An underrated batsman

ONE of the admirable traits of cricket supporters in India is their love of the game and all who play it.

Obviously they hero-worship their own, but they also appreciate the overseas stars. In addition, they love and respect the players of the past.

Even today I am immediately recognised and greeted with almost embarrassing affection but received by me with great appreciation.

The late Ken Barrington was a great favourite and they responded to his wonderful ability, sense of humour, friendliness and his ability to interact with them even in the tightest situation.

Ken Barrington is probably the most successful England batsman since the War and in many ways the most underrated.

I am biased, because I became a close friend of Ken and because I rate so highly, quality, guts, attitude and all the things which Barrington and so many of the genuine cricketers of the world stand for.

Look at his record against Australia, in particular, and tell me why he never achieved the lasting fame he obviously deserved.

Wally Grout, the great Australian wicket-keeper once remarked, "Whenever I saw Ken coming to the wicket I thought a Union Jack was trailing behind him."

On many occasions Ken carried the weight of England's chances on his shoulders. Yet, he was good enough to finish with a Test average of 58.67.

In England he played 13 Test matches and scored 1065 runs at an average of 59.16. In Australia he played 10 Tests and made 1046 at 69.73.

The players of a generation pitted against him admired and respected a real competitor, a true Englishman who fought for his country as hard as they fought for theirs and then smiled his broken smile over a beer afterwards.

It always seemed to me he never received the recognition he deserved.

Part of that was probably because of his adopted style of batting, which was admittedly very unglamorous, and his perceived slowness at the crease.

He was even dropped by England for batting too slow after making 137 against New Zealand, perhaps because England were expected to wallop New Zealand in the 1960s and Ken's seven and a half hours for 137 was too much to take.

Couldn't they do with that sort of stickability now! And simply rattling off the bare statistics of a long innings is deceptive, especially across the generations.

When I made 311 at Manchester in 1964 to secure the Ashes it was considered ultra slow. However, it is usual for batsmen who make 200 these days to take longer getting there than I did on my way to a triple century.

Times and expectations change. Batsmen nowadays don't receive as many deliveries in an hour as we did, but history does show that so called attacking players were not as quick scoring as their image suggests. A pleasing style often gives a false impression of speed - and poor Ken certainly couldn't lay claim to that.

Ironically enough, he was a thrasher when he began with Surrey in the English county championship, a batsman who went after everything he could reach.

While it worked he was praised, but when the same flashing stroke got him out he was accused of irresponsibility and inconsistency.

So he changed his approach and became a really tough customer to remove.

He opened his stance so that sometimes his left shoulder pointed in the direction of mid-wicket.

Consequently, he always looked as though he would be easy meat for an inswinger - but he never was.

Even Alan Davidson, the greatest left-arm swing bowler of them all, found him hard to dislodge.

Ken's wide-open stance and method of playing back and across should have left him as a lay-down misery for a bowler of Davo's class - but Ken's record says otherwise.

Sometimes he would show glimpses of his old attacking self. Then he could be quite devastating, a great hooker in the safe short arm jab mould and a wonderful square cutter of the ball.

Such an open stance meant he needed the ball really well up rather than just slightly overpitched, but he was still able to smash it through the offside.

Being a leg-spinner himself - and always ready to talk about the art - he was a very competent player of the leg spin, whereas most English batsmen have no ideas.

He may well have been the first English leg-spinner to learn how to bowl a flipper after picking it up from Richie Benaud on a Ron Roberts tour to South Africa and Rhodesia in 1959.

We Australians virtually adopted Ken on that tour. I think he liked our Egalitarian approach to the game and he repaid us by scoring more Test runs against us than any other batsmen of the time.

His image as a dour man at the crease was nothing like the Barrington the players knew, off it - always good for a laugh, a great practical joker and impersonator and a wonderful mangler of the language.

According to Ken target shooters used 'high philosophy bullets'. He woke one morning having 'slept like a lark'. And he described the players at a buffet in Pakistan as 'a swarm of lotuses'. He loved brass bands and would take up the baton at the drop of a baton.

And he had high ideals about the game he loved, one of the few players prepared to come out publicly against the highly controversial bowling action of Charlie Griffith when the topic was political dynamite in the mid-1960s.

That issue took a lot out of Ken emotionally, but he felt an important principle was at stake.

Ken had a mild heart attack during the double-wicket tournament in Australia in 1968, after which he announced his retirement from first class cricket.

However, he stayed involved in top class cricket as Manager of England tours.

He was Assistant Manager in Barbados in 1981 when he suffered a second heart attack and died in the arms of his wife Anne.

It says a lot for the respect in which he was held that the ultra-competitive fleet street contingent on tour agreed to delay the news of his death until it had been broken to his son, Guy, at boarding school.

Kenny Barrington had a technique which may not have suited every batsman but certainly worked for him. He had courage, enormous tenacity and integrity.

He loved to chat between overs on the field, but once we discovered that we made sure he had nobody to talk to.

I loved the bloke but gave instructions, "Don't let's make Kenny feel too much at home."

Not that it seemed to affect him. Kenny, wrapped in his Union Jack, knew just what we were doing.