Bob Willis Trophy reunites cricketers with the undulating fortunes of a frustrating game

PAUL EDWARDS: Jack Shutt went from zero to hero at Trent Bridge on his second first-class outing. A tale which any player can relate to in a game which can be a mess of emotions

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“Loneliness is a crowded room,” croons Bryan Ferry in the song ‘Dance Away’. Just so, of course, but I often think that few experiences expose the individual to himself quite as brutally as a cricket match. You can’t pass the ball nor can you hide from it. Your batting partner is 22 yards away and has his own thoughts. If you are bowling, your fielders will support you but they cannot deliver the bloody thing. Who can wonder if it all becomes a bit much for people?

This story has a happy ending, although Nottinghamshire supporters may disagree. Last weekend, I was at Trent Bridge watching the home side play Yorkshire. On the second afternoon, Notts were replying to Yorkshire’s first-innings 264 when Steve Patterson brought on Jack Shutt, a 23-year-old off-spinner who was playing only his second first-class match. (In his first, a six-wicket defeat of Durham on a seamer’s pitch, he had bowled eight unremarkable overs.) Immediately it was clear the lad could find neither length nor line. Far too often Jonny Bairstow was scrambling down the leg side and Shutt even bowled two wides, one of which, if I recall correctly, went to the boundary. His final figures were eight overs for 49 runs.

For something like an hour that sweltering afternoon Shutt seemed the loneliest man in Nottingham. Often fielding in the deep, he stopped the ball and threw it in with deliberate care, as if determined not to make another horlicks of things. It hadn’t helped, of course, that he was bowling on a sixth-day pitch, Nottinghamshire having opted to play the game on the wicket used four days earlier for the Derbyshire match.

The previous day Yorkshire had lost their first three batsmen to the new ball but the rest of their wickets had been taken by the spinners. Chris Nash, who had bagged four wickets in the previous five seasons, had produced a little ripper to bowl Harry Brook with the first ball of his spell. So Shutt had been expected to succeed. More significantly, he had probably expected it of himself.

For a minute or two, my thoughts went back to a piece I had written during lockdown about the Lancashire slow left-armer Ian Folley. ‘Fol’ was a beautiful bowler who could get the ball up and down at good pace and turn it for laughs, something he also enjoyed. He took 287 wickets for Lancashire and in 1988 it was between him and John Childs for a place in the England side. Yet, towards the premature end of his career for the Red Rose – he bowled his last ball for the county, aged 27, in 1990 – ‘Fol’ lost it almost completely. Deliveries would bounce twice or they would loop high over wicketkeeper Warren Hegg’s head. People called it a tragedy and for once the description did not seem tasteless when applied to a sportsman

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As part of my research for the piece, I contacted my friend, Ken Grime, who was a marketing executive at Lancashire in the late 1980s. He supplied invaluable testimony that Folley felt pressured by the expectation placed upon him. This is an extract from Ken’s email:

“‘You want to know about pressure?’ he said. ‘You turn up at a ground and realise if it’s a spinning track everyone’s looking at me and Simmo [Jack Simmons] to win us the game. That’s real pressure.’ He mentioned the game in question but I can’t recall it now. Although that situation is probably true for many spinners, and indeed many cricketers, it showed a serious side to Ian I’d not seen before. And I got the impression it was something that was on his mind.”

It is generally a bad idea if slow bowlers have anything on their minds except the simple complexities of their chosen trade. More than most cricketers they are vulnerable to the yips and at least one scholarly paper in the Journal of Sports Sciences has been written about the problem. There have been some bowlers who could land it perfectly in the nets and then sprayed it everywhere during matches. When I was at university there was a fast-medium bowler called David Gurr whose brief county career at Somerset was blighted in this way. David Foot’s brief pen-picture in Sixty Summers includes this tiny anecdote about him:

“When Greg Chappell was back in Taunton, having a net for a challenge competition, he was repeatedly beaten repeatedly by Gurr. ‘Who is this chap,’ he asked. ‘Is he going on tour for England?’ ”

For other players promotion to a higher level destabilises them. Last Tuesday, Simon Kerrigan signed a two-year contract with Northamptonshire. Kerrigan’s many friends and supporters in the game, many of them hailing from his native Lancashire, were delighted by that. For it is nearly seven years since his only Test appearance and his destruction by Shane Watson. Less than four seasons later Kerrigan played his final game for Lancashire. A spinner who had looked likely to take a wicket almost every ball was suddenly finding it difficult to bowl at all. The full account of all that has yet to come out and maybe never will. That is the cricketer’s business. But what we can say is that it is enormously to Kerrigan’s credit that he is rebuilding his career. Pretty much everyone in the game will appreciate his courage and wish him well.

It is important not to overblow the drama at Trent Bridge. All Jack Shutt had done was bowl eight poor overs. His experience is very far removed from that of Folley or Kerrigan. All the same, there was a certain tension in the press box when he was brought on at the Radcliffe Road End in the fourth innings of the match, albeit Nottinghamshire were 82 for 6, chasing 188. We needn’t have worried. Shutt had Peter Trego lbw with his fourth ball and completed Yorkshire’s victory when he had Samit Patel caught by Dawid Malan at midwicket with his 12th. They were his maiden wickets in first-class cricket. Within a few weeks, those earlier overs will probably seem as significant as a tick on an elephant’s arse. Next spring they may well have been forgotten. 

After the match, Yorkshire’s cricketers circled the wagons in admirable fashion. Jordan Thompson spoke of how they all knew what Jack could do because they had seen him do it in age-group and second-team games. Patterson made the point about expectation but said that if you pick someone, you play them rather than leaving them to watch the senior professionals go about their business. (In relatively distant eras the latter practice was relatively common. A few counties had a pecking order and only a ballsy new boy would try to disrupt it.) 

Yet, I suspect both Thompson and Patterson understood the obvious point that this wasn’t age group or second-team cricket. This was a big step up and Shutt had eventually taken it. Those twenty balls in the second innings may yet be among the most important of what we hope will be a successful career. And no one could bowl them for him.

It isn’t only spinners. Batsmen presented with a flat track are expected to make hay. Seamers given a green pitch or swing bowlers offered a heavy atmosphere should, so their colleagues quietly believe, cut down batsmen like a scythe levelling a meadow. The cricketers in question know it, too, and they also know it sometimes doesn’t happen.  This game is neither so simple nor so generous.

Perhaps that is why people like me keep watching it and why attempting to understand it is like climbing most mountains. You reach one peak only to find seven more waiting for you.       

As for the players, I suspect there are one or two days when, if they did not love this game beyond reason, they would hate it beyond measure. And there are even afternoons when they manage both emotions at the same time.

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