Cult Heroes

Duncan Hamilton finds Nottinghamshire's Luke Fletcher charismatically different, a worthy successor to Barry Stead of a previous generation

Pure serendipity took me to Trent Bridge on the morning when a small phenomenon began: the birth of a new cult hero. 

It was 2009. Inspired by JB Priestley’s English Journey, I was indulgently ground-hopping and then writing about the experience, a six-month holiday ostensibly disguised as damn hard graft. 

In early May, Nottinghamshire handed Luke Fletcher his home Championship debut against Somerset. It was a cool, bright day, and Trent Bridge, fabulously spruce after a spring-clean and some fresh white paint, shone in the hard sunshine. Somerset won the toss and decided to bat, which must have seemed like a good idea to them at the time. 

I had neither seen nor heard of Fletcher before. I knew nothing about him or his nascent career except the few details crammed into the Notts yearbook and random scraps of gossip gleaned from members who were complete strangers to me before we started talking and good companions afterwards. 

He was a local boy, aged 20, born less than 10 miles from the Dixon Gates. He was from a pit family (coincidentally, like me). He was 6ft 6in tall in his socks. He was right-arm, fast-ish-medium. He had blond hair, close-cropped above the neck and around the ears. The sheen of a high forehead was partly hidden by the flop of an untidy fringe. 

Someone told me that Fletcher struggled to maintain his “fighting weight”. Someone else explained how, a winter or two before, he’d been the club’s car park attendant during the mornings and sweated tin buckets in the gym every afternoon. He added that Fletcher had been a waiter at Hooters, a restaurant where the gentlemen clientele went principally to admire the scenery rather than the chicken wings. 

As soon as Fletcher came on to the field, he was so conspicuous by his presence as to be impossible to ignore. He reminded me of the enormous block of sandstone rock on which Nottingham Castle sits. Before play began I’d looked at Bill Voce’s MCC blazer, pinned behind a glass case and hung on a wall in the pavilion. Put it this way. Fletcher would have found the blazer too narrow across his shoulders and too tight across his chest; his bulk would have popped the two brass buttons and split the back-stitching.

^{Fletcher is embraced by his team-mates at Taunton}

From the Radcliffe Road End, Fletcher pounded in. The tremor his size 13 boots created must have rattled the cups and saucers in Notts’ committee room. 

With only his fifth ball, he got one to nip away from Arul Suppiah, who nicked it loudly into Chris Read’s gloves. That summer Marcus Trescothick picked up runs (nearly 3,000 in all competitions) as easily as gathering windfall apples. Not that day, though. Trescothick tried to steer Fletcher to third man and perished in the slips. This was a less embarrassing dismissal than James Hildreth’s shortly afterwards. Fletcher tore down two of his stumps. 

At lunch, Somerset were 57 for 5. 

I prefer to travel peripatetically, drifting from spot to spot. I’d seen Fletcher bowl front-on, side-on and from the top tier of the Radcliffe Road End, which I suppose is what sitting in the crow’s nest of the Cutty Sark must have been like. When Notts let him lead them off, I’d reached the pavilion gate. Fletcher accepted his honour shyly and a tad disbelievingly. He folded his cap into his left hand and waved rather self-consciously with his right, as though unsure of the protocol and whether or not he deserved his starring role in it. 

Even factoring in what time does to memory, I am sure I knew there and then that Fletcher wasn’t just one of those ordinary, wholehearted sons of toil from whom the only thing that sparkles are beads of sweat. Here was someone strikingly different from the norm. 

Later on, he claimed another Somerset wicket, finishing with 4 for 38.

Everything about Fletcher fascinated me. His size, of course, but also his upbringing, his zig-zag journey into the team and the perseverance demanded of him to get and stay there. 

From then onwards, I began following his career as avidly as Neville Cardus once followed Cec Parkin and Emmott Robinson to near obsession. If I’d been writing regularly about Notts, Fletcher would unquestionably have been a central figure in dispatches. Even if he’d taken no wickets or eked out no runs, I am sure something he did instead, even the miniscule, would have lit up a paragraph or three. He was one of those cricketers I appreciated immediately. Not only because of his gusto, but also because of the mischievous cheek evident in his personality. Fletcher grabbed attention merely by being himself. How obviously individual he seemed when compared with everyone else.

