Bob Taylor jumps out of his chair, clasps his hands together, catches an imaginary ball and throws it to first slip in a move that is as smooth at the age of 82 as it was when he faced Bob Willis.
Taylor sits in his study in his beautiful stone cottage, on the edge of the Peak District and just outside Stoke-on-Trent, where he has lived with his wife Cathy for 35 years. His office is filled with autographed bats, balls, caps and photos from a life in the sport, but one item is missing.
Does he have wicket gloves to pose for the photographer? ‘Sorry, I don’t do that. They are in the Lord’s museum.’
Of course it is, and rightly so, as Taylor holds the world record for most dismissals in first-class cricket, 1,649, and that’s a record that will never be surpassed. “They don’t play enough games these days, do they?”
Over the course of an hour-long interview, before Cathy serves lunch soup that was bubbling on the Aga (sandwiches for the journey home were gratefully received later), Taylor talks about his take on the modern game; the most important skill for a top goalkeeper; sympathizes with Ben Foakes over his treatment by selectors; reminisces about Headingley 81 and the life of a cricketer that is a far cry from the life they lead today.
‘I thought the Bazball hats looked weird – then I remembered mine’
Taylor doesn’t actually know anything about Bazball. “I heard it in the summer, I’m still not sure what it means, but Harry Brook, he’s a very good player with great technique who can hit sixes, but in Test cricket when you see the reverse sweep and scoops and so… older players must be turning in their graves.” Bob may not have played the reverse scoop, but he does share one thing with Ben Stokes’ team: a love of a bucket hat.
We joke that he was ahead of his time and chose a bucket hat instead of a blue England cap. Stokes and the Bazballers made the bucket hat a must-have for fans during the Ashes last summer. When they sold out they changed hands on Ebay for a few hundred pounds. But when Taylor played for England, the players had to be a little more imaginative. No hats were supplied other than the formal cap, so he used a golf hat he bought in South Africa (it has a strap to hold the T-shirts) and Cathy sewed on a St. George and Dragon emblem the frontside. When you hold it now, it’s about as crispy as a Ritz cracker, which Cathy said was due to the amount of starch she had to use to remove the sweat stains.
Goalkeepers are notoriously picky when it comes to equipment and the hat was no different. “I wore it because the cap would be tight on your head in the heat, but this just felt so comfortable. When I saw the English boys wearing them in the summer I thought they looked a bit strange, but then I thought of mine.’ He hangs out in the front hall and is occasionally taken to work in the garden, which, together with daily walks in the fields around the village, keeps him slim and fit.
Taylor’s directions to his cottage told him to look out for the Union Jack and the flagpole on the front lawn, but in reality it was clear which house belonged to an old cricketer: the Father Time weather vane on the roof. ‘I had it done by the local blacksmith. I have been there for 35 years.”
It was of course at Lord’s that Taylor played probably the most famous walk-on role in Test cricket when he was brought out of the hospitality tent to replace the injured Bruce French during a Test against New Zealand in 1986. Retired for two years, Taylor was then working for Test sponsors Cornhill when he answered a call from Mike Gatting, the then England skipper, who asked if he had any equipment. He held on impeccably for a session before Bobby Parks arrived to formally intervene.
“Too bad I never got a catch, but I was happy with how it went. The best part was meeting Her Majesty again. When she came down the line to meet the players, she said, “I understand you work for the sponsors, Cornhill Insurance.” ‘That’s right, ma’am.’ She then said, ‘Would you like to come over? I need some home insurance. ”
‘In India I would choose Ben Foakes’
For someone nicknamed Chat, there will never be many awkward silences during our interview, but it is on his beloved subject of ‘love’ that Taylor finds his real flow. He was a throwback: a keeper with a batting average of 16 and just one first-class century in 639 matches. Taylor, a one-club man who spent his career at Derbyshire, where money was always tight, was Alan Knott’s understudy for many years. He credits two men for his Test career: Ian Botham and Kerry Packer. The former because he was an all-rounder, which meant England could choose the keeper with weaker batting skills, and the latter because World Series Cricket tempted Knott.
Taylor played 57 Tests, the first at the age of 29 as a one-off for a rested Knott, the other 56 between 1977-1984, finishing just shy of the age of 43.
