David Frith's Ashes Top Ten

We are honoured to have David Frith, the venerable cricket historian, as this week's guest writer. David crosses the borders between England and Australia, having been born in London but emigrated to Oz when he was 11. Very sensibly, he returned North in the 1960s. He founded and edited Wisden Cricket Monthly and wrote, among many books, my favourite cricket history, Bodyline Autopsy.

David writes: Stop anybody at a cricket ground (apart perhaps from those suffering from twentytwentyitis) and ask them to name some prominent Ashes figures and they’ll surely reel off the Bradmans and Hobbses and Hammonds and Millers and Bothams. But Mr Kidd tells me he does not mind how “eccentric and quirky” my selections turn out. What an irresistible challenge. So from left field, as they say, come the following ten selections, several heavily influenced by personal bias and experience:

JACK BROWN belted 140 (his fifty coming in a record 28 minutes) at Melbourne just when it seemed that England were finished in the deciding final Test of the 1894-95 rubber (the first great Test series). Brown smoked and drank a little too much for his own good, and had a secret second family tucked away in Yorkshire. Memory of him deserves renewal.

WILFRED RHODES as a blind nonagenarian whispered to me that he had actually “wanted to get at Victor Trumper”. No-one else ever said that, for the great Vic specialised in making bowlers look fools, even on rain-damaged pitches. But the wily old Yorkshireman was fed up with left-hander Darling padding him away and felt he had more chance against a right-hander. Wilfred’s Ashes stats are, of course, very, very impressive.

SYD COPLEY was a youngster on the Notts ground staff. Called onto the field when England needed a further substitute during the 1930 Test at Trent Bridge, he held a brilliant diving catch at mid-on to end Stan McCabe’s threatening innings. Although Bradman made 131, Australia fell 93 runs short, giving England their only victory of that Bradman-saturated summer. Copley then returned to obscurity.

ARCHIE JACKSON, Trumper’s successor as poetry in pads, began with 164 at Adelaide in 1929, when he was nineteen, and finished against England just over a year later with 73 in awkward conditions at The Oval, helping Australia regain the Ashes. Alongside Bradman’s ferocious run quest, this artistic batsman had briefly kept the torch of batting beauty aflame. If spared (he died at 23) he would have kept artistry alive through the age of remorseless run compilation.

ROSS GREGORY averaged 51 in his two Tests in 1936-37, helping skipper Bradman to turn a 0-2 deficit into a 3-2 Ashes triumph. He was barely out of his teens, and might well have gone on to captain Australia after the war. But he was killed in the service of his country while navigating a Wellington bomber. His impact on that famous Ashes series might just have stretched a good deal further.

LEN HUTTON comes in on the same selection basis as Lindwall: he was a boyhood obsession. He and Compton and Bedser seemed to be standing alone against supreme odds, valiant figures all. But Len had once scored 364, and that locks in something beyond mere admiration. It got to the point where I pressed my thumb hard against my nose all through school lessons in the hope of flattening it like Hutton’s.

RAY LINDWALL terrorised England in seven post-war series, displaying the most mesmerising fast-bowling run-up and delivery ever seen. He certainly shaped Ashes cricket, but, equally significantly, no nicer bloke ever played the game (Rugby League too). As a 14-year-old I asked him for a lift home one evening after a Test at Sydney. “Sure, hop in,” he said. Can’t imagine such a response from any current top cricketer.

SHANE WARNE sneaks in because he just happens to have saved leg-spin from extinction at Test level, and that’s a debt that cricket can never hope to repay – even though he’s done (deservedly) rather well out of the game. In all the long Ashes narrative he is the only man to hit the stumps with his first delivery. His other antics have proved equally diverting.

GARY PRATT makes the list just for generating that unforgettable pout of fury on Ricky Ponting’s flushed face when his bazooka throw ran the Aussie skipper out and pointed England to victory in the 2005 Trent Bridge Test. Pratt fully deserved his place on the top deck of the Ashes Special red bus in Trafalgar Square that September.

FLORENCE MORPHY: nobody said the selections for this zany list had to be all men. Had the delightful Miss M. not rustled up that little terracotta urn as a come-on for the tall, charming, hypochondriac Englishman Ivo Bligh, these two countries might all these years have been playing for nothing more impressive than some cheap tin token with Gregory/Lillywhite stamped on it.