June 6, 2004

No other country in the world could have produced a John Arlott other than England and no other sport other than cricket.

John Arlott was the English summer from T.S. Eliot’s “April is the cruelest month”, to A.G. Macdonnell’s “The cricket field itself was a mass of daisies and buttercups and dandelions, tall grasses and purple vetches and thistle-down, and great clumps of dark-red sorrel...”

John Arlott was the poet who became a cricket commentator. He had a way with words that Dylan Thomas did, but he had little conversation in him. He had little to say when he did not have a microphone in front of him or a pen in his hand or the beat-up Olivetti typewriter over which he hunched over, his rain-coat and brief case by his side. He would have cut a lonely and forlorn figure had he not been John Arlott, the world’s best ever cricket commentator who had a cult-following.

I had first heard of John Arlott from my brother Asif (Achoo) when I had arrived in England from the United States. He was obviously a fan. I heard snatches of his commentary when Pakistan toured England in 1954 but I rather suspect that he was like young wine that was still maturing though he had a distinctive voice, described as a Hampshire-burr that would ultimately become both his signature and his identity card. It was a heavy voice but not one that sound-effects makes up to convey impending gloom but more like a smoker who needs to clear his throat. But it was a voice that matched his face, rugged and handsome like a cowboy in a Marlborough cigarette advertisement.

In 1953, John Arlott was on his way to Australia and would be in transit in Karachi for a day, staying at BOAC’s Speedbird House at the airport. Kardar asked me to meet him and look after him. I telephoned him, introduced myself and picked him up.

“I don’t suppose you’re interested in sight-seeing?” I asked him.

“Mercifully for the both of us, not in the least,” he said. And that’s the way he and I became friends.

In 1962, BBC invited me to be the guest commentator on its team of Test Match Special. One of the first things I did on arrival in London was to go to Simpsons in Piccadilly and get myself fitted for two suits. Alas, bespoke tailoring is a lost art but it used to be a ritual, every bit like visiting a shrine. But I didn’t know how I was expected to dress, at Lord’s, particularly. The first match I broadcast was at Old Trafford, a county game against Lancashire. John Arlott arrived, wearing a crumply tweed suit. I was clearly overdressed in my Simpson’s three-piece grey-flannel suit and John gave me a once over and decided to call me ‘Kureishi Sahib’ from then on. I never knew whether he was being respectful or mocking.

I was a natural broadcaster and never had any of those butterflies in my stomach one is expected to have minutes before airtime. But I was sharing the mike with John Arlott. How would I stack up against him? The cue-sheet showed that I would be leading off. John was rummaging through his brief case that contained his lunch and a bottle of wine. It was a cold and miserable day and play had been delayed. “The news from Old Trafford is that there is no news,” I started and went on to describe the weather and John looked up and gave me a thumbs up. I never worried again.

Funny how gestures that seem trivial can mean so much. Test matches would be different and there would be experts. That year Norman Yardley and Freddie Brown were the experts and they were inclined to be pompous in an all-knowing way. But I was damned if they would intimidate me. As it happened, I got on well with them. It helped that the Pakistan team was a bit of a disaster and was no match for England. This earned me a good deal of sympathy. The English are at their valiant best when they are knocking the hell out of their opponents. There being no fear of losing, they can afford to be generous and magnanimous.

By 1962, John Arlott had become something of an icon, not merely the voice of cricket but a keeper of the game’s soul and if one shut one’s eyes, one would be transported to the village green and “with the outfield dense with daisies sloping towards a winding country lane and a thatched inn beyond the cricket field’s fence.”

The blacksmith and the farm-hand, downing pints in the pub may not have understood the meaning of the many literary references that were contained in the flow of words but they recognized the word-pictures he drew. John Arlott was not a back-slapping, hearty and jocular person. There was a certain reserve, not shyness but an aloofness and he didn’t shout across a crowded bar to hail you. But he became a sort of guardian to me and would always invite me to go with him to the sponsor’s tent to partake of the hospitality.

Pakistan was playing Derbyshire at Burton-on-Trent. There was no commentary box and we functioned from the OB van. It was raining heavily and one look at the grey, leaden sky with rain clouds so low that one felt that one could tousle them by reaching up. “That’s it for the day,” John announced and we retired to the sponsor’s marquee. It continued to rain. We had lunched well but not wisely. Late in the afternoon, we heard a ripple of applause and though it was still spotting, lo and behold, the umpires were coming out followed by the Pakistan fielders. We dashed back to the OB van, the engineers had the wind-shield wipers going and switched on the lights in the van and soon we were on the air. John was magnificent: “‘Kureishi Saab’ has brought the monsoons with him,” he began and spoke of distant figures in whites and the poor Pakistanis who should have been provided with umbrellas and the splashes of water Mahmud Hussain kicked up as he came in to bowl. But he didn’t miss a ball.

In 1967, I went back to do the commentary for BBC and teamed up with John Arlott once again. Rex Alston had retired and his place had been taken by Brian Johnston, a jolly character with a stunted humour of a prankster at one of England’s public schools. Eton or Harrow or Wellington. But a good chap and all that sort of thing.

I was far more confident this time, not in any kind of awe and was accepted as one of the boys and was allowed to make adjustments in the cue-sheets to allow me to write my dispatches. The late and adorable ‘Lumboo’ Ansari would pack a lunch of aloo-keema and parathas and we would spread a blanket on a green patch near Warner’s Stand. I invited John Arlott to break bread with us and for the duration of the Lord’s Test match he would squat on the blanket and share in the lunch. Passers-by were amused to see John Arlott go native and be eating with his fingers, no spoon and fork for him, as for the rest of us. The bond between John and me got stronger and my admiration for this remarkable man grew by leaps and bounds; a former policeman in Hampshire, he had become an institution.

In 1974, I managed the Pakistan team and we had arrived on what was the fourth day of the Lord’s Test match. We noticed that there was a dark, wet spot on the wicket. It was obvious that rain had seeped through the covers but the dark spot suggested more than that. The senior players were discussing the situation with me when the dressing-room attendant informed me that I had a visitor. I went to see who it was. It was John Arlott and he was out-of-breath, having climbed the steep steps to the dressing-room. He didn’t even greet me. He just said: “Don’t play.”

I must have looked at him, as if I had no idea what he was talking about. He pointed to the wicket and then repeated: “Don’t play” and he was off. It was this conversation that convinced me that there was some foul play afoot. And I decided to lodge an official protest accusing the ground authorities of “appalling negligence.” What was heartening was that the British media backed me. The timing of the protest was “fiendish”, as The Daily Mirror described it. Not a ball had been bowled when I made the protest. My team backed me to the hilt. But it was John Arlott who had convinced me that there was something rotten going on at Lord’s.

John Arlott had a profound influence on me. Our commentary style was different but we shared a love of the game and saw it as the connection it makes between time present and time past. Rain may have stopped play but the sun always peeped through and rain-drops would sparkle like jewels as rays of sunlight caught them. John Arlott’s voice could brighten the gloomiest of days ... “Here is Jenkins, little man with a very muscle-bound, bow-legged walk and almost a sideways action’ Nourse looking Napoleonic than ever.” It was magic.

John Arlott left this world in 1991. No one has come forward to claim the throne and no one will. For me it was an honour to have linked arms with him and been his friend. He was a commoner with a princely touch, a prince with a rough burr that made him a man of the people.

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