John Lever – universally known as JK – is perched on the arm of a wooden bench at Chelmsford’s county ground, while the sun shines and a gale-force wind demonstrates that his silvery-grey hair is all his own.
“You look like you’re on a boat,” says our photographer, as he snaps away with his portrait camera. “I’d love to have a boat,” replies the 77-year-old Lever with a smile. “But when I was playing, cricketers never earned enough to buy one.”
The remark is not meant bitterly, because Lever is a lifelong optimist whose glass brims over with bonhomie. He is right to observe that the 1970s and 80s were hardly a goldmine for any English cricketer whose name was not Ian Botham. And yet, there were many compensating factors: the travel, the excitement, the good-fellowship. Not to mention the fact that, until Harry Potter cast a spell, he was the most famous JK in the country.
A regular fixture on Sunday Grandstand, thanks to Essex’s powerful one-day line-up, Lever used to float in from 30 yards and smack batsmen on the pads with his shin-seeking missiles. His left-arm angle helped stack up the lbws, and so did his natural diplomacy. According to the inimitable commentator David “Bumble” Lloyd: “It always helped to keep on the right side of umpires in those days, and JK was one of the most genial, likeable characters ever to have played the game.”
So, how did such a popular fellow end up attracting so many brickbats: accusations of ball-tampering, whispers about chucking, and denunciations of his moral standing? The answer is that Lever played in a turbulent era. Like many of his England colleagues and captains – the likes of Graham Gooch, David Gower or Mike Gatting – he became all too familiar with one-eyed home umpires and high-handed mismanagement from Lord’s.
The most notable furore, and the hardest for Lever to shake off, developed on his first England tour in 1976-77. Making his Test debut in Delhi at the age of 27, he sliced through India’s batting order with seven wickets for 46. “Telegrams flooded in,” he wrote in his autobiography, A Cricketer’s Cricketer. “Suddenly I was a national hero and the BBC wanted to interview me.”
England surged to a 2-0 lead, but after temperate conditions in the north of India, Lever was concerned about the heat of the south. So when the series moved to Chennai (or Madras, as it was then) he asked England physio Bernard Thomas for some Vaseline to keep sweat out of his eyes. The only thing Thomas could find was Vaseline-impregnated gauze, which Laver plastered to his forehead before frustratedly tearing it off and throwing it on the ground. At this point, the umpire picked it up and examined it suspiciously.
As Lever recalls: “Bish [Indian captain Bishan Bedi] leapt on it and said: ‘We’ve caught him cheating. He’d probably used it in Delhi too.’ But of course, we’d only bought it the day before. And then, next day, the hoo-ha with the big banners: ‘Cheater Lever go home, Tony Greig down down.’
“We were due to go straight on to Australia and I thought, ‘Christ, what am I going to get there?’ Nothing at all, as it happened. The Aussies saw it for what it was, somebody desperate to hang on to the captaincy and make an excuse for why they’d done so badly.
“And then the next thing was: ‘Right, we’re going to have the ball analysed.’ They sent it back to England, and I met a policeman or a forensic guy, years later, who came up and said: ‘I looked at that ball. We found lots of suncream on it, lots of saliva on it, but no Vaseline.’
“To cap it all, my dad had a fatal heart attack while I was away, and he’d had the press camped outside his door saying ‘Do you think your son could have cheated?’ And I think that got to me a little bit. I got very annoyed with Bedi. The next time we played Northants, I ran up and bowled him a short ball. A few years later, there was an old India side, and we played at Goodwood. I looked at him, and he looked at me, and we shook hands and left it at that. I think he died not so long afterwards, so, happily, that was the right thing to do. But I just think if that had happened by the end of the Test series, I would have felt happier about it. I think he might have felt happier about it, too.”
While the 1976-77 trip to Australia for the one-off Centenary Test passed off without any trouble, it was a different story when Lever returned Down Under a couple of years later. For a second time, his equipment came under scrutiny – this time the long-sleeved shirts that he used to wear buttoned up to the wrist.
“The Australian press came out with ‘He throws his bouncer. That’s why he keeps his sleeves down’,” Lever explains. “And that was a big story out there. With the sleeves, it was Fred Trueman’s routine to roll them up on the way back to his mark, but then they would fall down again when he bowled. I didn’t want the distraction, because my routine was very much about working on the ball, trying to shine it as I was walking back.”
The fuss gradually died down. Not only did the papers grow tired of reporting England’s 5-1 win over a team denuded by Kerry Packer’s breakaway, but Lever lost his place to a second spinner on pitches that did not suit him. One of the peculiarities of his career was that he played 15 of his 21 Tests away from home, in generally unhelpful conditions, despite being a classic English new-ball bowler with a Pythagorean mastery of inswing. The explanation probably lies in the fact that he was such an excellent tourist: a man whose spirits could survive the most unpromising of postings.
On that first tour of India in 1976-77, “I was given explicit instructions by Bernard Thomas, near Christmas. He said: ‘You’re with Dennis Amiss [then England’s premier batsman, but a man who married young and had a new family]. Don’t let him stay in his room. If you’re going down to the team room or you’re doing something, make sure you take him with you.’ I said, ‘Yeah, OK.’ And yeah, on Christmas Day, he’s in tears. Not easy, not easy. I didn’t get married [to Chris, an air hostess he first met on the same trip] till I finished.”