^{Barry Stead bowling against Worcestershire at Dudley in July 1973}

In the past I’d admired other cricketers for precisely the same reason.  

There was Worcestershire’s opener Ron Headley, whose bottom hand buttressed the splice and whose top hand was scarcely on the handle. Every successful stroke from him astonished me. There was the vertically challenged Harry Pilling at Lancashire. Whenever Pilling got into a mid-pitch conversation with Clive Lloyd, he was obliged to crick his neck like Jack gazing up at the beanstalk. For a while, after I read and re-read Peter Roebuck’s bitter sweet diary It Never Rains (a sadly prophetic title, given the fate awaiting him), I habitually turned first to Somerset’s match reports. I ticked off, too, the early and middle hundreds that Mark Ramprakash scored, his batting a thing of beauty. When Ramprakash completed his 100th hundred in 2008, I was among the sparse crowd at Headingley who gave him a three-minute standing ovation. I congratulated myself for being there, aware I’d witnessed a sliver of history that would never be repeated.  

With hindsight, I know who influenced my initial judgments of Fletcher. He embodied the charismatic spirit of another Notts player, who I guess only the old fogies among us still have rooted in our memories. 

Barry Stead was a Yorkshireman. He was born in 1939, which proved inconvenient for his career. He grew up at a time when every third pram pushed around the Ridings contained a future cricketer. The competition was so bloody that even those picked for Yorkshire’s staff weren’t necessarily privileged enough to play for the county. If you were lucky, you carried the drink’s tray for Fred Trueman et al. If you were unlucky, you ran Brian Close’s bets from the dressing room to the bookies on Otley Lane. 

Stead, a left-armer, had to wait until 1959 for his chance. He took seven wickets for 76 against India at Bradford Park Avenue. He played only one more game for Yorkshire. 

As ridiculously cross-eyed as this observation will surely seem to you, Stead and Fletcher were (and remain) so alike to me but paradoxically so dissimilar too. For one thing, Stead screeched to the crease, his arms beating against the air at frenetic speed (imagine an agricultural threshing machine that contains a Formula Two engine). He batted the same way as he bowled, which was to fling himself, practically pell-mell, at everything. Nor did he physically resemble Fletcher. Stead, barely 5ft 8in, stuffed an inch of padding inside his boots to give himself a bit of extra lift.   

But the qualities Stead showed back then, guaranteeing the fandom he got, are identical to those behind Fletcher’s immense popularity at Trent Bridge now.

A bowler’s life is mostly about stamina. Stead, a former bricklayer, did a lot of the unglamorous heavy lifting for Notts, and he was always prepared to take on another great burst of work. His game was based on absolute effort.

^{Notts at Derbyshire}

Stead was also always willing to banter with anyone on the boundary edge, making him a part of the crowd rather than aloofly apart from it. He demonstrably revelled in that. “No point in being out there for six hours and saying nothing, is it?” he asked. “You might as well enjoy yourself.” Stead confessed to liking the odd pint, which was hardly classified information to anyone who stuck around after a day’s play and saw him wander into The Tavern or the Trent Bridge Inn. “It doesn’t do you any harm. I’m not one for going to bed early,” he said, half-suggesting alcohol was fuel and sleep was a waste of time. 

Like Fletcher, he brought with him a sense of performance. Also like Fletcher, he captured quite straightforwardly the strong loyalty and affection of the paying customer. Nothing ever ruptured it.  

For me, Fletcher and Stead are brothers born 49 years apart.

Each is the epitome of the cult hero. My copy of the shorter Oxford English Dictionary blandly describes that phrase as a “devotion or homage” … “a fashionable enthusiasm” … a “transient fad”.  This wishy-washy definition is lamely wide of the mark.  

