There have been many articles devoted to Fred Trueman, who died on Saturday, but a slightly different one appears in today’s Daily Telegraph by Simon Heffer, one of their political commentators.
Heffer offers a slightly left-of-centre insight to the man:
“Fred was rarely injured and missed Test matches usually only because, in his profoundly English bloody-mindedness, he had been caustically rude to someone in officialdom. His successors, none of whom has yet reached his league, spend more time recuperating from strains and stress fractures than they do engaging the enemy.”
He also trots out some anecdotes, but not necessarily the ones used in most other obituaries:
“Trueman berated some Yorkshire batsmen for finding Wes Hall, the equally terrifying West Indian, so hard to play. When he, too, was knocked over by Hall, one of his team-mates had the nerve to point out that it wasn't so easy as it looked. ‘Ah'd 'ave been all right,’ retorted Fred, ‘if I 'adn't slipped on that pile of s--- tha'd dropped out there’.”
But it is his conclusion which not only sums up the man, but also the way that the world has changed:
“In his way, he had his cult of celebrity, but this was not a man who would be worshipped for the sunglasses he wore or the women he stepped out with; all he wanted to be judged by, and would be judged by, was what he could do on the field of play. He died on a day when hideously overpaid grown men wept over having lost a game of football, and one of them assisted his side by engaging in the simian action of stamping on the private parts of a rival, and being sent off. They never did that in Fred's day.”