But even Lever was hard-pressed to stay positive when England went back to India in 1981-82. After edging a low-scoring first Test, the home side then shut up shop, and won an agonisingly dull six-Test series 1-0. Disillusioned by the whole experience, Lever and his Essex pal Gooch were more sympathetic than they might otherwise have been to the idea of a rebel tour. In the early months of 1982, they travelled to South Africa, thus breaching the Gleneagles Agreement and bringing down the wrath of Lord’s.
Does he regret the decision? Lever takes a deep breath before replying. “Perhaps it sounds a bit big-headed, but I thought I was a good enough bowler to get 100 Test wickets. [He finished with 73 at 26.72 apiece.] And I probably thought: ‘Yeah, if I hadn’t gone, I might have had a chance to get there.’ But at the time, cricket was so badly paid. And that series in India was soul-destroying. Pitches that didn’t bounce. They bowled at 12 overs an hour, with two spinners operating, and by the end, we were doing the same thing. I thought: ‘Well, I’m getting on a bit [he was 32]. If that’s what Test cricket is, I don’t really want to know about it.’
“It was very emotive. I think Goochie got some shekels sent to him, pieces of eight or some sort of payment. And then there was Southend: the local Labour MP wanted to stop us playing at Southchurch Park, which was Corporation land, although that was squashed in the end. To get a three-year ban [from the England team], that just seemed a wee bit over the top when you looked at it. So they were the ‘against’ parts. But I made a lot of nice friends in South Africa and wound up playing four winters in Natal, where there were non-white teams in the league. So I felt like cricket – through [rebel-tour recruiter] Ali Bacher – was trying to do the right thing out there. Plus, once you make a decision, you stay with it.”
England’s loss proved to be a mighty boon for Essex, who had snoozed through 105 years of first-class cricket before finally landing their first title – actually two titles, counting the Benson & Hedges Cup – in the summer of 1979. Such memories have been regularly invoked this summer, as it is the 150th anniversary of Essex’s foundation, and Lever – as club president – has been overseeing the celebrations.
A half-century ago, Essex were the crazy gang of cricket. Left-arm spinner Ray East and all-rounder Keith Pont ranked among the great eccentrics of the county scene, sometimes borrowing bicycles from spectators so that they could ride from fine-leg to fine-leg. In an era of patrician gentlemen and dour players, they rejoiced in being misfits, and in provoking Ray Illingworth – the epitome of the crabby Yorkshireman – to predict “this bunch of madmen will never win anything”.
But Illingworth could not have been more wrong, because Essex were very much the team of the 1980s, racking up three Championships and five one-day trophies. A good deal of this came down to Lever himself: the most valuable player in county cricket for most of the decade.
“Essex were a great team to play against,” recalls Lloyd. “Fabulous fun, all barking mad the lot of them. In the 70s it was Brian ‘Tonker’ Taylor leading the charge: father figure, captain, coach, wicketkeeper. Then Fletch [Keith Fletcher] tried to introduce decorum into the team, which failed miserably.
“In an era of sledging, JK would never sledge anybody. He would just smile at them and have a conversation. But he would keep running in. He reminds me so much of Jimmy Anderson with his longevity in the game. He was naturally fit – it didn’t even seem like he had to work at it – and light on his feet. But he knew how to enjoy himself too, which is important if you want to play for a long time. And you talk about lbws: yes, he got a lot of decisions, but he would have got a damn sight more in the age of DRS!”
One man who did not relish Lever’s lbw factory was legendary umpire Harold “Dickie” Bird, a confirmed not-outer who would always ask Lever where he intended to bowl from – and then choose the other end. In those days, a good step down the pitch rendered you immune from dismissal. But none of this prevented Lever from accumulating no fewer than 1,722 first-class wickets – a total that only the West Indies’ Courtney Walsh, among pacemen from the colour-TV era, can surpass.
Even if you take the three-year ban into account, it remains a colossal injustice that Lever played only six home Tests. When it came to England selection, could he have been too genial for his own good? His book hints at this possibility, in a passage that sounds mild but conveys a certain depth of submerged feeling.
“Perhaps there was a flaw in my make-up in that I did not push myself forwards enough and demand recognition,” wrote Lever, who became a sports-master at Bancroft’s School in Essex after retirement. “Perhaps I should have been a bit more like Ian Botham, who turned up at the Centenary Test in Melbourne as a virtually unknown youngster on a Whitbread Scholarship and told us all that he should be in the England side.”
When I put these lines to him, he nods gravely. “Yeah. I can remember a few times when I was told I was 12th man, and there was something inside me that wanted to say: ‘This is my sort of wicket, and we’re going in with three right-arm bowlers.’ You had Chilly, Hendo, Beefy and Goose [otherwise known as Chris Old, Mike Hendrick, Ian Botham and Bob Willis], and Lord’s was a special case because there was that slight ridge coming from the Pavilion End, and that was Hendo’s length.
“But even now, going to book launches for Mike Brearley – because he has one a week, doesn’t he? – he always says: ‘I should have picked you a bit more, JK.’ I say: ‘It’s no good telling me now, mate. What’s this book about?’”