Manchester City, Packer and Sky: Bob Willis in his own words

HUW TURBERVILL interviewed the great fast bowler for The Cricketer magazine three years ago. Here, we run the conversation again, following Willis's death at the age of 70 last week...

You were born in County Durham – are you a Geordie?

I was only there six weeks! My old man was a journalist, on the Sunderland Echo, and he moved to the Manchester Evening Telegraph, so we spent six years there, where I developed my passion for Manchester City. My first memory was being handed down the crowd, and sitting on the white wall behind Bert Trautmann’s goal in about 1954. It is a good time to be a City fan now, but they were lean years after the 1976 League Cup win.

Trautmann broke his neck in the 1956 Cup final, but it didn’t put you off…

I was goalie for Corinthian Casuals (I played the first 12 games in the Isthmian League in 1970/71 before I went to Australia) and Guildford City (reserve goalie in 1969/70). I retired when I got the England call …

Were you like Joe Corrigan?

I didn’t dive as much. Narrow the angle, that’s the secret. Don’t get your shorts dirty unless it’s absolutely necessary.

What happened after Manchester?

My dad went to the BBC. I went to school in Guildford but we lived across the railway tracks from Chelsea’s training ground, Cobham. I went through Surrey schools, and had a trial against Surrey Colts in 1968, taking a few wickets. I then had a season’s trial at Surrey, 1969; I was paid £12, 10 shillings a week. I only played three Championship matches and a third to a half in 1970.

The Surrey combination was two seamers, an allrounder (Stewart Storey) and two spinners, Intikhab Alam and Pat Pocock. Geoff Arnold was the best bowler, and Robin Jackman and myself were vying for the other spot. He’d been there longer, and I said one of us had to move on, and it probably should be me, because he was two more years down the line to the benefit. In the end we both had benefits in 1981. It wasn’t money, I just wanted to play. I enjoyed life at Warwickshire.

^{Bob Willis died last week at the age of 70}

You went on five Ashes tours – 70/71, 74/75, 78/79, 79/80, 82/83 – pretty good going…

I enjoyed every one, even 74/75. It was frightening [facing Jeff Thomson and Dennis Lillee], oh yeah. I’ve seen all the quicks since the 1950s and Thomson was the fastest. In 78/79 we were playing largely their third stream, apart from Kim Hughes, Allan Border and the opening bowlers, Alan Hurst and Rodney Hogg. The rest weren’t really Test quality.

The same could be said about my tour in 82/83. We were shorn of about 15 players who went to South Africa. We had players who, with the greatest respect, were not Test quality: Geoff Cook, Ian Greig. But the core was Allan Lamb, Ian Botham, David Gower, Willis, Bob Taylor. There weren’t many other Test regulars.

Were you tempted to play Packer cricket?

Oh no. Playing Test cricket … and beating Australia at anything was all-important. Tony Greig asked me and we went to Richie Benaud’s London flat. If I remember, it was Derek Randall, Bob Woolmer and myself, and dreamy sums of money were talked about, a five-year contract, which was tempting.

But because Greigy had been stripped of the captaincy in the 1977 series, and Mike Brearley was made captain, we knew that these guys were going to be banned from Tests, and playing for England – having done so at such a young age – was everything to me. I decided, with Warwickshire’s help, to turn it down.

If you could do it all over again, what would you change?

It was difficult being the sergeant major/vice-captain figure under Brearley, Botham and Keith Fletcher to then take up the reins. We were a weak side, and it’s not easy captaining when you are a fast bowler. Unlike Brearley I don’t think I got the best out of Beefy. We had dinner the other night, and if you look at the record books, Brearley bowled him into the ground.

He’d bowl him 30 overs in a day. One time, possibly in Perth, he bowled him all but two overs in the day … perhaps I should have bowled him more! I had a pretty good record against

Australia, but Pakistan and West Indies were my least successful hunting grounds.

