Proctor - The Missing Link

GH on Mike Proctor

Gideon Haigh

Everyone has their preferred passage of Richie Benaud commentary, usually associated with vintage understatement, suave observation or even a portentous silence.  My favourite is the very opposite.  It described a passage of play in a Benson & Hedges Cup semi-final in 1977, with Hampshire hosting Gloucestershire.

This was a king of golden age of county cricket, when because it was really the only full-time professional circuit in the world it enjoyed the pick of global talent.  The home side called on Gordon Greenidge, Barry Richards and Andy Roberts, their guests on Zaheer Abbas, Sadiq Mohammed and Mike Procter.  On the day in question, Sadiq had made a cultured 76, but the visitors had only 180 to defend on a balmy afternoon in front of the full house.

Link: Proctor v Hants, 1977 Benson and Hedges Cup Semi Final

YouTube has the condensed version of Procter sprinting in from the Northlands Road End, hair flopping, chest bursting from his unbuttoned shirt, single arm discharging like a catapult.  He produced the acme of a match-winning spell: four wickets in five balls including the hat trick.  The county ground at Southampton had a capacity of only 7000, but it sounds like a colosseum, as Benaud tries but endearingly fails to contain his excitement.

First, it’s Greenidge bowled all ends up: ‘Bowled him, what a great sight for a fast bowler, the middle stump removed without either of the other two being touched.’

Next, it’s Richards beaten for pace: ‘He’s given him out lbw, Tom Spencer’s given him out, and look at the joy on the faces of those Gloucestershire players.’

Trevor Jesty, a future international, comes down so late on his inswinger that it’s like he’s looking the wrong way while someone taps his shoulder: ‘Oh that’s got to be close.  That one looked… very very… good. And Procter has done it again.  And the crowd has gone berserk. Perhaps it’s the Gloucestershire supporters who’ve gone berserk. But what a crowd, and what a noise.’  And what a delirious mess - it’s Benaud but not as we know him, an enthusiast, a fan, caught up in the moment. 

Finally, there’s John Rice, not a bad county all-rounder, but never in the race as Procter’s yorker zeroes in on the stumps.  ’Oh bowled him!’ says Benaud.  ‘He’s done it!  The hat trick, four in five balls. What a performance.  And Rice was never going to get the bat down on that. And the crowd has gone mad.’

I’ve chronicled this not because of the commentary, of course, but the performance, Procter having died aged 77.  The two, though, are linked.  It is not nothing that Procter was the cricketer that Benaud lost his shit for: had his Test cricket not been curtailed, I suspect the Procter would be remembered as bridging the gap between Sobers and his 1980s all-round inheritors - Imran, Botham, Kapil Dev, Hadlee. Only the best all-round cricketers could hold their places on the basis of either their batting and bowling: having made forty-eight first-class hundreds, including a world record six in a row, and paid less than 20 runs each for his 1417 wickets, Procter belongs in that tiny elite.  

Procter batted the longer, starting out as merely an occasional bowler of swing and off-spin - it was only when he joined Gloucestershire in 1965 he finally began to think of branching out more decisively. Even then he became a curious hybrid.  His batting was orthodox, well-organised, even classical: he hit a long ball, including five consecutive sixes off Ashley Mallett, but based his game around strong defence, simple movements, and handsome driving inside out.

The bowling - well that, untutored, unrestrained, was something else.  In the absence of any gather, leap or other body action to speak of, it was all about the headlong, high-speed charge.  Procter would cavil when it was said that he ‘bowled off the wrong foot’, explaining it was merely that his fast arm led to the ball leaving the hand just before his left foot landed.  But honestly, nobody has ever bowled quite like him - bending the ball back from round the wicket as his open chest determined, relying on the angle to get the edge when he altered his line.  A bowler against whom match conditions are impossible to replicate in practice because of the uniqueness of their skills gain a huge advantage.

Procter credited county cricket with something else too: ‘Now until I played professional cricket in England did I realise that the black man wasn’t inferior to me.  I was brought up in a typically middle-class South African environment and you just didn’t question the laws of the land.  In my naivety I assumed apartheid was correct when it was there.’ These are the arresting opening lines of Procter and Cricket (1981), which begins by describing the famous Newlands walk-off ten years earlier in public opposition to the Nationalist government’s refusal to countenance non-racial selection of the Springboks: Procter bowled the single ball of that trial match to Richards before the players symbolically left the field. 

As protests go, however, it went.  It was civil disobedience before an empty gallery.  Even if they did not know it, Procter and Richards had played the last of their handful of Tests; even if South Africans did not grasp it, nothing short of momentous political challenge could regain them their Test franchise.  So of Procter today there is comparatively little to be seen, which concentrates your mind on what is there: some thoroughbred shots in a Gillette Cup final, an inswinger yanking out Viv Richards’s middle stump, and that legendary spell in 1977.  When first I met Richie back in 1990, I told him how much I had always enjoyed that call, identifying with the struggle to find the right words for something so explosive, so delirious.  ‘Procter, yes,’ he reflected.  ‘Marvellous.’  More like the Richie we know, but here was a rare instance where less was not more more, because the more spoke volumes.