become a seemingly spent force. He came to New Zealand with a determination to re-ignite his Test career.

In the first Test against New Zealand he took 3-23 off 14 overs (Freddie Trueman 1-39) in the first inning and 2-23 off 14 overs (Trueman 1-20) in the second innings.

England batted first and scored 374, with Ted Dexter making 141. New Zealand were bowled out for 142 and 133, losing by an innings and 99 runs.

The next match of the tour was against Wellington, at the Basin Reserve, scheduled for Friday March 6, 7, 9 (Sunday was a rest day). Tyson was clearly in better form than he had been in Australia (and the opposition decidedly weaker), and looking forward to pressing his claims for further Test selection.

I had enjoyed a successful club season and was selected with two other youngsters (Jim Morrison and Bruce Murray) to represent the province for this match. We had not played any cricket for over a month. A one-day match against the Governor-General’s XI was organised for the weekend before.

Keith Miller, then some years into his retirement, opened the bowling in that match. But his quickish deliveries were hardly at the express pace we were going to experience from Trueman and Tyson. So in the nets leading up to the MCC-England match we practised by having our so-called fast bowlers, at best brisk medium-pacers, bowling from a mark about three-quarters of the way down the pitch.

The only result of this exercise, on dodgy practice wickets, was to further intensify our anxiety as the balls whistled past our ears.

On the first day, it was obvious to us youngsters that we were totally out of our depth against the English professionals. England put on 474 for eight, with Colin Cowdrey on 99 at the close of play.

I had bowled to Cowdrey and he had hit my flighted left-arm finger-spinners with the precision of a surgeon through a stacked offside field for three fours. Morrison, one of the youngsters and without a representative cap, managed to drop a catch off John Mortimore, during my short bowling stint. The lowering sun had blinded him.

On the second day MCC-England batted on. Cowdrey got his century, Frank Tyson made a duck and Roy Swetman was dropped by me, off probably the easiest catch ever offered in first-class cricket. I was perched in at silly mid-on, Swetman swung at a short ball. I ducked. Then, looking up suddenly as the crowd roared, I spotted the ball gently floating in the air only a metre or so away. I dived for it.

The ball fell gently to the ground. The ground, unfortunately, did not swallow me up.

England declared 9-511 and we had about 90 minutes to bat before lunch.

In the dressing room, our captain John Reid told Bruce Murray and me to lift our bats before Trueman or Tyson released the ball, because “you won’t have time to take it up and bring it down”.

I exchanged quizzical raised eyebrows with Murray. “How fast must they be!” I told him.

Our anxiety was hardly allayed with the sight of the more experienced players in our team donning all sorts of chest and thigh pads as protectors.

I slipped my small pink box into place (later an urban myth was created that I batted without a protector) and put on the school boy pads I liked to bat in. I pulled a Gunn and Moore bat with nice wide grain lines from the team’s kit bag, as I did not have my own bat. I wore rubber spiked batting gloves, two left hand ones because I didn’t like the large thumb protector on the right hand glove.

I tightened up the laces of my sand shoes which allowed me to run faster (or less slowly, if the truth be told) and with these ancient protections went out to face the chin music from Trueman and Tyson.

After being hit high on the thigh with the second ball from Trueman and turning down Cowdrey’s offer to massage the bruise, I found myself trying to avoid a series of bouncers. I discovered I could pick his bouncer by seeing whether his shoulder dipped markedly at the moment of delivery. The crowd loved it as I threw myself to the ground to avoid the rearing ball. But then the bouncers stopped and batting become slightly easier.

I found out much later from Murray, who was batting down the other end, that captain Cowdrey was annoyed at the way Trueman was trying to intimidate us. “Listen here, Fred,” Murray heard Cowdrey tell Trueman, “give me a sensible over, or you’ll find yourself fielding at third man and fine leg for the rest of the day.”

Tyson, I found, was more difficult for me to play. Trueman moved the ball away from the batsman. On most occasions I was, as the saying goes, ‘not good enough’ to get a touch. But Tyson, at great pace, cut the ball into the batsman and at the wickets. His deliveries were either threatening my chest or if they were slightly lower, the resilience of my pink box.

Bruce went on to score a polished 31, in only his second first-class match. This was the harbinger of a fine career as a quick-scoring opener for New Zealand. The second ball he faced from Tyson, though, was pitched wide of his off stump and moved in almost at right-angles and just went over his stumps.

Careers are created on centimetres. Tyson turned to me and asked in exasperation: “Does he always show this sort of judgment in leaving the ball?”

I had settled in so well that a school friend who had travelled down from Auckland on the night train to see me bat decided to sneak out of the ground before the lunch break to get some fish and chips, a lunch time tradition at the Basin Reserve, before the crowd invaded the shop.

As he was making his way back into the ground, he heard a great roar. He got inside the ground just in time to see my pathetic little figure wending in melancholy fashion back to the pavilion.

An in-swinger, the type of delivery that had shaved the top of Murray’s stumps, had clattered into mine.

We were dismissed for 127 and asked to follow on.

Tyson was at us again having bowled only a handful of overs (four overs, 2-8) in the first innings. Hefty grunts preceded balls of awesome pace, once again. When he pitched one short, I leant back and with a legitmate square cut crashed it to the boundary. In the hundreds of hours I had played and practised cricket, that particular moment was probably the zenith of my performances.

Not long after this sliver of domination, Tyson sent down another particularly fast ball. This time I was good enough to get an edge. The ball flew straight to Ted Dexter in the slips who snaffled it with the ease of a magician doing a trick with a handkerchief.

