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A Highlander's Low Blow

Mike Denness' stern rectitude emanates from his being a part of the cricketing establishment

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A Highlander's Low Blow
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After last week, there is very little doubt about that. In fact, South African captain Shaun Pollock says that just before the fateful second Test began at Port Elizabeth last week, Denness came on "very stern" in a conversation. "I am going to come down very hard on erring players," he told Pollock. But the glaring inconsistencies in his penalty-slapping spree—Pollock being let off after, arguably, Test cricket’s longest appeal—clearly undid all his ‘good’ work.

The first time Indian cricket suffered at the hands of Denness (pronounced Dee-ness) was in 1974, when he was appointed captain—Denness took over from Ray Illingworth after England were routed 2-0 by the West Indies in a 1973 home series. He led England to a whitewash of the touring Indian team. He had an outstanding series with the bat with scores of 26 and 45 not out, and 118 and 100. Of course, India had their first look at Denness in 1972-73 when he was vice-captain under Tony Lewis in the MCC touring team. He had displayed impressive technique against India’s fabled spin quartet, though he only had one half-century (76 at Madras) to show for it. But at the end of his all-too-brief and largely uninspiring career of 28 Tests with a batting average of 39.69, Denness faded away in the cricket lover’s mind.

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Former Indian cricketers don’t have any stand-out memories of Denness. Bishen Singh Bedi remembers him as "just a reasonable batsman, nothing outstanding about him". Says Bedi: "He has never been a brave player. I have never seen him encouraging fellow players. He also came across as a very overbearing kind of a captain. From what I remember, he never really got along well with Geoffrey Boycott.". Former Indian captain Ajit Wadekar is more acerbic: "I remember him as a typical Englishman, pompous, reserved and extremely difficult, at least for me, to talk to. He didn’t talk much to any of us on or off the field." Abbas Ali Baig echoes the same sentiment: "I don’t recall him at all. That, I guess, speaks volumes of him as a cricketer. He dropped himself as the captain in Australia because his own form was not good." Denness sneaked back into the team in the final Test on finding out that the dreaded Lillee-Thomson pace duo was not playing the match.

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In his latest avatar, the rather anonymous, stiff-upper-lip former England captain’s six-year-old career as an ICC match referee had been rather uneventful and placid—till Port Elizabeth happened. icc chief executive Malcolm Speed says that Denness had been a referee for matches involving India on nine previous occasions and had not penalised any Indian player. In fact, the dour, 61-year-old Scotsman is known to have ruled for India a few years ago when he asked the on-field umpires to continue play in the final of the Independence Cup in Dhaka. India beat Pakistan with Hrishikesh Kanitkar hitting a four off the penultimate ball.

Interestingly, despite his unremarkable career, Denness was the blue-eyed boy of the cricket establishment during his early years as a Kent and England player. This, clearly, landed him the job of captaincy for 19 Tests even though he was a Scot—Scots have generally been on the wrong end of the English cricketing establishment’s stick.


Denness was thought to have had the right middle-class credentials for the job—a class location he was willing enough to overplay so as to move between his Scottish and English identities—when the two other leading contenders for the job were a loud-mouthed South African all-rounder and a self-centered opening batsman who had sworn loyalty to the miners and working classes of Yorkshire. Denness might have lost some of the reputation of being an establishment figure after his controversial move from Kent to Essex, the southern county neighbouring Kent with which it has a bitter rivalry, in the late ’70s, a time when moving counties was still defined along pre-industrial lines. But in the end, Denness remained a truly English cricket establishment figure and has ended up a martinet who will be remembered for triggering off one of the biggest controversies in cricketing history.

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A. James in London, Ashish Shukla in Johannesburg, Gulu Ezekiel in Delhi, Bobby John Varkey and Manu Joseph

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