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| Steele by name... |
In the 58-year history of the BBC’s much loved Sports
Personality of the Year (SPOTY) award, there have been only four cricketers to have
received the main prize. All the first winner had to do was snare 19 wickets in
a Test match, at a cost of 90 runs, while the two most recent were buccaneering
batting-and-bowling behemoths, latter-day action heroes whose pinnacle came
against the oldest cricketing enemy in the two most dramatic Ashes series of
the modern era. The fourth recipient was also a player whose apogee came
against Australia ,
but he was as similar to Ian Botham and ‘Freddie’ Flintoff as a bank clerk is to
a boxer.
Silver-haired and bespectacled, David Steele was the most
unlikely of all winners – “Test cricket has not enjoyed such a romantic story
in years,” remarked Wisden – yet
perhaps also the most cherished, the one whose success chimed most deeply with
the British national psyche, our stoicism, defiance and perseverance, be that
real or idealised. The Dunkirk Spirit in whites. He didn’t so much strike a
blow for ordinariness as for the extraordinary in those considered ordinary,
and at the time of his emergence there had been little in Steele’s modest
career with Northamptonshire to suggest that he would take to Test cricket with
such aplomb.
That he got his opportunity at all owed much to fortuitous
circumstance, as is always the case to one degree or another – the notion that
you ‘control your own destiny,’ in cricket or in life, is a self-help manual
myth (just ask Barry Richards and Mike Proctor). Geoffrey Boycott was in
self-imposed exile from international cricket having taken umbrage at being passed
over for the England
captaincy in favour of Mike Denness. This – and Denness being summarily deposed
after innings defeat in the first Test had followed a 4-1 pummelling in
Australia that winter – created the space in the team, but a 33-year-old
batsman averaging in the low thirties for “an unfashionable county” was a far
from obvious choice. However, the new captain, Tony Greig, had a clever way of
finding the sort of Steel(e) required to withstand Lillee and Thomson: “He went
to see the umpires and they gave him a nod. Good move, that”. Their hunch would
prove inspired.
It wasn’t only on the cricket field that things were bleak.
Having failed to qualify for the 1974 World Cup as they would the one after, England ’s
football team were bungling their European Championship campaign. Inflation was
at 24.2%, the highest since 1800. And the political climate was fraught, with
the far-right National Front mobilising and the IRA active. From out of this desolation
came an improbable figure to briefly and gloriously galvanise the country,
walking straight out of his solid if unremarkable county career into the
flaming roars of Lillee and Thomson.
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| England team on Steele's debut. Back, L-R: Woolmer, Gooch, Old, P Lever, Amiss, Steele, Wood. Front: Snow, Knott, Greig, Edrich, Underwood |
Well, not quite straight.
Famously, on debut at Lord’s, when Steele first “went to war”, his grand
entrance was not so much gladiatorial as farcical, redolent of another
character seen on the big stage for the first time that summer, Basil Fawlty:
“I went down a flight of stairs too many and almost ended up out the back of
the pavilion. When I got out there, Lillee called me ‘Groucho’.” But Steele was
no comedy act and there would be no faux
pas once out on the field. Gritty rather than pretty, he immediately “got
stuck in” and would slowly turn the tide of the series, perhaps the national
mood.
* * *
There are certain superficial parallels between Steele’s
effect in 1975 and that of the Olympics this year, the latter offering a similar
dollop of succour – for a city submerged by riots and looting twelve months
previously and for a country paying the price for financial joyriding. Indeed,
it’s debatable quite how much affection Steele’s famous “bank clerk who went to
war” epithet would inspire in today’s economically straitened times, with
government bailouts for banks and simmering rage at executive bonuses. Where all
this provoked the short-lived Occupy movement, Steele, the very antithesis of
recklessness – indeed, his parsimony earned him the nickname ‘Crime’: it doesn’t
pay (also outdated, some would say) – decided he was going to do some
occupation of his own: namely, of the crease, which was largely lacking in
Boycott’s absence.
