They miss, I hit

Only in his going did the lean, spare fellow who answered to George receive the approbation he had so sheepishly ducked throughout his life and his cricket. In his pomp, up the hill and into the wind, Brian Statham had lightly worn his worldwide fame; in his death, even he could not escape the universal chorus of admiration and affection.

The hymns were much warmer and more familiar in flavour than the upright and austere valedictions a twelvemonth before for Statham's erstwhile county captain Cyril Washbrook, the imperious opening batsman with the defiant mien. Perhaps that's because the two Lancashire legends - who probably stand highest together on the top-most plinth in the county's all-time pantheon - were definitely not two peas from the same pod. To the end Washbrook was gruffly caustic, even haughty. There was much of the Victorian mill-owner about him, whereas Statham- whose death on June 11 came just six days before his 70th birthday - never lost his confraternal and cloth-capped working man's complaisance. You could hum softly to yourself one of those corny sepia Hovis-ad brass-band melodies over a conversation with Brian.

I remember telephoning Washbrook on his 80th birthday in 1994, offering greetings on behalf of The Guardian in the hope of scrounging a few paragraphs on the state of modern cricket. I addressed him as Sir, but was at once put in my place: What gives your newspaper the right to telephone a complete stranger out of the blue and wish them Happy Birthday? ... and good day to you, sir!

In contrast, telephone Brian Statham at his modest Heaton Chapel home and he was always happy for a chat on this and that and his beguiling old times. Audrey says a natter is as good as a cure, he'd say, referring to his beloved wife who nursed him through the stoically borne ill-health of his final years.

By then, even though the wry humours kept breaking through, he was more than ever whippety-spare and sickly - stump-thin in fact - and his parchmenty skin was washed out pale as a new bleached bat. Statham had osteoporosis, a debilitating calcium deficiency which, specialists said, was more than likely a direct result of his untiring cricket for club and country from 1950 to 1968.

Statham took 252 Test wickets (briefly wresting the all-time world record from Alec Bedser before handing it on to Fred Trueman) at 24.84 - 102 of them bowled, as testimony to the sole published maxim he uttered to his craft, They miss, I hit. Of the wood-hitting greats only Ray Lindwall with 42.98% of victims bowled (98 out of 228), heads Statham's 40.48%. In all, Statham took 2260 wickets at only 16.37 apiece. And each one of those 2260 was glad to call him a friend, observed Neville Cardus. No man in history has taken more so cheaply. A quarter of Statham's nigh-on 17,000 overs were maidens; he gave away barely more than two runs an over. For Lancashire alone, he took 1816 wickets at the scarcely credible average of 15.12.

On leaving cricket, Statham at first enjoyed a rewarding and successful career with the Guinness brewing company. For years it was the perfect job for a bloke who preferred lager, he would joke. But business is business. Guinness had to change their timeworn selling structures and affable old-time trading habits to compete with thrusting hi-tech rivals and monthly productivity printouts. Brian lost his confidence and, traumatically, found himself unable to cope. He had to take early retirement, which botched all his pension plans.

Says Audrey: He had always been a `traditional' salesman, and thought he had been very good at it. Then the old systems changed and he panicked. When he first came off work, it had looked more like a mental breakdown at first. He lost even more weight and was really very ill, and we all the time presumed it was to do with the Guinness sales reorganisation and him feeling insecure. It was a terrible time. The night he collapsed in the car was the worst. He never thought of going back to work after that.

Then another series of tests showed it was osteoporosis - lack of calcium, tiredness, brittle bones - you name it. They said he could never replace the calcium he'd lost, and had been losing all his life, so after that it was just a question of pills to keep up his levels, and then some more pills. In his way, he coped wonderfully to the end, didn't he?

So, in their way, the famed old feet at the ten-to-two gait did let him down after all. Once, towards the end of his sublime bowling career, he was sitting in the pavilion with a mug of tea and a second cigarette, his knotted, grotesquely knuckled, carbuncled, Cornish-pasty bare feet resting on the chair in front of his bench - and he was actually talking to them, fondly, encouragingly: C'mon, me old beauties, sorry and all that, just get us through a first burst of a half-dozen overs or so. Then I can give you both a rest, a good long soak and a nice night's kip.

Fred Trueman, a firm and generous friend to the end, and confrère in immortal harness, once seethingly told me he reckoned he could date the overbowling of Brian to as early as 1955, only five years after his first county appearance: Because he was that priceless commodity - the fellow who could keep an end bottled up as well as take wickets.