What I discovered from this brief experience of facing up to the greats was that sheer persistence of pace, from both ends, was my undoing. I knew I could keep any individual ball out. But sooner or later the continual sequence of fast balls was certain to find out my deficiencies.

In 244 first-class matches ‘Typhoon’ Tyson took 767 wickets at 20.89. Two of those wickets were S. Zavos who extracted six runs from him (and two from Trueman). My performance was poor, mediocre in fact. But it was better than those Australian openers in 1953.

The details of this match with its predictable outcome is of little interest these days, so far back in time did it take place. Wellington was bowled out twice in one day, for 127 and 173 (better than New Zealand!), losing by an innings and 211 runs.

But there was one important consequence that came out of the contest. John Reid had been convinced for a long time that Tony Lock, England’s left-arm quickish spinner, was a thrower.

Lock bowled 21 overs in our first innings and conceded 49 runs for three wickets. Reid was one of his first innings victims, scoring only 10 runs. In the second innings, Lock bowled 21 overs and conceded 72 runs for four wickets.

Reid asked his follow New Zealand representative Harry Cave to film Lock from side-on.

A couple of days later, Reid showed Lock the film of his bowling action. The spinner was truly horrified at the throwing action that he saw. He did the right thing. He withdrew from cricket and changed his action. He became a classical orthodox left-arm finger-spinner, with loop and side spin being his main weapons.

He migrated to West Australia. On the cricket field everything went well. Lock created a record for the number of Sheffield Shield wickets he took. Off the field, though, his life degenerated into a tragic ending.

Many decades after this now obscure match, I was contacted by a dear friend, Mike Dormer, someone I had first met when we played together in a representative youth team. He has the loveliest cricket ground in New Zealand, the Willows, which is situated in the countryside out of Christchurch.

Every year Mike organises the captains of the First XIs around New Zealand to come down to Christchurch to play a cricket match and to listen to an inspirational speech from a noted sportsman. John Eales and Brad Thorn have been among the speakers. And when Tyson, some years ago, was lined up to speak to the boys, I took up Mike’s invitation to come to Christchurch for the event.

As I explained to Mike: “I have met Frank Tyson but I can’t say as a batsman that I ever saw him.”

I found Tyson, like those other champions of his generation (Arthur Morris, Richie Benaud, Alan Davidson, Ian Craig) to be a charming, humorous, generous and insightful conversationalist.

He told me he had been a graduate of English Literature from Durham University before he became a first-class cricket player. He loved poetry and recited for me lines from Wordsworth (quoted by others in their obituary of him) about the pains of fast bowling: “For still, the more he works, the more do his ankles swell.”

Like Harold Larwood, that other England fast bowler destroyer, Tyson settled in Australia, initially in Melbourne before retiring to the Gold Coast.

He discussed his career as a successful educator, writer, television commentator and coach, and told me he was fluent in French. You could understand from chatting to him that he was thoughtful, instructional and pastoral by instinct.

Dean Jones noted on Twitter about his coaching: “Ex Vic coach. I was his student for a few of his books. Terrific cricketer. Terrific bloke.”

I asked him about his favourite players. He told me he loved watching Brian Lara bat. Lara liked to name his kids after the town they were conceived in, he said. “Lucky,” he chuckled, “no daughter was conceived in Lahore.”

I am writing this during the 2015 Rugby World Cup. Some of the commentators were scathing about the prospect of Namibia, with its 1000 or so adult rugby players, taking the field against the All Blacks. David and Goliath contests like this, they suggested, had no place in sport. It was an insult to the spectators and to the tournament and so on, and so forth.

When I read this nonsense, I get angry. The commentators have no idea what the point of playing rugby (or any other sport) really is. Essentially, it is as the great Cliff Morgan once suggested, “a magnificent irrelevance”.

Sport is irrelevant because in the grand scheme of things the outcome of Tests and tournaments don’t really matter. The sun comes up the next day when the Wallabies win, and when they lose.

It is magnificent because in the crucial small scheme of things, in the every day life and happiness of ordinary people, the emotions and insights and friendships accumulated as part of these sporting occasions, both small and great, really matter.

And this was particularly so when ordinary players and supporters have access to the great practitioners of a particular sport. There is a pleasure that is hard to match which comes from experiencing, if only for a crowded hour or so, the glorious life of sporting contests, especially as a participant.

I grew up in an era when as a school boy I could face a New Zealand fast bowler in a Sunday match. In grade cricket in Wellington (and in Australia) you could bowl to current and past Test players and bat against bowlers who had taken wickets at Lord’s.

At the first first-grade match I ever saw in Sydney, I watched Norm O’Neill bat and then bowl leg-spinners. Our club wicketkeeper in Wellington was Frank Mooney, a century-maker at Lord’s, a silent assassin behind the stumps and a raconteur to match Tyson and all the other wonderful tellers of tales.

The great cricket players were not celebrities to watch from the outer and never to be chatted to or played against. You played against them. They practised at the club nets. You had a beer with them after the game, and after practice.

Cricket has lost this intimacy with the expansion of the professional game. Kids don’t get to bowl to Steve Smith or face the fast bowling of Mitchell Starc.

This is the truth that the journalist cynics who want to put down the Namibians, the Romanians and the Georgians as interlopers at the 2015 Rugby World Cup don’t seem to understand.

Rugby, despite its professionalism, still retains some of the old amateur ethic with its minnow teams at the World Cup. A tough young man from Namibia can still smash into Richie McCaw on the field and then have a beer with him after the game in the All Blacks dressing room.

So when some one like Tyson dies, a little part of all those who participated in his brilliant career – even in some small, insignificant way – dies with him.

Farewell Frank ‘Typhoon’ Tyson, a scholar and gentleman, on and off the field.