Spectator Sport

21 February 2009

A damned fine spell

A few of us had a small dinner the other day to thank Angus Fraser for his distinguished stint as the Independent’s cricket correspondent. Not quite reeling off 45 overs from the Nursery End, but a damned fine spell anyway. The evening was, as such occasions should be, wine-fuelled, good-humoured and jam-packed with cracking stories, most of them unrepeatable.

Gus was one of those remarkable players who just stepped over the boundary ropes when they finished their career in the first-class game and then, seemingly effortlessly, took up a career as a first-class journalist (think Mike Atherton of the Times, the Telegraph’s Derek Pringle, or the Guardian’s Mike Selvey). Such a pity it doesn’t work the other way; there can’t be a cricket writer anywhere who hasn’t harboured fantasies of being called up to open for England.

As a journalist Gus was pretty much like he was as a player: hugely industrious, modest and selfless, very loyal and totally dependable. And, of course, bloody good too. He played 46 Tests for England, taking 177 wickets, twice in the West Indies taking eight in an innings. He played 17 years of first-class cricket, all of them, and this is getting rarer nowadays, for just one county, his beloved Middlesex.

When Gus retired from the game, that fine cricket writer Michael Henderson observed: ‘In Fraser’s world the sky was never blue and the sun rarely shone. There were squalls and showers and he observed it all with a face like thunder. But beneath that unsentimental exterior beat the stoutest of hearts.’ Gus himself said that his own favourite description of his sometimes tortured and always lengthy run-up was that he ‘bowled as if his braces had been caught in the sightscreen’.

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