Bob Cowper: A lost promise

by Kalyanbrata Bhattacharyya

‘What of the future? Watch out for … Bob Cowper who showed in his first season of Shield Cricket undoubted test material’.

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That is how the great Neil Harvey of Australia predicted  in his autobiography, My World of Cricket  published in 1963. Indeed, nothing could be more prophetic about this young batsman from Victoria  who later played for Western Australia, as well.

Early days and Test debut

Cowper was born on the 5th of October, 1940. His father was the captain of the Australian national rugby union team.

Cowper received his formal education at the Scotch College, Melbourne. He began his playing career in 1958 for the Hawthorn-East Melbourne club  and  grew up in its eastern suburb. After   attending College,   he had been playing for Victoria.

In two years time at the tender age of 18, he made  his First class debut against Tasmania and scored only 21 . But in the second innings, he captured 4 wickets for 24 runs which guided Victoria to win the match.

 After a series of  impressive performance in the Sheffield Shield in 1962-63 and 1963-64, where he scored 5 centuries,  Cowper was selected to tour  England under the leadership of Bobby Simpson in the summer of 1964 and performed decently in the initial tour matches.

He made his  Test debut at the age of 23  at Headingley, Leeds in the third Test and was not an instant success during the series. He toured India and Pakistan a  few months later and again big scores eluded him. A stubborn 81 in 204 minutes at Bombay being the only innings of  any consequence.

However, he came to terms with himself during the Australian tour to the West Indies in 1964-65. He scored 143,  his maiden Test century, at Port of Spain,  in the second Test match. This innings prompted Wisden to write,  ‘Cowper’s century established him in more ways than just a technically sound batsman. His stout heart and fighting cricket re-established his side’s morale when it threatened to become dangerously low.’  He followed it up with 102 at Bridgetown, Barbados,  in the fourth test match,  was the leading batsman  from Australia scoring 417 runs at an  average of 52.12,. He displayed commendable technique against Wesley Hall and Charlie Griffith at their fastest. Thus, he entrenched his place in the team for years to come.  

The Triple Hundred

However, his finest hour came in 1965-66 against Mike Smith’s visiting England team.  In the second Test at Melbourne, he narrowly missed the century mark by a solitary run. He scored 60 in 250 minutes  in the Sydney Test , an encounter which has gone down in the annals of Test cricket as the ‘Barber Test Match’. Bob  Barber, opening the inning with Geoffrey Boycott,  scored a magnificent 185 and Cowper was relegated as the 12th man  for the next Test at Adelaide for slow scoring.

However, such are the vagaries of life that on regaining his placeat the expense of  Peter Burge, he responded with  307 . Compiled in 722  minutes, he faced 589 deliveries, hit 20 boundaries and he ran three a record 29 times. This was the longest innings played in Australia till that time.

When he arrived at the crease  the Australian total was 26 for 2 in reply to an impressive 465 by England. It was raining intermittently and he batted with Bill Lawry, his team-mate from Victoria.  Rohan Rivett, a correspondent for The Canberra Times wrote, ‘As a day of cricket or an exchange in virtuosity, today belonged entirely to Bob Cowper...’  

Cowper later said that the wet outfield forced the batsmen to raise the total by running threes and fours in between the wickets. Australia finally declared the innings at 485 for 9 and the match ended in a draw.  This was incidentally, the first ever triple century scored in the Australian soil and in   the process, he surpassed two records held by  Sir Donald Bradman. 

He broke his record of 270 runs for the highest score by an Australian batsman in Australia  against England at Melbourne, as well as his 299  against South Africa at Adelaide  in 1932 for the highest score by any batsman in Test cricket in Australia. After the match, the young man was privileged to toast  his feat with Bradman though  the photograph of this proud moment  printed in the newspapers  was somewhat submerged  by the dramatic demonstration  by  Bobby Simpson, the captain,  desperately trying to snatch a stump from an enthusiastic spectator at the end of the match.

Years later, Cowper said in a casual manner that he hardly remembered  this innings and bothered little  about the records. He said   that owing to the  repeated interruptions  by rain, he almost felt like playing a series of innings, rather than one single knock!  

He also said, ‘It didn't change my life at all.’ Lindsay Hassett, the former Australian captain, wrote in ‘The Canberra Times’, ‘Cowper, 12th man in Adelaide, staged possibly the most sensational comeback in the history of Test cricket. Apart from the occasional pull-shot, he did not loft a single ball. He occupied the crease for 12 hours and eight minutes. Most of his runs came from  elegant and powerful cover drives, and he played some pull shots that would have done credit to Stan McCabe at his best.’

