by Arunabha Sengupta
The Oval, 1957.
In response to 412 by England, the West Indians—choc-a-block with Worrell, Walcott, Weekes, Sobers, Kanhai, Smith—managed 89 and 86. Tony Lock 5 for 28 and 6 for 20.
Trevor Bailey was standing in the slips with David Sheppard while Lock was sweeping his way through the formidable West Indian batting. He posed a question to the cricketing parson: “How do you play a left-hand medium pacer who keeps pitching on the leg stump and fizzing the top of off?” Neither of them could provide an answer.
Once Vic Wilson was bowled, middle-stump ripped out of the ground, before he had got his bat up. And he did not have a very high back-lift. Colleague Ted Lister remembered “It was like Tyson at his fastest.”
And Lock was ostensibly a left-arm spinner.
Indeed, he was called for throwing three times in the 1952 match for Surrey against the Indians. The same season he made his Test debut and asked Polly Umrigar to move back to the wicket from the leg side because he could not see the bowler.
Lock gelled in famously at the highest level, became a feared bowler, and was immortalised because of his partnership with Jim Laker for Surrey and England. He was one of the best close-in fielders of the country to boot.
But had it not been for the lenience of the umpires during the 1950s and nothing more serious than some leg-pulling about his proficiency at javelin from his teammates, Lock could have had a much less productive career.
When in the same season in 1952 on one dark afternoon he bowled Essex captain Doug Insole with his faster ball, the disgruntled batsman first looked at the shattered stumps and then at the square leg umpire before demanding, “How was I out then — run out?”
Lock’s problems arose because of his stint at the indoor school at Croydon. The roof was low and the beams that loomed over the Croydon nets discouraged loop and flight. His bowling arm became lower, trajectory flatter and pace had increased to almost medium-fast. The action became as different from the classical left-arm spinner as possible. But, he discovered that if the ball hit the deck at high speed, it could fizz from the leg stump and hit off, and sometimes take off from the wicket and jump shoulder high.
What emerged was a curious bowler. David Frith noted, “There never has been a more aggressive slow bowler.”
However, after taking 11 wickets at Christchurch in 1958-59, for the first time he looked at a film of his bowling. He was aghast. “Had I known I was throwing I wouldn’t have bowled that way.”
He remodelled his action again. By then Laker had departed from the scene and he himself had become less than a threat. But, ageing, completely bald, he toiled on in the Sheffield Shield for Western Australia. And then he was recruited by Leicestershire in his second innings of county cricket. He also earned a recall to the Test side in 1967-68. He enjoyed himself by walking out at No 9 and scoring a career-best 89.
174 Test wickets at 25.58 marks him as one of the great left-arm spinners. His 831 catches in first-class cricket is behind only WG Grace and Frank Woolley.
And then there was his captaincy of Leicestershire, which hauled them from No 14 in 1965 to No 2 in 1967. Yet, some curious characteristics he had picked up from Australia jarred with the grizzled English professionals. Lock returned from Down Under with a penchant for hugging the bowlers and fieldsmen for on-field successes and sometimes extended his embraces to kisses on the cheek.
David Constant tells the story of Peter Marner, who made a catch at slip off Lock’s bowling and on seeing the skipper advancing down the wicket with lips pursed dropped the ball and ran off towards the sight screen. In the very next match, one of the fielders missed a catch that would have given Lock a hat-trick. When the incensed captain confronted him, Lock was told: “I didn’t catch it because I couldn’t face another of your kisses.” The veteran spinner supposedly got the point after that.
Tony Lock was a character. A fair haired country boy from Limpsfield who knew he would have to overcome his diffidence by making his impact boisterously on the field. An essentially kind and considerate man who never quite learned how to cope with his renown as an international cricketer, even when all the fair hair had gone leaving behind a shiny bald pate.
He was born on 5 July 1929.