The latter had Lawrence Rowe, Roy Fredericks, Gordon Greenidge, Viv Richards, Rohan Kanhai, Clive Lloyd, Garry Sobers, Alvin Kallicharan … then later Larry Gomes, Desmond Haynes and Richie Richardson – formidable. I got hepatitis in Pakistan in 83/84, and I only played the first Test. I came back and Peter May made Gower captain. I played the first three Tests against West Indies but the symptoms kept occurring, and I packed up in mid-season in 1984.

"It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, to call it how it is: it alienates the dyed-in-the-wool, can-see-no-wrong England fan. You hear the voice of the minority all the time"

Is Headingley 1981 the one people remind you of the most?

Of course, that was a fairytale, a kids’ comic. It was an extraordinary day when everything went right.

People have criticised you for the interview with Peter West...

I regret that really. We were getting a tough time by the written media. It was a grumpy, self-indulgent interview.

You have had a long career with Sky...

Sky celebrated 200 Tests and I have been involved in most of those. Mike Atherton, Nasser Hussain and Nick Knight appeared on the scene, so I started doing The Verdict programme, and that’s my niche in the market.

It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, to call it how it is: it alienates the dyed-in-the-wool, can-see-no-wrong England fan. You hear the voice of the minority all the time.

You have always spoken your mind…

When I sat on Test and County Cricket Board committees, I was always the one vote against; then me, my brother, Mike Atherton, Michael Parkinson and Nigel Wray formed the Cricket Reform Group in 2003; and my soap box hasn’t changed: quality not quantity. I’ve felt for more than 20 years that we should have an elite group of six teams playing three divisions, 10 matches a season.

Sometimes one steps over the line, and you get a slap across the wrist. People like the honesty of it, and the fact that Joe Root mimicked me shows the team respects what you say. They don’t like the individual criticism: that Gary Ballance bats with his shoelaces tied together, or that Adam Lyth is a good county cricketer but will never make it for England. But the more mature ones, like James Anderson, like to hear our views.

Both Paul Downton and Andrew Strauss are keen to tap into the former players who are on the other side of the fence in the media. In the Duncan Fletcher and Andy Flower days there was just a Berlin Wall.

^{Willis in the Sky studio with David Gower, Ian Botham and Nasser Hussain}

And you delivered an Ashes pep talk?

I was invited up to Nottingham two days before the (2015) Test. I met the team in the bar, although not many were having a drink. There was a bit of banter about one or two comments I’d made. I was staggered how little Alastair Cook knew about the generation in which Botham and Willis played; but then I suppose if you’d asked me in 70/71 about stuff that happened 35 or 40 years before I wouldn’t have known much about it. You kind of think Botham’s performance would be known and studied by everybody… I think Jos Buttler, when Beefy spoke to them, thought it’s like all our yesterdays, with grandad.

We have to accept that the generations change and we all very guilty of believing our generation was the best. I then had dinner with the seven bowlers – Mark Footitt, Liam Plunkett, Steve Finn, Stuart Broad, Anderson, Mark Wood and Ben Stokes, with Ottis Gibson, and that was pretty revealing. These guys know what they are about.

The idea came out because Andrew Strauss has been on both sides of the fence; I think he was pleasantly surprised when he started working for Sky Sports how reasonable these people actually were, and how accurate their analysis is when you take a step back … Andrew now, and I’m sure Alastair will do the same, will readily admit that they were far too defensive at times, with their captaincy and making declarations.

Were you offended by Root’s impersonation?

No, not at all! I was highly amused. I mean, it was an appalling impersonation. It was more Brian Clough, though I was flattered to be compared to Albert Einstein.

Any thought of retiring? Certainly not until 2017. Some other company seems to have got the rights to the Ashes in 2017/18, but until then I will keep stirring the pot. It’s been a very lucky existence.

I was fortunate enough that there weren’t any genuine other fast bowlers around; if I was in form, I got picked. For a long time I was the second name on the sheet after the captain. Before Botham, you had John Lever, Chris Old, Mike Hendrick – they were top-class performers who would have played 100 Tests, but the county system did not help them. Imran Khan was right when he said you can’t bowl fast every day of the week. I was certainly guilty of saving my best for England.

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