David Bairstow with Derek Hodgson (1984) – A Yorkshire Diary: Year of Crisis, London: Sidgwick & Jackson

Note: This is our second non-90s pick, having completed our look back through the decade.

I never saw the late David Bairstow play, although during a county match at Scarborough in July 2022, a few questions about the playing career of umpire Neil Mallender somehow sent me scurrying off to purchase a copy of this book, which I had read and re-read as a teenager.

(It had somehow passed me by that Bairstow’s son Jonny is now captain of Yorkshire; back then, of course, he was busy with England, and batting like God.)

The old cricket books that I inherited in the mid-90s were, in a pre-internet age, my main source of information about teams and players of the past.

Through them, I learned that Mike Gatting wasn’t always a struggling veteran in a losing team; Ray Illingworth was a successful former England captain, not just a baffled-looking man in a Tetley Bitter shellsuit; and there was more to Geoffrey Boycott than a booming voice going on about poor batting technique.

This collection’s strong Yorkshire flavour meant that fallings-out between big personalities and the club’s occasionally baffling internal politics were also introduced and discussed in some detail. Indeed, after the author is permitted a brief section of biography, David Bairstow’s A Yorkshire Diary soon begins the process of explaining the context of its subtitle and the crisis in question.

Typically, the controversy centres around Boycott, and Yorkshire’s decision not to offer him a playing contract for the 1984 season. The details are slightly more fathomable than those offered by the man himself in Boycott on Cricket, although the photos of various committee men in suits, references to ‘the storming of the winter palace’ and indeed the very idea of such a huge fuss being caused over a 40-something ex-England batsman continuing to play county cricket in the first place will all be slightly baffling to modern eyes.

Eventually, Boycott is retained, with Ray Illingworth – who had made an unlikely return as captain at the age of 50 after initially rejoining Yorkshire as team manager – leaving the club. Left to pick up the pieces as skipper is Bairstow, whose straightforward and affirmative answer to the question of whether Boycott was still worth a place in the team led some to conclude he had picked a side in the club’s latest civil war.

While there are few signs of Bairstow’s personality, as described so memorably and affectionately by others, leaping off the page here – the story is told in the clipped, professional tones of the co-writer (in this case the late Derek Hodgson) – his exasperation with the club’s politics and the myriad ways in which Yorkshire make life difficult for themselves certainly shines through.

Hamstrung by the lack of an overseas player, or indeed the ability to recruit anyone not actually born in Yorkshire, his view that a weak side could ill afford to lose a player of Boycott’s class was a clear-headed and pragmatic one.

As a character, though, Boycott’s portrayal in this account – as a capricious character whose interest in the wider team vacillates between supportive senior pro and completely uninterested veteran depending on his mood – is consistent with many others on record. A late-evening dismissal via a misjudged hook shot off the bowling of Ian Botham in the season opener against Somerset leaves Bairstow speculating strongly about a battle of egos between the two: ‘It was a shot of defiance, an attempt to prove he was bigger than Botham, and it made for pathetic cricket.’ (1)

Anyone expecting a season of fireworks and fallings out is likely to be disappointed, however, by an otherwise uncontroversial account of a difficult county season.

Bairstow gamely attempts to shuffle the pack, but despite the intermittent presence of a young Paul Jarvis and a seemingly out-of-sorts Graham Stevenson, the seam bowling appears heavily reliant on Arnie Sidebottom, while the emerging talents of Martyn Moxon and Ashley Metcalfe are still too callow to lift the team’s batting efforts.

Despite this, England, without the services of Graham Gooch to take on a strong West Indies side during the home summer, flirt with the possibility of selecting Moxon, a prospect that leaves Bairstow fearful of the potential damage caused by an early-career failure against the visitors’ mighty pace attack. In the end, the stars never quite align for Moxon, although the experiences of two other England top-order debutants that summer – Andy Lloyd of Warwickshire (concussion) and Hampshire’s Paul Terry (broken arm) – suggest that Bairstow’s caution was well-founded.

Bairstow himself received an international call-up in 1984, and his three appearances in the one-day series prior to the Tests were the final England caps of his career. During a curious period for English wicket-keeping, with the role passed back and forth between various candidates, Bairstow’s combative qualities were apparently considered best-suited to limited-overs cricket.

After an unhappy tour of the Caribbean in 1980/1, during which he lost his Test place to Paul Downton, Bairstow never earned another chance in the longer format. Here, despite being pleased and proud to answer the call, he frets about his form with the gloves, and appears to view the ODIs as a slightly unwelcome distraction from the main business of captaining Yorkshire.

A diary format frequently captures the drudgery of a long county season, and despite being a largely factual account characterised by its author’s determination to push on regardless, Bairstow’s frustration – at criticism in the press, the suitability of some of the county’s smaller grounds for hosting first-class cricket, drunken and racist behaviour from spectators and, especially, the lack of quality in the team – is often evident.

Any chance of silverware evaporates after a heartbreakingly narrow loss to Warwickshire in the semi-final of the Benson and Hedges Cup. But after taking charge of a team that finished bottom of the County Championship in 1983, while battling a whole host of off-field issues and juggling the captaincy with wicket-keeping duties, Bairstow emerges with some credit.

Despite that, the book ends uncertainly, with the epilogue reporting that after meeting for three and three-quarter hours at the season’s end the Yorkshire committee announced that the decision on Bairstow’s future as captain had been deferred – leaving the man himself to find this out via the TV news, and batting off speculation over his future.

A curious decision, but one not untypical of this uniquely political club. As David Hopps – the cricket correspondent of the Yorkshire Post in 1984 and namechecked briefly in this book – later wrote of this season, ‘With the rest of Yorkshire torn asunder, depending on whether they worshipped Boycott or loathed him, Bairstow seemed to be the last man to believe he was leading a normal cricket team.’

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Young Lions Sometimes Roar: Watching Bad Cricket (And Playing Cricket Badly) in the 90s by Ben Richards is out now.

Click here for more info or here to buy a copy.

Notes:

(1) Boycott later recalled this specific dismissal in Boycott on Cricket, ascribing this ‘careless stroke’ to Botham’s ‘strange ability to pick up wickets with bad balls, to persuade batsmen to sacrifice themselves as though hypnotized.’

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Young Lions Sometimes Roar