It was the summer after Statham's grandest tour of Australia. In the Lord's Test that year, after his new captain Peter May had asked him for 27 overs in South Africa's first innings (2 for 49), in the second he bowled 29 consecutive overs to take 7 for 39 and secure victory. In his previous match for Lancashire he had bowled 52 overs. Then, pretty shattered by now, he had gone to Headingley and reeled off an incredible 60 overs for Peter and the team, remembered Fred. I reckon it took him a year to recover from that passage - certainly for those poor old feet of his.

We were boys then - and they were men. What giants they were, what craft-versed, overachieving, sun-browned heroes. We queued for their autographs and tried to copy their actions. Trueman's, of course, was the classic. There is a surviving newsreel clip of Fred's gathering, full-throttle run-up from pavilion-end mark to the crease at the Oval's fabled Test in 1953 which still takes the breath away for both hostility and aesthetics.

My first beau ideal in this regard was Gloucester's George Lambert; after the First Test I saw in 1949 Trevor Bailey- crease-jump bob and kicked-out left leg - was the action to mime; then Fred's pluperfect glory was the one. None of us could remotely do the Statham, which we were now seeing on fuzzy black-and-white TV. We tried, but Statham was a one-off. You had to be double-jointed to start with. There was a bounce about it, but a metronomic longish-legged lolloping bounce; 16 almost lazy strides of gathering, soft-shoed intent and, at the high point of delivery, almost a Spanish dancer's heel-click jump.

Cardus saw a lot of it. The truth about Statham's action is that it was so elastic and balanced (and double-jointed) that there was no forward shoulder-rigidity possible; his movement, from the beginning of his run to delivery, to the final accumulated propulsion, had not an awkward angle in it at all. The whole man of him was the effortless and natural dynamo and life-force of his attack.

The delivery's snaking exactness, its bullseye accuracy, was another matter. As was the uncomplaining devotion to the cause. For all the time, we now know, the calcium was not recharging itself. Oh, sure, said Brian, matter-of-factly, I'd often come off with my socks sodden with blood. Way back, Adelaide'55 I think [41 overs, 3 for 108], was the first time I had to cut out the toe of my boot. That trip my big toenail came right off. And a time or two since. Often my toes just went all black. The tale simply told; amiable, philosophic, ungrumbling.

Those could be the three watchwords of the life of the boy from Gorton who never bothered with cricket as a lad but, posted to the Midlands for National Service in the RAF, found the game excused him menial duties. However, totally uncoached, he bowled to such effect that his corporal, a Middlesex supporter called Larry Lazarus, excitedly sent Brian's details to Lord's, who forwarded the letter to Old Trafford- where old Harry Makepeace was coach and, apparently, needed just one look.

Within three months of his demob, on his 20th birthday in 1950, Statham was opening the bowling for Lancashire against Kent. As he trod that green, green Manchester grass for the first business time that morning, Washbrook had one severe warning: Don't bowl anything short to Arthur [Fagg], lad,'cos he'll flog you out of sight, Now young Brian didn't know what an outswinger was, let alone a yorker, so how was he meant to know which of the Kent openers was Arthur Fagg? So he reasoned that if he dropped one short - just one - he would soon find out and take it from there. So he did, only a fraction short but a climber all right, Arthur (for it was he) went for the hook but it hurried on him ... Fagg c Wharton (forward short leg) b Statham 4. He finished with 5-1-13-1. Lancashire won by an innings in two days - and in no time it was Old Trafford's rafter-packed Bank Holiday Roses match.

In his first over, the unheard-of stringbean hurried Hutton. Len then looked on from the bowler's end as Lowson and Lester were comprehensively bowled for ducks and Watson was snaffled by Edrich in the slips, also for 0. The colt finished with 5 for 52 and the performance so lodged itself in Hutton's mind that the following winter he and Washbrook insisted that Freddie Brown send for Statham when MCC's Australian touring team needed a fast-bowling boost. Seven months after taking Fagg's wicket, he was playing his first Test at Christchurch

By the next tour of Australia, four years later, Statham was to play a riveting part in retaining the Ashes. His captain Hutton summed up: He was the most accurate fast bowler I ever saw. No bowler shaved the stumps more often. But never a moan or a harsh word nor a black look at the umpire or captain could be associated with Brian. Never once was Statham common or mean. Never once did he bounce a tailender: How they can stoop to such a thing these days, it defeats me? A non-bat is going to get killed soon. Once, on Hutton's tour of West Indies in 1953-54, fast bowler Frank King gashed Jim Laker's temple with a pearler. When King, a rabbit, came in to bat later, Trueman from mid-off insisted Statham answer the cruelty and let King have one between the eyes. Brian looked across at his friend: No, lad, the best way to hurt him is simply to clean-bowl him.

