Roebuck held no allegiance when writing © PA Photos

I don’t precisely recall when and where I met Peter Roebuck first; it feels like I always knew him. It must have been in the English summer of 2001, or perhaps 2002. I am certain he was wearing a straw hat, and was struck by his physicality: large and strong hands, sharp nose, enquiring eyes, and hair protruding out of his ears. But the strongest, most lasting impression was left by his manner of delivering sweeping snap judgements.

“I think the best cricket writing now comes out of India.” He said this out of the blue, without a preamble, and without bothering to qualify it. And this continued through my ten-year association with him, in emails, in conversation, and even in his columns.

Of course, he was not always right. The last time I met him in person was in Sri Lanka during the last World Cup. He spoke animatedly about a young Sri Lankan journalist he had just met, and tried to persuade me to hire him as a writer. The young man in question walked up to us a few minutes later. He turned out to be a photographer. “How many times have we been told not to rush in to a judgement,” Roebuck said upon instant reflection. But nothing dissuaded him from making them. And often he was spot-on.

His judgements were based not merely on the keenest understanding of the game but on a wider understanding of society, history and human behaviour, and his ability to connect the dots. Like all good writers, he was observant, sensitive, and deeply affected by the world outside, even as he grappled with his own complexities.

Few drew better portraits of cricketers as human beings because few had the combination of his talents: having been a player himself, he had the ability to view the inner lives of cricketers from the outside. He grasped their torment, and had the gift with words with which to articulate it. At the top of his game, his writing was both profound and poignant. His writing, in a sense, was like Brian Lara’s batsmanship: it had beauty and depth, it reflected his moods, and while it could be inconsistent, it attained incomparable heights. Even his poorer pieces contained priceless gems.

Among the cricket people I have known, he cared more than most about the game, and he worried incessantly about its future. He saw his writing as not merely a vocation but as an obligation to the game. To this effect, he became a missionary and avenger. In his latter years his concerns grew wider. He was deeply affected by the political situation in Zimbabwe, where he had a home, and he sometimes began exceeding his brief in his cricket writings. When Firdose Moonda, our South Africa correspondent, travelled to Zimbabwe to cover the country’s return to Test cricket, I sought Roebuck’s advice on stories she could pursue. For the next two weeks he wrote me almost daily, suggesting ideas, pointing me towards reports and other writings on Zimbabwe. Very few of these were cricket-related.

Continue reading "Remembering Roebuck"

The serpentine queues outside Lord's © Getty Images

Lord’s, the grandest of cricket grounds as far as the richness of heritage and history go, had a new chapter added to its pages today. Never has a Monday morning at the ground been so busy, so urgent and so alive. Not even the prospect of a first Ashes victory in 75 years brought so many people to the ground in 2009. Today’s full house beat that record by over 4000, but there is no account of those who had to return disappointed.

I certainly haven’t seen a longer queue at a cricket ground, or anywhere for that matter, than today. It began right outside the St John’s Wood tube station, about half a kilometre from Lord’s, and snaked all around the stadium. And incredibly there were two of those.

I was in Granada in the south of Spain last month where they sell a limited number of tickets for the magnificent Alhambra Palace. Though the ticket counter opened at 8.30 am I had been advised to go early; I reached there at 6 am, bleary and cold, and was astounded to find 15 people ahead of me. By all accounts, there were over a thousand outside Lord’s at that hour. Sam Collins, one half of the Chucks who do a delightful video diary for us, met the man who was first in one of the queues - he had reached there at 2 am.

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To fully appreciate Jenner, you had to hear him talk legspin © Zimbabwe Cricket

If you like cricket, you had to like Terry Jenner. And if you love legspin you had to absolutely adore him. No one spoke more eloquently, knowledgeably, and passionately about legspin than him. I met him properly only once, but even years later, I can picturise him vividly.

We met in the lobby behind the press box at the Adelaide Oval in 2003. That morning he had been in the nets with Shane Warne, preparing to make his comeback to international cricket after serving his one-year ban for taking diuretics. I had asked him for five minutes; he gave me close to an hour, during which I might have asked him no more than five questions.

I did ask him, though, about the difference between Stuart MacGill and Warne. MacGill had benefitted from Warne’s absence and used the period profitably, claiming 43 wickets in eight Tests at 25.11, with a strike rate of 45.9. But of course he had made no impression on the touring Indians, nor was he expected to. During a meet-the-press event before the Test, MacGill, while giving fulsome praise to Warne, had questioned, only half in jest, his claims to mystery balls.

“Stuart is right,” Jenner said. “There is only so much spin you can generate, and there are only so many balls you can bowl.” Then he counted them: the legbreak, the topspinner, the backspinner, the flipper and the googly. The difference between Warne and Macgill, he said, wasn’t the number of different balls they possessed or how much they spun the ball. It was in how the ball arrived at the batsman.

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