The novelist and critic James Baldwin pinned down what he believed attracted audiences to Hollywood’s film icons. Baldwin did it in two sentences that haven’t been bettered since he wrote them almost half a century ago: “One does not go to watch them act,” he declared. “One goes to watch them be.” I can legitimately relate Baldwin’s argument to cricket and to cricketers. For a blissful period, from the early to the mid-1970s, going to Trent Bridge simply to watch someone be was the whole purpose of every season for me. I would gladly have paid the few shillings admission to glimpse Garry Sobers do no more than scratch out his guard or pace out his run.  He made even those menial tasks appear aristocratic, graceful, entitled. You can analyse to exhaustion the things inherent in superior beings, such as Sobers, but you’ll never fathom them out satisfactorily because genius is inexplicable.
It just is.   

But the appeal of the cult hero, who has a sort of glamour and also a gravitational pull all of his own, is more complicated still to sum up because – like beauty and taste and the unsolvable mysteries of attraction – it is wholly subjective and nuanced beyond belief. 

I can only tell you what I think.  

I think being a character is one thing and possessing character is quite another. These traits do not always co‑exist, but we have an inbuilt barometer that registers the crucial difference between them in the cult hero. I think you never remember cricketers in columns of figures: you recall instead their élan, their originality and those stupendous acts that made such a terrific visceral impact on you that only the emotionally numb could fail to respond to them. I think we relate to some players either because we see a little of ourselves in them or because we want to be a little like them. I think there are certain cricketers, especially the triers and the strivers, who become intrinsically connected to their audience. I also think their empathy with us, which we detect in currents, explains why it is reciprocated and why we will them to do well as a consequence.

^{Fletcher in One-Day Cup colours}

You’ll have your own criteria about the making of a cult hero, but Stead and Fletcher emphatically fit mine.

How the years whiz by in a flash-bang way. 

It’s hard for me to credit that a dozen have passed since I first saw Fletcher. It’s harder still to believe that 45 separate me from my last sight of Stead. 

Fletcher had to wait until 2014 for his county cap. By then, he’d taken 175 wickets and already had a Championship winners’ medal (please, don’t get me started on the inequities of the county cap system, which is frequently feudal-like). Afterwards, came the domestic double: the Royal London One-Day Cup and the T20 Blast. In 2017 he also survived an horrific accident, live on Sky, when the stomp of his follow-through and the dip of his shoulders took his head into the flight path of a screaming straight drive from Sam Hain at Edgbaston. Fletcher – typically being Fletcher – seemed after a day or two to shrug this off as casually as someone putting Elastoplast on a paper cut. 

Being the big lad was always going to be Fletcher’s unique selling point, but it wouldn’t have taken him far without mettle, without a plausible work ethic and without the overwhelming desire for self-improvement to burnish his talent. In this regard, he and Stead are identical again. 

At the start of this season, Fletcher took a maiden six-wicket haul against Essex at Trent Bridge. Less than a fortnight later, he bettered it by taking seven, flattening Worcestershire with career-best match figures of 10 for 57. Not yet fully jabbed, I watched both games piecemeal on the streaming service. I thought his arm was a little higher than usual, his wrist positon firmer and also that he delivered the ball from closer to the stumps.  Even with his youthful 20s well behind him, his peak is perhaps still to come. I hope so.  

And Stead?

Every story can have a happy ending; the only decision you have to make is where to stop it. With Stead, I’d like to stop at one of two places. 

Firstly, in 1972, which was his stellar summer.  Unlike Fletcher, he collected three wooden spoons rather than silverware at Notts, who were permanently in the doldrums. In ’72, however, Stead took 93 wickets in a team that finished 14th in the table, a personal triumph rewarded by the PCA. He was crowned Player of the Year. 

Secondly, in 1976, which was his final first-class season. His last Championship match sent Stead back to where he began. At Bradford Park Avenue, he faced again the county that had rejected him. No novelist, fearing a charge of implausibility, would have dared to write such a plot. 

Alas, I can’t stop in either of those years – even though I prefer to pretend that what came next for Stead didn’t happen. 

He died of cancer in 1980, only nine weeks before what would have been his 41st birthday. 

Here’s the thing; and I promise you this image is never forced or contrived. Occasionally, it just comes to me unbidden at Trent Bridge. 

Fletcher is bowling from the Radcliffe Road End. Stead is hurtling in with the Pavilion rising at his back. In my imagination, the two of them are sharing the new ball. 

If only…

This article was published in the Summer edition of The Cricketer - the home of the best cricket analysis and commentary, covering the international, county, women's and amateur game