FEBRUARY 2015: The other cricketing Gunner

When combining summer and winter pastimes was still a possibility, Brian Close, briefly, gave it a go.

Perhaps it’s just as well that Denis Compton had left Arsenal before Brian Close signed for the North London club in October, 1951.  It seems unlikely that they would have got on at the time.  As cricketers, of course, they were very different.  One was the dashing darling of Lord’s, the other the more pragmatic hero of Headingley, Bradford Park Avenue and Bramall Lane, where Middlesex were made about as welcome as a flat head on a pint of Ward’s or Richdale’s. 

As it transpired, the two came face to face when Close, having already become the youngest cricketer ever to play for England, was selected for the ill-fated 1951-52 winter tour of Australia.  Compton had taken over the captaincy from Freddie Brown for the match against Tasmania, by which time young Brian was suffering from an all-too-typical football injury -- a strained groin or “ruptured tendon roots on the public bone” as it said on the doctor’s letter that he handed to the stand-in skipper.  He promptly tore it to shreds.  “I couldn’t care less what the ****ing doctor says,” was Compton’s sympathetic response.  “You’re playing.”

The gruesome details, and more, are all in Close’s autobiography.  But he doesn’t mention it when we meet some 63 years later on a wet Monday lunchtime in the car park at Guiseley Station, one stop out of Leeds.  “No, Denis had retired,” is all he says when I ask if their paths ever crossed at Highbury.  “But Leslie was still there.  Good centre half he was.”  And Arthur Milton, last of the doughty dozen who played for England at both games?  “He was a good winger and a good mate.  I remember going to Wembley to see him play against Austria one Wednesday evening and being interviewed on the telly.”

Amid the clutter in the front of his blue Vauxhall are two testimonies to the passage of time.  One is a walking stick, the other an asthma inhaler.  The latter remains unused in the course of our conversation, despite him reaching for his fags and lighting up at regular intervals.  My offer to go for a coffee or a pint has been declined.  Just as well, perhaps.  The youngest man ever to play cricket for England is now well into his eighties and I’m not too keen to find out whether his reputation as an extremely fast driver has improved in the intervening years.  Being kippered by cigarette smoke seems the safer option. 

On the cricket field, of course, Close always appeared indestructible.  Not for nothing was the aforementioned autobiography entitled I don’t Bruise Easily.  Few who saw it will forget the way he strode down the wicket to Wesley Hall on that nerve-wracking final day of the 1963 Lord’s Test against the West Indies.  The memory plays tricks but I’m fairly sure I was home from school early enough to watch through parted fingers on my parents’ black and white television.  Certainly I remember Colin Cowdrey coming out to bat with a broken arm in the final over.  His heroism hogged the headlines in the following day’s papers but, as I recall, there were also pictures of the bruises on Close’s upper torso acquired in the course of compiling a vital 70 before he was caught behind by Deryck Murray off the bowling of Charlie Griffiths, Hall’s partner in terror.

Similar pictures appeared thirteen years later when, aged 45, Close was brought back by England to counter the equally terrifying partnership of Michael Holding and Andy Roberts.  His 20 in England’s second innings at Old Trafford was the second highest score, prolonged and unflinching as it was.  Bear in mind his tendency to field at a forward short leg without a helmet and expect fielders to catch any rebounds off his legs or head and Eric Morecambe’s line about the start of the cricket season seems all too telling – “ah, the delicious sound of the smack of red leather on Brian Close”.

It was the opening of the 1952 cricket season that put paid to his promising career with Arsenal.   Yorkshire were warming up with a “friendly” against the MCC at Lord’s.  “The first day was a Saturday and I had permission from [the captain] Norman Yardley to leave at tea-time so that I could get across to Stamford Bridge to play in a London Combination League cup final against Chelsea,” he recalls.  “Unfortunately, Norman’s wife was expecting twins at the time and he didn’t come down with the rest of the team.  So I had to seek permission from the Yorkshire secretary John Nash.  He just turned round and said: ‘No, you’re not going to get off early.  Your job’s cricket.”’

Close’s dash across London at close of play was to no avail.  “I didn’t get there until half-time and they’d had to play an A-team lad instead of me.  Unfortunately, they lost. George Male [the coach] just said: ‘Give me a ring in the morning.”’

When he finally got through, Male’s response could be summed up as “your job’s football”.   Close was told that the Gunners were “gunner ‘ave” to let him go.  “I was only eighteen,” he says, gazing sadly through the cigarette smoke at the back end of the Guiseley ticket office.  “And there I was being given a free transfer.”

“You must have been devastated,” I suggest.

“Course I was. I was a bloody good inside forward and I scored goals.”

For a moment there’s a real sense of what might have been.  After glimpsing the marbled halls of Highbury, he was back on the treadmill of the county circuit, changing in sometimes primitive pavilions on festival grounds such as Weston Super Mare or Ashby de la Zouche where you might have to hang your clothes on protruding nails and pick splinters out of your feet.

“That didn’t bother me too much,” he shrugs.  But there’s no doubt that he would have loved to have played for Arsenal first team in front at a large home crowd. “The first time you saw Highbury you just marvelled at that wonderful stadium,” he sighs. 

Valley Parade, Bradford, was hardly comparable.  But it was Bradford City who came a-calling towards the end of the 1952 cricket season in which he had been the first to do the double of a thousand runs and a hundred wickets.  Okay, Bradford weren’t Arsenal but they were offering the prospect of first-team football, albeit in the Third Division North rather than the top-flight.  What’s more, he didn’t have to stay in digs in Muswell Hill.  He could live at his parents’ house, as he did for home matches in the cricket season until he married at thirty four. 

So he jumped at the chance – and made the most of it.  “I played in about seven games for Bradford and got nine goals,” he maintains.  “Then I got my leg smashed up at Port Vale.  It was a bloke called Leek who did for me.  The ball came across and I trapped it on my chest.  As I turned towards the goal, he hooked his legs around mine, just below the knees.  I twisted and felt both of my cartilages go.  As a result, I missed the entire 1953 cricket season.  Yorkshire were not happy.”

You can imagine how Close himself felt.  “I never played [professional football] again,” he says, reaching for the cigarettes, and that sense of what might have been returns.   During nearly thirty years as a pro’ cricketer, he captained Yorkshire with considerable success. Somerset, too, and England on seven occasions (six wins and a draw).  He faced devilishly fast bowlers without a helmet and without flinching.  He stood ridiculously close to batsmen capable of hitting stray leg-side balls out of the ground.   Yet he survived with bruises and occasional stitches.  Meanwhile, one injury ended his football career before it had really begun. 

Can we conclude anything from that?

He shrugs again before admitting: “You never really expected to get injured at football.  It just happened.”  Then he adds: “Wes [Hall] could be a bit lively on uncovered wickets.  Especially Lord’s in the days when they had that ridge.”   

A rumbling chuckle punctuates his memory of that long-ago summer before he dissolves into a coughing fit.   A remarkable man, Brian Close.  There’s no shortage of brain power inside that resilient head. Academically he was very bright, excelling at maths, chemistry and biology.    “I had a provisional place to do medicine at Leeds University,” he reveals.  “But I had to go and do my national service and, while I was doing it, they extended the stay from eighteen months to two years.  By the time I came out of the Army, my university place had been filled.”

So Dr DB Close never materialised, unlike Dr WG Grace, a man capable of drawing large crowds with bat in hand for Gloucestershire and England and ball at feet for the London amateur side Wanderers FC. It seems unlikely, however, that his patients saw too much of him.  
  

Interview by Chris Arnot, author of Britain’s Lost Cricket Festivals