SPECTATOR SPORT
Bowled over
Frank Keating
APART FROM Graham Gooch's two heroic centuries of sandbag staunchness in the Test matches at Old Trafford and Trent Bridge, the most glistening three innings I haVe witnessed by a Brit this summer have each been played by Glamorgan's spruce young prince, Matthew Maynard. Now England have summoned him across the Dyke at last, and if he brings with him the daring and impudent batsmanship he dis- plays with the daffodil at his breast, then Edgbaston could be in for a treat this week- end. He's the tops, he's the glam in Glam- organ.
Omens, alas, are none too promising. Down the years, Glamorgan's Test bats have been very thin on the ground. Their scores, when they have been called up, have been even thinner. Since the war, I suppose the best five padded leek-eaters with May- nard have been Gilbert Parkhouse, Alan Jones, Tony Lewis, and Hugh Morris. In their first Test match innings those four made, respectively, 0, 5, 0, and 3. Maynard himself has played one Test before, of course — in 1988 at a callow 22, on a hiding to nowt against the West Indies, he made 3 in a nerve-twitching debutant's curtsey. That was at the Oval Test at the end of a blighted series for England in which they picked 21 players and four captains. May- nard was next spoken to by a member of the England management on Monday, five years later.
At which rate, it will be 1996 before the Glamorgan captain, Morris, gets another call for England — although he has surely been pencilled in, as a leftie with guts, stickability as well as strokes, as Atherton's opening partner on the winter's Caribbean tour. In that first Test of his, at Edgbaston in 1991 against the West Indies,•Morris, fol- lowed his first innings 3 with a solitary sin- gle.
Many still say Parkhouse was the best Welsh bat of them all. He was a loose- limbed, delicate man from Swansea, and a beautifully organised, precisely geometric stroke-maker. He had been educated at Wycliffe, across the river in Gloucester- shire, and could unroll almost as lissom a cover-drive as young Graveney, whom he preceded briefly for England. That first Test duck (b. Valentine) was in the 1950 Lord's Test when England were `Ramanvalled' and they promenaded the premiere of the famous calypso to the two spinners.
Alan Jones made more runs (35,000) than any batsman in history who never had a Test cap to show for it. It was 1970, when the South African tour was cancelled and England played the Rest of the World instead. But the idiots at Lord's pro- nounced them as not Tests — so poor Jones has nothing to show his grandchil- dren. Not that there was much — 5 in the first innings, including a snick over the slips for a boundary off Procter, was followed by 5 fewer in the second; both times c. Engi- neer b. Procter.
Then came Tony Lewis, with the double daunt of making his debut also as captain against India at Delhi in 1972.
A.R. Lewis lbw Chandrasekhar 0
I retreated, head down, through all those bay- ing Indians and when I flopped on the chair in the dressing-room, I could not believe it. I still don't believe it. Is it really true? The England players were generous, but now I have to face the past and the frightening future; nought behind me, and what next time, that is the question.
Next time . . . 70 not out and he was on his way.
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