Statham and Trueman, red rose and white, made up one of fast-bowling's grandest duos of opposites, one of the most enduring for all history. Imperturbable Brian's almost mystical control, seaming either way, with such indefatigable consistency that, on soft turf, the marks where the ball had pitched were closely grouped like a swarm of bullet-holes round the bullseye at Bisley ... in glorious contrast to Fred's bullish aggro and hearty self-belief, his swing either way and his violent, volatile resource.

Oddly, for such a perfect partnership for posterity, in only half of Brian's 70 Tests was he harnessed with Fred. Statham's other grand liaison for the fabled legend, that with Frank Tyson, was only a 12-match affair- but enough to lay waste to Australia in 1954-55. (The three of them only once bowled together in a Test innings, at Adelaide in 1958-59 when Australia made 476: Statham 3 for 83, Trueman 4 for 90 and Tyson, past his blazing peak, 1 for 100.)

Both Trueman and Tyson rush to acknowledge their partnerships' dependency on Statham. In 15 years at the other end his accuracy ensured countless wickets for me, said Fred, and in 50 years as true friends we never had a wrong word. Said Tyson of their raging tour of Australia: The glamour of success was mine when I captured 6 for 85 in the Sydney Test, but few spared a thought for Brian that day who bowled unremittingly for two hours into a stiff breeze and took 3 for 45. Throughout the tour I owed much to desperation injected into the batsmen's methods by Statham's Menuhin playing second fiddle to my lead.

Was it always into the wind and up the hill, I once asked? Statham smiled. No, not always. Towards the end it was, 1962, Pakistan at Leeds. We made 500, heck of a flat pitch. Fred and I have supper on the Friday night, not relishing next day, thinking that Hanif and his brothers could bat the match out from there. Next morning, Fred comes downhill and I'm staggering up from the football-stand end into a really stiff gale. Terrible stuff. But Fred couldn't get his strides right, so he comes up to me and says, `Tell skipper we'll swap ends.' And I say, `What, me have the wind and the slope, this is a first for all time, Fred.' Anyway, Colin [Cowdrey] agreed, we changed ends and bowled them out twice in the day!

In fact, Brian took 6 for 90 that day - but on the whole, like the handful of sport's most chivalrous knights, into his pained and sick old age, he preferred to talk of the deeds and nobility of the foe rather than his own. What about the 7 for 39 at Lord's [ 1955], you'd say, or 7 for 57 at Melbourne [ 1958-59], and he'd shrug: Can't remember much about that, why not look it up in the book? Then the eyes would glint with recall: Tell you what, though, the best innings I ever saw at Lord's was 1957, Everton Weekes, absolutely brilliant, top drawer, the ridge playing up something terrible, good-length balls just taking off; he got 90 and it was just utterly superb to be there watching it.

But of all he bowled to, the best was Denis Compton. It was nothing less than genius with DCS. If it was his day, you didn't stand a chance. He could play the same shot to the same delivery - and the ball could disappear into three different parts of the faraway field, simply by minutely opening or closing the angle and face of his bat.

The best ball he ever bowled? You have to drag it out of him. Okay, Jeff Stollmeyer, good bat, Guyana Test one time [ 1953-54]. Flat track. Pitched fractionally outside leg stump. He went to glance - and it just popped off the top of the off bail. Beautiful, eh? That was in an opening burst in which, as well as Stollmeyer for 2, he had Worrell for 0 and Walcott for 4; so at 15 for 3 in reply to England's 435, West Indies were at once heading for an innings defeat.

Both wicketkeeper Evans and Hutton, who was at slip, said that Stollmeyer ball was the equal of Alec Bedser's peach which had dismissed Bradman at Adelaide in 1946-47, hitherto the best they'd ever seen in close-up - though Brian's was about five times as fast, said Evans.

Among the obits was a touching interview with Trueman, who had been planning another testimonial dinner to mark his pallid old friend's just-missed three-score-and-ten, recorded by Bill Bradshaw in The Observer. It's true, we both liked to have a drink. But I wasn't in Brian's league. He loved to unwind with cigarettes and beer - well, lager actually, that was his drink. He rarely got drunk - not nastily, anyway, but he could put a lot away. I always knew if he'd had a heavy night because his fingers would be black from smoking.

George Statham. True and utter great. The familial name among all cricket's freemasonry - and only a member could address him thus - derived from a Lancashire dressing-room habit of always having a staunch King George. When stalwart Winston Place abdicated the name, John Brian Statham proudly assumed it. His last wicket was in the Old Trafford Roses match ( Sharpe l. b. w. b Statham 20) of August 1968- his last over, a maiden of course, to Brian Close- and the Wisden Almanack reported, On each and every one of the three days the big crowds gave him standing ovations as he entered and left the field. And in his own rich thanksgiving piece, Cardus enquired: Did Statham ever send down a wide?