Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes — when Australia’s cricketers rocked up and England’s rolled over

When Richie Benaud boarded the SS Himalaya with the Australian cricket team bound for England to defend the Ashes in 1961, he did what any good leader would do. He put his “captain’s allowance” — meant to last 28 weeks — behind the ship’s bar so that his team would not go thirsty.

They may have needed to lift their spirits. At the start of the series, which would be decided in one of the most thrilling matches in Test history, England legend Jim Laker called Australia’s bowlers “the weakest ever to visit these shores”.

But with Benaud at the helm, the visitors had other qualities — an indomitable team spirit, a daring captain who understood his players and a plan to play attacking cricket. It was a series that would expose critical differences between two leaders and two cricketing cultures.

Among the crowd at the opening tour match were two boys, David Kynaston and Harry Ricketts. One became a historian, the other a poet and critic. More than 60 years later, the pair have revisited why England lost that series in Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes, a compelling book based around the decisive fourth Test at Old Trafford.

This is not just a tale about one game. Through the prism of that match the authors expose what they see as one of the fatal flaws at the historic heart of English cricket — an over-reliance on the “old boy” network.

In May 1961, as Peter Cook and his band of comic upstarts ripped into the establishment in Beyond the Fringe, English cricket was locked in a time warp. Its captains were, the authors write, uninspiring amateurs “out of sync with the meritocratic-cum-anti-establishment zeitgeist of the 1960s”. Peter May, the then skipper of England’s Test side, was from central casting: after attending Charterhouse public school then Cambridge university, he then played for Surrey and, after his retirement from cricket, worked for Lloyd’s of London.

By contrast, Benaud first learnt his cricket with a bat made of packing-case timber in a small country town. After high school he worked as a police reporter on The Sun in Sydney, when, as the authors note, competition between the city’s tabloids “made old-time Chicago look soft”.

May was a brilliant batsman but struggled to connect with players from different backgrounds. He played as an amateur at a time when certain English cricket grounds still had separate changing rooms for “gentlemen” and “players”.

Going into the final morning of the Old Trafford Test, these two captains from “completely different hemispheres” were under immense pressure. Australia were 154 runs ahead with four wickets in hand, but were soon in disarray, after spinner David Allen took three wickets in 15 balls. Then Alan Davidson clubbed 20 off one of Allen’s overs. May panicked and took his danger man off. It was a big mistake. The Australians put on 98 runs for the last wicket. Australia set England 256 to win in 230 minutes. Then Ted Dexter played what Australian journalist Jack Fingleton described as one of the greatest innings he had ever seen and England again looked certain to win. Benaud told his team a draw was out of the question. The only way out was victory.

The previous night, Australia’s skipper had strolled to the centre of the ground resplendent in his blue suede shoes accompanied by former teammate Ray Lindwall. Examining the pitch, Benaud asked Lindwall if he should bowl his leg-breaks around the wicket into the “footmarks” — gouges in the pitch that can turn spinning deliveries into lethal missiles.

It was a tactic Australian spinner Shane Warne would employ with success more than 30 years later, but at the time it was considered radical. Lindwall agreed it had merit, but Benaud would have to be deadly accurate, or he’d be smashed around the park.

With England coasting to victory, Benaud rolled the dice and came around the wicket. Almost immediately Dexter was caught behind. May lasted just two deliveries, bowled around his legs to a ball that turned out of the footmarks. England lost nine wickets for 51, Benaud claiming six of them. Australia won the Ashes.

The authors elegantly capture the tensions of that final day, dexterously putting the game and its players in a historical context and drawing rich profiles of the individuals involved. This was a great sporting heist, and the authors show that decisions made by the two captains, and the repercussions that followed, said much about the differences between Australian and English cricket.

For the final Test, England dropped its two Yorkshireman — bowler Fred Trueman, blamed for creating the footmarks, and batsman Brian Close, accused of playing “vainglorious swishes” one of which saw him dismissed, precipitating his team’s catastrophic collapse. England’s establishment did not learn from defeat. The next three captains were Oxbridge amateurs.

Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes makes a convincing case that merit matters when it comes to picking leaders and that class has played a disproportionate role in English cricket. A large proportion of its Test team continues to come from elite schools. Still, with one and a half New Zealanders at the helm, in Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes, England are playing bolder and more enterprising cricket.

Today’s team would be under no illusions whatsoever about what to do on a final-day run chase — they’d play for a win, and to hell with the consequences.

Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes: The Story of an Ashes Classic by David Kynaston and Harry Ricketts Bloomsbury £22, 320 pages

Steve Cannane is a journalist with Australian broadcaster ABC and the author of ‘First Tests: Great Australian Cricketers and the Backyards That Made Them’. He plays with the Authors XI

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Letter in response to this review:

A cricket class act? Fiery Fred vs the future bishop / From John Joisce, Berkeley, CA, US