It was sad to hear of Ian Bell’s decision to retire, all the more so because he had recently signed a contract to play another season for Warwickshire.
A scratchy few innings in the first rounds of the Bob Willis Trophy seemed to have decided for him that he was no longer up to it. Then, in the last match of the competition he made 50 out of a total of 186 in the first innings against Glamorgan and what sounds like a glorious 90 in the second. Like all his admirers I was hoping for a century, and yet, somehow, just falling short seems appropriate. No English batsman of his time has given me more pleasure and yet too often that pleasure was cut short by a momentary loss of concentration.
That at least was how it seemed, for there was rarely a technical reason for his dismissal. It was also the case, as with David Gower before him, that he looked so good that his failures were judged more harshly than those of less gifted players. I sometimes wondered if he ever realized just how good he was, if, perhaps, he suffered from a degree of self-doubt which never afflicted team-mates like Kevin Pieterson and Alastair Cook.
Ian Bell often reminded me of Colin Cowdrey. Like him Cowdrey was a classically correct batsman who made batting look the most natural thing in the world but who seemed at times to be afflicted with self-doubt. In form he too had days when he stroked the ball elegantly and effortlessly, others when he inexplicably failed. Both finished with 22 Test centuries. Only a great player can score that many.
Bell played in five Ashes-winning series and very few England players can match that. In truth he did not make a great overall contribution to the first of these, the memorable 2005 victory. That year he still looked immature and was the subject of a cruel gibe from Shane Warne which suggested he was still a child playing a man’s game. Even so, I was lucky enough to be at Old Trafford on the fourth day of the Test when with England seeking to hurry the score along towards a declaration, he made an exquisite 60 something, rich in glittering strokes which included driving Glenn McGrath over his head first bounce to the boundary.
His greatest season came in 2013, a generally low-scoring Ashes series in a damp summer. Bell made three hundreds against a formidable pace attack led by the excellent Ryan Harris, and averaged 62. Alastair Cook averaged 27 with a highest score of 62; that’s how difficult batting was that summer. Even though the old adage that “it’s bowlers who win matches” holds true, England would undoubtedly have lost the Ashes in 2013 but for Ian Bell.
He always gave the impression of being a shy man, one reluctant to push himself forward and rarely at ease in television interviews. I have wondered if he might have been better suited to the time when there were only five or six Tests in a season when players returned from Test matches to play fifteen or so matches for their county in the championship, and no one-day internationals. Surely then he would, like Dennis Amiss – his only rival as Warwickshire’s greatest batsman- have finished his career with a hundred hundreds to his name. He has of course been a very successful batsman in white ball cricket – only a couple have scored more runs for England in ODIs- but it is for the style of his batting in the traditional form of cricket that he will be best remembered, for the perfection of his cover-drive and his exquisite late cuts matched in my memory only by Denis Compton’s. If all the textbooks on batting were destroyed, you could reconstruct the grammar and art of batting from videos of Ian Bell at the top of his game. Artist and craftsman both, Ian Bell has breathed the spirit of cricket and enriched the experience of all true lovers of the game.
This wretchedly truncated summer has at least left us with the happy memory of his last innings.
Cricket’s summer of young spin bowlers
Despite some wretched weather this summer the Bob Willis matches have been a success. This is not merely of the desperate relief to have any cricket played, but because of the performances of some young players, notably and surprisingly spin bowlers.
It seems the captains have been more willing to trust spinners than usual. When Surrey played Sussex in their last match, Rory Burns entrusted the second over of the second Sussex innings to his young slow-lefthander, Dan Moriarty. The result? We had the remarkable (for these days) experience of seeing an opening batsman being stumped before he had reached double figures. Moriarty went on to take six wickets and the equally young off-spinner Amar Virdi took the other four, as Sussex were dismissed for 128. When did two Surrey spinners last take all ten wickets in an innings? Not perhaps since the distant days of Laker and Lock. Then, when Surrey batted, a sixteen-year-old James Coles took two wickets bowling slow left-arm, one of them Rory Burns himself, neatly stumped as he played forward to a lovely curving arm-ball.
On the other hand, while I recently praised Hampshire’s Sam Northeast for what I took to be sympathetic handling of the young wrist-spinner Mason Crane, I thought he missed a chance against Kent on Tuesday. In a low-scoring game Kent were set only 185 to win, and it seemed to me that Northeast should have had Crane on early. But, in common English fashion, he preferred to trust his quicker bowlers and Crane was neglected till the match was all but lost. Whereupon he had Zak Crawley lbw for 105. If Northeast had trusted Crane an hour earlier, who knows how differently things might have been. Still, in his four matches Crane, though bowling only 60 overs, has taken 14 wickets at an average of 13.57. It seems his career, interrupted by injury, might be on a happy upswing.
Perhaps, next summer when normality has returned (one hopes), the new shape of normal will find captains as generally ready to trust spinners as some have been this late August and September.