Kelly’s eye

Dotted about the house is the occasional sporting print. Flash, bang, wallop, what a photograph! At the top of our staircase is Herbert Fishwick’s imperishable study at Sydney in 1928 of Hammond’s pluperfect cover-drive -— coiled power, poise, omnipotence, and with the famous blue handkerchief peeping from his pocket. Among the family snaps and sepia descendants on the walls of the downstairs cloakroom is Neil Leifer’s bespoke, breathtaking birdseye shot of Cleveland Williams canvas-flattened by Ali at Houston in 1966, a memorable Neil Libbert evocation of that golden afternoon at Wembley in the same year, and a Patrick Eager 1/500th-of-a-second first-ball freeze-frame of Warne vs Gatting at Old Trafford a dozen summers ago. I’m writing this being watched by a classic Chris Smith of Coe at Moscow in 1980, a Chinese ping-pong player by Eamonn McCabe, a Daley Thompson by Tom Jenkins, Colin Elsey’s slimed-in-mud Fran Cotton at a lineout in Wellington in 1977, Dermot Barry’s immortal shot for the Irish Times of Alan Duggan’s clamorous cornerflag crash-landing to score at Lansdowne Road four decades ago, Steve Powell’s mesmerising, taunting Maradonna vs six Dutchmen in 1982. And three Ken Kelly’s — a commemorative Tom Graveney off-drive at Cheltenham in the 1950s, Botham wolfishly clocking his 300th Test wicket at The Oval in 1984, and a ravishing close-up action portrait of turbanned Indian left-arm spinmeister Bishen Bedi at work in 1974, for my money the finest cricket photograph of a bowler ever.

Ken Kelly was probably Ireland’s most notable gift to cricket. Pa from Cork, Ma from Connemara, they set up home in Leeds. Ken was born in 1921 at 197 Kirkstall Lane, Headingley, and there aren’t many better cricketing addresses than that. In his very backyard, as apprentice to Yorkshire Evening News cameraman Jack Slater, 14-year old Ken saw Don Bradman make his epic 304 in a day — ‘more sharply than anyone else on the ground through the magnified lens of our Long Tom camera’.