His autobiography, published in 1985 and directed by the BBC’s Pat Murphy, is called Standing Up, Standing Back. “That tells you how I rate goalkeepers,” he says. “Can they do it standing?” It only takes ten pages for him to wonder why goalkeepers are picked for passing ability, rather than goalkeeping. “It seemed that a wicketkeeper’s batting was more important than his ability on the other side of the stumps,” he wrote. One chapter is titled Keeping and Batting.
“It didn’t mean I wasn’t trying with my batting and I’m not making excuses, but no one, either in Derbyshire or England, encouraged me to try and improve my batting,” he says. “I never lost sleep over my percussion. But I did lose sleep when I missed stumps or dropped catches because that was my job. Today it would be a different story, I think, but it still happens. Ben Foakes, James Foster, Chris Read and Jack Russell were all picked, dropped, picked and dropped. I think that’s wrong.”
It is a debate that will be an issue in India. Will Foakes return for Jonny Bairstow who dropped catches in the summer, or will England go for Bairstow’s batting? In India, getting up against the tree stumps and changing grass on hot days is a devilish challenge. “I was there in Galle when Ben Foakes scored a hundred on debut. I would have stuck with him, but next thing you know, he’s dropped. The only thing I noticed last summer was that Jonny Bairstow was not fit. He had a serious injury and came back and had gained some weight and that can affect your concentration. I would go to India with Ben, where you spend all day in heat and humidity.
He uses an anecdote about Javed Miandad as an example. The latter part of the day in a Test in Pakistan saw Taylor Miandad hit out of his crease and advance down the wicket to John Lever. “He turned his spikes over a length to roughen the field for Abdul Qadir.” Taylor decided to hold out for the rest of the match against Lever, who was sharp. “I took one down the leg side, took the bails off and Javed was way out of his crease but the square leg umpire was Shakoor Rana.” Taylor smiles. ‘We know what he ended up getting involved in [a stand-up row with Mike Gatting in 1987]. When I stunned Javed, Shakoor Rana didn’t even look. He was looking away, so he didn’t report it. But I still had the concentration to do it. That’s what you have to do as a goalkeeper, go for it and make something happen.”
Taylor likes Bairstow, whose father David was one of those better batsman-keepers ever picked for England before him, but there is something about Foakes that puts him on another level with the gloves.
He keeps coming back to the word ‘concentration’. “When I coach wicketkeeping to children, I would say to the young boys: forget what you see on TV, with goalkeepers shouting and ranting. You have to concentrate. It’s fine to train your own guys, but I said if you’re too busy talking to the opposition or all that stuff, you won’t concentrate and you’ll let your team down.
‘Spitting on the ground is disgusting’
Taylor keeps in touch with old cricket friends through a messaging group set up in lockdown by former England spinner Pat Pocock. “It’s called raising a glass. We just say that and exchange old stories, it’s a great way to keep an eye on each other,” he says.
Of course he has a lot of stories. One of these is Headingley 81 and on the wall of its kitchen hangs a commemorative plaque given to the players who appeared at Leeds in that great Ashes Test.
“I still see it now. The new electronic scoreboard flashed 500-1. I had two pounds in my pocket and £1,000 was a lot of money in those days.” But he never made it to the bookmakers. Autograph hunters prevented him from reaching the bookie tent before he had to return to the field. “If I hadn’t signed the autographs, I would have gotten there. I didn’t want to ask anyone else to take the bet. Rod Marsh and Dennis Lillee did. Rod told me they put the money on it, like gamblers who thought 500-1 in a two-horse race was too good to miss, but you know, because of Ashe’s history they wouldn’t give it away against us.
Taylor is a self-proclaimed traditionalist. He doesn’t like white ball cricket and doesn’t really know much about the Hundred. He still watches Test cricket, and his career after playing at Cornhill and then the company that makes the Dukes cricket ball kept him in touch with the game for decades after he retired. He coached Jack Russell and also worked at several private schools. He likes the entertaining way England now play Test cricket, but is less enthusiastic about some of the modern behaviour. “I grew up in the old school and one of the dirty habits I see now is wicketkeepers spitting on the ground. They should know they are on TV, but they do it anyway. It’s disgusting. It was one of the things I tried to tell kids not to do.”
His grandson Jack, who lives in New Zealand, is twelve and obviously a keeper. “When I was there last year I took him to the nets to catch and keep wickets and had one of the Nelson Cricket Club batsmen shadow him.” And the message? “Just look at the ball all the time, keep your head down and just when a batsman plays the ball, be physically ready to go through the motions of taking the ball. Once you do that, you’re ready.”
Time to stop, although we could go on for another hour. Soup is served.