Bob Willis died seven years ago and his acerbic television punditry is much missed by lovers of English cricket… with the possible exception of some of the underperforming current players.
The England fast-bowling great found a late-career TV niche with his withering analysis on The Verdict. There is a feature (10.15am today, Sky Sports Cricket) about Willis and the programme before action from the England vs India ODI at Edgbaston.
Charles Colvile, Bob’s long-time handler, presents the retrospective. Colvile told Telegraph Sport that his colleague would most likely have taken a very dim view of recent developments in the England Test match set-up.
“In terms of Bazball, I think Bob would have been excited by the positivity but in despair at the stupidity,” Colvile said. “Bob would often say that you cannot take liberties with Test-match cricket. You might get away with it in a one-dayer or a T20, but Test cricket will always come back and bite you if you try to take the mickey out of it.”
It seems fair to speculate that Willis, like many England fans, would have been glad to see the back of Brendon McCullum’s no-brains brainchild but, of course, many of the key players remain in place.
Harry Brook, who leads the England side today, is one figure who would doubtless have got Willis coming in off his long-run on The Verdict.
“I cannot begin to think what Bob would have made of the fourth evening of the last Test match [against New Zealand at Trent Bridge last month] when Brook in particular was trying to launch every ball all over the shop,” Colvile said.
“He would have been almost speechless, although Bob was never speechless for long. The opposition aren’t idiots and if they know you are going to tee off every ball they are going to bowl and set fields for that. Bob really would not have been happy with the stupidity. I also don’t think he would have been happy with the timing of the Ben Stokes retirement and the way It was done.”
Whether that desperate performance would have prompted Bob to top his assessment of Graeme Swann’s mid-Ashes retirement (“creeping into the lifeboat of the Titanic with the women and children”) we will sadly never know, but England cricket coverage is missing a fire-and-brimstone preacher of the old school at the moment.
For all their broadcasting excellence, the likes of Michael Atherton, Nasser Hussain and the increasingly pivotal Stuart Broad are all reasonable men and prone to sympathising with the pressures facing the players.
Paying fans and TV subscribers, however, are not at all encumbered by this sort of generosity.