It is ironic that his opportunity arose in the manner it did,
for Steele was “a big admirer of Boycott, the way he played. We’re similar
people, from a mining background. We had a good discipline of the mind. And
that’s what you need. I always felt I had a good temperament and north
Staffordshire gave me that, no question.” At the heart of that upbringing was
his uncle, Stan Crump, a Minor Counties stalwart of thirty years and pro in the
North Staffordshire league when “it was in its
heyday, before television. When there was a derby match, you couldn’t get in. It
was marvellous.”
Practising come rain or snow with future county teammate
Brian Crump on Stan, his dad’s back-garden concrete pitch, at the weekend the
teenage Steele pitted his wits against the likes of Sonny Ramadhin (“a
fantastic bowler, whether he threw it or not; a sort of early-day
Muralitharan”), Roy Gilchrist (“mad as a March hare, but quick”) and West
Indies captain, Frank Worrell (“wonderful man and marvellous player”). All the
while he did a six-year apprenticeship as a printer, earning £14.50 a week, and
played Minor Counties cricket for Staffordshire along with the likes of future
England wicket-keeper Bob Taylor, and his captain, the former England leg-spinning
all-rounder Jack Ikin, who popped his head round the Lord’s dressing room door after
Steele’s debut innings half-century. “A lovely memory”.
His pay would rise to £21 per week when he came on the radar
of the Northants secretary and recruiter-in-chief, Ken Turner, who “had never
played cricket but he knew what being a cricketer was all about and had a knack
of finding good cricketers. He said to Crumpy, ‘Who’s this chap Steele who’s
getting all the runs for Staffordshire?’ Brian said, ‘It’s my cousin’. He said
‘Well you better get him down here’. And that’s how it went.”
Progress was steady, if unspectacular, until 1972 saw him
miss out by twenty minutes on becoming the first batsmen to 1000 runs. By 1975,
he says, “I was ready. I was at the top of my game”. His ascent was fortunate,
in both sense of the word. “It was the benefit year. It all helped the revenue.”
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| Steele on the attack at Headingley |
After his 50 and 45 at Lord’s, Steele top-scored in each
innings at Leeds (as he would do in six of his first eleven innings) before
vandals protesting the imprisonment of George Davis caused the abandonment of
the game, preventing an England team considered bedraggled two games earlier
from the chance to force an Ashes decider at the Oval. Steele finished with 365
runs at 60 and, with no tour that winter, had to wait until the arrival of the West Indies for the resumption of his international
career.
As has been wonderfully captured in the documentary Fire in Babylon, the tone of that encounter
was set by a pre-series verbal salvo from the captain that did little to endear
him to his own batsmen, let alone the opposition – a red rag that would become
a white flag. “It was ridiculous, what [Greig] said. He said he ‘loved a
challenge’ but the challenge was too much.”
The most gruesome act was played out on “a s--- wicket” at
Old Trafford. “There were one or two who were twitching a bit, but we didn’t
have fear. We were apprehensive of what was to come, but it wasn’t fear. Brian
Close almost got battered to death, but he was an idiot. He said no bowler
could hurt him and set out to prove it. He got more runs off the shoulders, chest
and rib cage than he got off the bat. Brilliant bloke, Closey – 45, he was
then. We don’t rush things in England ,
do we? We like our cricketers to mature.”
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| storyteller |
These were grand tales to begin with, of course, but have
been polished to perfection by years on the after dinner circuit, where he remains
a popular speaker. His enduring love for the game drips from each sentence,
whether reminiscing about bagging 8 for 1 as a fifteen-year-old or watching
Pietersen’s hundred in India :
“I loved the game. Still do. I think about it nearly every day.”
Indeed, when Steele reflects on his career the feelings are
vividly alive, memory telescoping faraway emotions into a tangible present –
not in angst, though, but warmly sighed over, a demonstration of that
equanimity that served him so well as a batsman. For instance, he regrets not
being able to deliver a Championship to a county still to win one (along with Somerset and
Gloucestershire, one of three in that boat), particularly the near-miss of
1965. “We just wanted someone to draw with Worcestershire and we’d have won it.
