Ray Illingworth and Jack Bannister (1997) — One-Man Committee, London: Headline

That time moves more quickly with age may be a cliché as tired and old as the kind of person who uses it, but personally I find it hard to accept that Ray Illingworth’s time as chairman of England selectors only lasted for three years – 1994-1996 – when my memories are of an all-consuming saga that seemed to span the whole of the 90s.

One-Man Committee is certainly true to those memories, reflecting its co-author’s apparent desire to offer candid opinions about England’s top players to the media and public at every available opportunity.

The idea of writing and releasing a book about your time in a top-level job, while still under contract to do that job, rarely turns out well, but by the time One-Man Committee was released, Illingworth’s tenure had already devolved into an ever-escalating media soap opera.

Not for Illingworth the usual journey from a tight-lipped, can’t-say-too-much time in office to a disappointingly measured (and dull) autobiography. All of the details that someone obsessed with mid-90s cricket, and selection of the England team, as a teenager are to be found within its pages.

But while I would have loved this book at the time, I instead adopted a high-minded stance, distancing myself from it as I would from an article in The Sun – controversy was tawdry, I felt my hero Mike Atherton had been diminished and demoralised by his working relationship with Illingworth, and I was still looking forward to the team finally fulfilling its potential.

Illingworth was, of course, a decorated former Yorkshire and England player, recognised as a shrewd tactician and man-manager with a formidable record as captain at both domestic (1) and international level, maintaining his profile and reputation upon retirement via regular appearances in the media, including the BBC’s television coverage.

Despite being in possession of two books from his playing days: Yorkshire and Back and The Tempestuous Years, they never quite held the same appeal to me as those written by Geoffrey Boycott – perhaps because the England team was my focus and Illingworth’s international career a little too far back in time to be of interest.

For all of Boycott’s apparent bluster about poor batting technique and other ills of the modern game, as a pundit – in the 90s, at least – he did still seem to have a grasp of the game in the present.

I have little recollection of Illingworth’s TV work, mainly because he relinquished these duties upon his appointment as chairman of selectors, but in the latter role he seemed slightly stuck in the past, making a virtue of sticking to certain fundamentals – including a persistent obsession with a combination of six batsmen and five bowlers – at the expense of other considerations.

Appointed after county chairmen bristled at the seemingly inevitable confirmation of MJK Smith as Ted Dexter’s successor, little thought seemed to have been given to how well Illingworth would work with Atherton, himself only recently new to the job. The two were a poor fit in terms of overall philosophy: Atherton wanted to identify and back a small group of young players, while Illingworth apparently favoured a swift turnover.

The chopping and changing of the team and frequent media interventions came to be the defining features of Illingworth’s tenure and are evidenced unapologetically in One-Man Committee. Players are discussed, dismissed, dropped and then returned to the team in rapid succession, often with little supporting explanation; while any discussion of self-inflicted media controversy largely downplays any possible impact on the players involved – especially the captain – with little evidence of self-reflection.(2)

Indeed, a frequent refrain in this book is Illingworth’s insistence that his captain’s opinion was sought and taken into account in selection and that the two were not always far away from each other on cricketing matters. Most discussion of Atherton here is sympathetic – which you might argue it had to be, given that he was still leading the team when this book was published – but the power imbalance, particularly in selection, is rarely acknowledged.

Even without following the logic that Atherton owed the chairman for his support during the ‘dirt in the pocket’ affair that dominated their first summer working together, once it became clear that Illingworth, and the other selectors, were of a different mind to the captain, he had little choice but to work within those limitations.

As the book progresses and media focus on Illingworth increases, particularly following the ill-judged decision to take on coaching duties after the sacking of Keith Fletcher in 1995, One-Man Committee increasingly becomes an exercise in self-justification and whack-a-mole responses to the minutiae of press criticism.

This paperback edition even makes a virtue of the controversy that followed its original release, after his response in the book to comments by Devon Malcolm about poor treatment on the 1995/6 tour to South Africa led to a charge – later overturned – of bringing the game into disrepute.

The most striking thing about One-Man Committee now, putting all of the ancient controversy to one side, is the failure to identify anything approaching a coherent philosophy of selection. The rapid turnover is hard to justify – Atherton writes in Opening Up that Illingworth assumed that the county game was as strong as it was when he was a player, but here the chairman says that it is average.

On that basis, the decision to keep dipping into it in search of players of international class appears a strange one. The notion that a good all-rounder, left-arm seamer and leg-spinner would be part of an ideal line-up appears to have been sufficient for quite a few contenders to earn consideration during this period.

Illingworth himself was a reaction to what had come before, and Ted Dexter – arguably the last of the old-school tie-and-blazer brigade – had attracted significant mockery towards the end of his reign for apparently strange remarks relating to the effects of smog and ‘designer stubble’ on performance during the tour to India in 1993.

Looking back, this at least had the effect of taking the spotlight away from the players. Illingworth’s high profile seemed to have the opposite effect, turning attention back onto the team by discussing in public things that should have been kept private.

While the constant speculation over selection may have been entertaining for the press, for everyone else – the team, its supporters, and even the man himself – the Illingworth years were too exhausting to be sustainable, and in retrospect feel like time wasted.

As he reduced his duties and prepared to step away from the role, there was no appetite to appoint another all-powerful ‘supremo’. A younger coach, David Lloyd, and selectors who instead searched for consensus – led by David Graveney – took his place.

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Notes:

(1) Illingworth’s achievements as captain at county level were with Leicestershire, rather than Yorkshire, although he made an unlikely on-field return as skipper of his home county in the early 80s after initially returning as manager in 1979.

(2) Atherton later wrote: ‘Initially, I could not work out whether [Illingworth] was being naïve or whether he was using the press to keep me in my place. Later, I came to the conclusion that his comments were not designed to hurt me although he must have been extraordinarily insensitive to think that they did not.’

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