How PCA Makes Sure Players Will Never Be Cast Adrift Again Like Larwood

Peter Hayter discovers how players in the modern game can find support from their 'union' when their careers end.

- Peter Hayter

The brilliant sports scribe Frank Keating was looking for somewhere to tap out his pipe and thesmall silver ashtray on the mantelpiece looked just the job.

“The old man hears the clink,” he wrote in The Guardian.

“I think you’ve just emptied your ash in my most treasured possession,” he says, though without any trace of admonition.

“Read what it says,” he orders.

“You read, ‘To Harold. For The Ashes. From a Grateful Skipper’.

” Behind the romantic humour of Keating’s story lay a less cosy truth.

Though Harold Larwood, of Nottingham shire, England and Ashes folklore, retained forever the gratitude of skipper Douglas Jardine for putting his leg theory into practice against Don Bradman on the Bodyline tour of 1932-33, the patrician overlords of the game at MCC were rather less generous.

Smarting from political fallout, questions in the house, accusations of bad sportsmanship and the rest, they seemed happy to let Larwood drift into obscurity, like a bad smell.

On his retirement from the game, the “one-time coal miner and one-time professional cricketer” first turned his hand to market gardening, then, after the World War II had ended, sunk what remained of his money into a Blackpool sweet shop. When that failed he was encouraged by Jack Fingleton, one of his Aussie opponents in that notorious series, to emigrate Down Under where, on arrival in April 1950, he was looked after properly.

At first, unbeknown to him, half his hotel bills were paid by a former Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, work was found for him and the family settled in the Sydney suburb of Kingsford, where, two years after Keating visited him, he died after a short illness, aged 91, in 1995.

Thanks to the generosity of his Ashes “victims” Larwood was one of the lucky ones.