But Hampshire did a stupid declaration in a rain-affected three-day game and Worcester bowled them out
for 31 and won the Championship. So that was a major disappointment.”
And then there was his omission from the 1976-77 winter tour
and the irritation at missing out on the overseas blazer. “They left me out
against India ,
which wasn’t right. I got runs against all the quicks and as soon as the little
diddlers came along I was left out. Out came the rabbits, the Fletchers and all
these. Then they went and played the Centenary Test in Australia . I
should have played that.” Even while alluding to “cliques, the old school tie,”
there’s little genuine rancour. “I knew I couldn’t do much about it and moaning
doesn’t do any good at all. I didn’t let them down. They let me down.”
Although he insists he would change nothing about his
career, Steele’s life was itself irrevocably changed by those events. The carnivorous
coup he pulled off with a local butcher – “lamb chops up to 50 runs, then
steaks after that. Kept me going two years” – has entered cricketing folklore,
while his exploits also prompted an unexpected call from John Moores, owner of
Littlewoods pools and Everton FC. “He said he’d like to give me a donation for
my benefit. I was busy with everything but he said it wasn’t going to be
tuppence, and it wasn’t: it was four grand [almost £33,000 in today’s money].
There he was with his old ducks, his secretaries, all sixty, seventy, lovely
man, old world, and he said ‘There we are mate; I’ve been watching you on that
telly, you’ve done a grand job’. Before I went he said to his PR man, ‘Take him
round the stores and let him take what he wants’. I thought, ‘Good god, it’s
Christmas here. Santa Claus has come!’ And I did: took a shirt here, a suit,
hats, you name it – went home with a bloody carful.”
* * *
In comparison with his on-field highlights – “walking out with
the lion of England
on, because that’s what you dreamed about, then kissing the cap when I got the
hundred, thinking ‘this is the ultimate’” – the SPOTY award was merely “the
icing on the cake”. And it was not an honour that surprised him – not from self-regard,
of course, but because he saw a couple of “old muckers” from his club cricket
days. “I said ‘What are you doing here?’ They said they’d won the Radio Times competition for saying why
they thought their choice should get the prize. When I went through the door
[into the studio], I suddenly twigged and thought, ‘If they’ve won it, I’ve won
it’.”
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| collecting SPOTY |
And won it he had, edging out the hurdler Alan Pascoe and
swimmer David Wilkie, although not without more mirth. “It was funny: when I
arrived at Lord’s on my first day, one of the selectors was Len Hutton, and he
called me ‘Derek’. Then when I got up to receive the prize, even the presenter
got me name wrong. He also called me ‘Derek’.”
This Sunday, when the eyes of the nation will be treated to
a pageant of sporting excellence in this most gilded of years, somewhere in the
audience will be an unassuming “professional grandfather”, fond of a glass of white
wine and a yarn, the latter doubtless flowing in proportion to the former. As
he mingles with the great and good of British sport, attempts to lure him into
saying something grandiose about his time in the spotlight will be met with as
resolute a forward defence as he showed to Thommo and Lillee, Roberts and
Holding. “We’d been down. People told me it was Churchillian. I don’t know… Somebody
just came and got stuck in and gave them a bit of inspiration and that’s why
the country got behind me”.
Steele will admit that a similar feelgood effect was
achieved by the Olympics: “They were inspirational. Brilliant. It had been a
miserable summer but suddenly we had three weeks of good weather and it was tremendous,
really brought the country together.” As for the award itself, he “can see
three or four winning the award: Jess Ennis, Mo Farah, Andy Murray. But I’m
backing Wiggins. It was an incredible achievement to win the Tour de France.”
For English cricketers to show admiration for a yellow
jersey is a rare thing, but the down-to-earth and determinedly normal Wiggins
would indeed be a worthy addition to an illustrious list of great sportspeople
– great people – including, among others, Bobby Moore, Jackie Stewart, Kelly
Holmes, Henry Cooper, Torvill and Dean, Seb Coe, Steve Davis, Steve Redgrave and
“just a bloke from Stoke who loves an oatcake,” David Stanley Steele.
The original version of this piece was published by ESPNcricinfo
