John Woodcock watched cricket for eighty-five of his ninety-four years on this Earth, beginning his career as a sports journalist with the match involving India. That wasn’t, however, his only connection with the country. Far from it. During his nearly six decades as cricket writer, he took multiple trips to India, the land of his father’s birth, and developed an enduring love for cricketers here — from Vinoo Mankad to Sachin Tendulkar.
Cricket is as much about followers of the game, as it is about those in the middle. And the former do make comparisons. The ‘Sachin Tendulkar or Don Bradman’ was a question that was also tossed to Woodcock, and the prolific sports writer did play it well and with nuance.
Woodcock rarely compared players across eras and was loath to look upon the present with sepia-tinted eyes. For a man whose first memories of Test cricket went back to the shenanigans of the infamous ‘Vizzy’ on India’s 1936 tour of England, who could count among his friends the likes of Don Bradman and Denis Compton, and spent years going on tours with England’s cricketers by sea, his opinions were contemporary to a fault. In 2010, with Sachin Tendulkar about to score his 50th Test century, Woodcock was asked to compare him to cricket’s greatest batsman. He paused for a moment and said: “Let us just say that Tendulkar is the Bradman of today – less hypnotic but scarcely less phenomenal.”
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Woodcock’s ‘India innings’
The first Test match that Woodcock reported on was during India’s 1952 tour of England. He was at Lord’s to witness India losing what has gone down in cricketing folklore as ‘Mankad’s Test’. In the previous Test match at Headingley, which featured debutant Fred Trueman at his very best, India had been 4 down without any runs on the board, the nation’s worst start to a Test innings, and had unsurprisingly lost the match. Vinoo Mankad, already acknowledged as one of the world’s great all-rounders and the architect of India’s first Test victory against England just a few months ago in Madras in 1951-52, had been left out of the original touring party, following a disagreement between him and the administrators who had let collective ego get the better of their judgement. Mankad had been playing league cricket in England, and after the debacle at Headingley, was quickly drafted into the team.
Mankad scored 72 on the first day and then bowled 73-overs in England’s first innings, picking up 5 for 196. Then he went back in to open the innings and stroked his way to 184 in less than five hours, which, at the time, was an Indian player’s highest individual contribution in a Test innings. Mankad then went back in to bowl, sending down an incredible 97-overs, over the two innings.
A mesmerised Woodcock would recount later in ESPN Cricinfo: “Mankad was a sturdy and businesslike right-hand batsman and a slow, orthodox left-arm bowler with a low trajectory. Cricket being a symbol of eternity as it was played in India in those days, Mankad personified it. No one else has ever been on the field for anything like as long in a match at Lord’s. Of the 24 hours 35 minutes for which the match lasted, he spent 18 hours 45 minutes in the middle. He was 35 at the time and nothing like as physically fit as his counterparts today. It was a prodigious effort.”
Although John Woodcock and I never met, we shared a mutual love for the art of spin bowling, particularly leg-spin, that drew me to his writing early in my life. I remember reading his account of India’s 1971 victory at the Oval in a back issue of The Cricketer that I had found on the bookshelf at home. Recently, my friend Marcus Lee was kind enough to send me an electronic version of the very issue that served as a reminder of why I was influenced by Woodcock’s writing. In it, Woodcock who was an ardent admirer of my childhood hero Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, writes about the Indian leg-spinner’s 6 for 36 that brought India their first ever Test and series win in England : “There are few cricketers I have greater admiration for than Chandra. Because of polio Chandra nearly had to give up cricket in his teens; but now, if he were never to play again, he would be a name to remember.”
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A legend, and a lover of the game
For thirty-two long years, Woodcock was the cricket correspondent for The Times, moving to the paper after starting his journalistic career with The Guardian. Despite three decades of shadowing the game from close quarters, he did not write a single book on the sport. What he did, was report, report and report, setting a record of covering 400 plus Tests, a feat that tells you of his unending love for the game. While covering the exploits of some of the greatest cricketers, Woodcock established himself as one of the foremost sports writers of all time.
“There was a time,” he told the Wisden Almanack at the turn of the century, “when I had watched half the Test matches ever played. It came and went very quickly, I don’t remember when.”
In the days before the internet, all day long, Woodcock would sit alone in the press box, peering through binoculars, watching the game carefully, evaluating players independently away from the clutter of discussions of fellow correspondents. And at the end of the day, he would pick up the phone, call the copy takers back at the newspaper and read out his report — well rounded, factual yet nuanced, with a unique take on the day’s play and evaluation of players.
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The India tour, Rolls Royce, London to Bombay
Woodcock didn’t just love Indian cricketers, his ties to the country were umbilical. If not for India, the world of cricket would have been denied one of the most evocative writers the sport has ever seen. A young widow, Nora Dunsford, came back to her village of Longparish, where the Woodcocks had held the right to choose a rector since 1762. Nora’s husband had been killed in a train accident in India and the grieving widow found solace in the arms of the current rector, Parry Woodcock, many years her senior and still a bachelor. Parry had been born in Ahmednagar where his father was a judge. John was the second son born to Nora when Parry was 70. It was surely fated that the first Test match the 10-year old John would witness was between his nation and the one that was responsible for his ‘accidental’ existence.
It was fitting, therefore, that one of the most incredible journeys Woodcock made as a journalist was to India in 1976-77. That winter, he and cricket commentator Henry Blofeld, decided they had had enough of the sea and the air, and would drive to work, so to speak. The two eternal lovers of the sport, got into a 1921 Rolls Royce and drove from London to Bombay to cover the Test series. In his book Squeezing the Orange, Blofeld would write: “My favourite part was going from Kabul in Afghanistan, along the Khyber Pass to Pakistan. It was simply unbelievable: the mountains, the gorges, up hill, down dale – the most remarkable scenery I’ve ever seen.”
True to form, Woodcock would only write about cricket. The series ended in victory for Tony Grieg’s England, but the win would forever be tainted by the charges of cheating labeled at John Lever (and by inference Grieg), whose arguably vaseline induced performance literally ‘swung’ the series England’s way. It was literally a series worth driving to witness.
Scyld Berry, one of the finest modern writers enriching the sport, was brought in as a part of Woodcock’s team when he took over as editor of Wisden in 1981. Berry remained close to his mentor throughout his life and mentions the fact that while Woodcock would stay a bachelor all his life, “the unrequited love of his life was a woman in Calcutta he had met on an England tour of India.” Intriguing as that reference is, Woodcock never discussed it again, and now we shall never know who she was and how that romance could perhaps have played out.
What will remain for cricket lovers to savour for ever more will be the romance of John Woodcock’s evocative account of matches he witnessed and insights on the players he saw. In his passing, cricket lost one of its most faithful scribes, a man who called the game as he saw it – accurately, authoritatively, and yet with deep insights without the benefit of action replays, slow motion studies and mind-numbing rows of data. His Times colleague Alan Gibson once labeled him “The sage”. There can be no epithet more appropriate to remember him by.
Anindya Dutta @Cric_Writer is a sports columnist and author of Wizards: The Story of Indian Spin Bowling, and Advantage India: The Story of Indian Tennis. Views are personal.
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)