Abhishek Mukherjee  alluded to a comment from  Ian Wooldridge who later wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald,  ‘Bob Cowper, cocooned in concentration, batted on and on and on. Then, after a night’s sleep, he batted on and on again.’  He added: ‘We had been compelled to stare at it for two whole days on end.’ However, the most interesting comment possibly came from the batsman himself who while returning to the  pavilion after the marathon innings, happened to say, ‘My God! That must have been the most boring innings you have had to sit through.’   When a journalist friend of his commented before the Test match that he was not fully fit, Cowper returned the compliment with a caustic jibe  in a humorous way, ‘Hey, how fit am I now?’

150 and five-for

After a lackluster tour to South Africa in 1966-67,  famed for the  outstanding batting of  Denis Lindsay, the South African wicket-keeper, Cowper was back in his element against the touring Indian team in 1967-68 under the leadership of Tiger Pataudi.

He scored 108 and 165 at Adelaide in the first Test match and at Sydney in the 4th Test match,  respectively. The latter match turned out to be an historic occasion since this was the first time in the history of Test cricket that Umesh Kulkarni and Rusi Surti, two left handed  bowlers,  opened the bowling against him and Bill Lawry,  the two left handed openers.

During this  match, Cowper turned out to be only the second Australian after George Giffen  to score 150 runs and take 5 wickets in a Test match.  

He  was never omitted from the Australian squad after his triple century till  the fourth test match at Headingley, Leeds in 1968. He  could not participate in  the fifth test match  at the Oval in 1968  when he had to be rested due to a hand injury.  

Early retirmenet

Thereafter, Cowper retired at an unusually tender age of 27  and thus his stint in international cricket was limited only to four years. The cited reason was business commitments.

Remarkably, his average in Australia is a staggering 75.78, while it is   a moderate  33.33  overseas. This  difference of 42.45 is still a world  record.  

It is also noteworthy that in the last thirteen matches in his career from 1966 to 1968, he totalled 931 runs,  which was the highest by any Australian batsman at that time.

Essentially, he preferred to play off the back foot and was endowed with good technique at negotiating lifting deliveries. Since then, he played club cricket for Nedlands and a handful of games with Western Australia and  captained Victoria   to victory in the Sheffield Shield in 1969-70.  

He was also a more than useful off-spin bowler, though he batted left-handed,  and had 36 wickets in 27 Test matches to his credit. He  paved the way for an Australian victory at Brisbane, Queensland, against India in 1967-68, when he dismissed Chandu Borde for 63 at a time when Borde, in tandem with  ML Jaisimha, had been cruising towards a possible Indian victory. However,  India lost by 39 runs and the match has a  historic overtone  for the incredible batting by Jaisimha who flew in as a replacement from Hyderabad  and without a wink of sleep, took part in the match and scored 74 and 101 runs.

Thereafter, he  left cricket for good in order to concentrate on his hugely successful business career but he continued to represent Australia in the International Cricket Council and he also served as an erstwhile match referee.

The man

Cowper was endowed with a keen sense of the nuances of the game and many experts believe that had he continued, the Australian captaincy would have  almost naturally been passed on to him from Bobby Simpson,  and Bill Lawry and thereafter, Ian Chappell,  might have  had to wait a bit longer for that honour. As a matter of fact, The Roar wrote on Cowper,  ‘It’s interesting to speculate what would have happened to the captaincy succession if first Simpson and then Cowper both extended their careers. Lawry might never have captained at all, while Chappell’s tenure would have been pushed back.’ He  was among the first few Australians to raise their voice against the Australian Cricket Board for  the mere pittance as their match fee  and poor living conditions for the cricketers during tours. Ian Wooldridge once wrote in Sydney Morning Herald,  ‘Had he been born a dozen years later he would probably have been a Kerry  Packer revolutionary’.   

It is often said that the Australian Cricket Board’s reluctance to increase the match fee for the cricketers was one reason for his quitting the game at such an early age when he was virtually a certainty in the side. Abhishek Mukherjee wrote on the decision of Cowper, quitting cricket and engaging himself in business activities in some greater detail. Cowper said, ‘It was time to do some work... People made something of a mystery out of it, but there was no mystery at all... One morning reality really hit me. I worked out that,  for playing cricket for Australia for nine months out of the previous 12, my gross income for the year was $3,000. It was time to go.’ He  turned into a multi-millionaire and was worth 100 million dollars in 1987.

He goaded  men like Ian Chappell, Ian Redpath,  and others to protest vociferously against the poor pay they were receiving and along with  Richie Benaud, Ian Chappell, and others, he was a member of the World Series Cricket Advisory Board and worked as an adviser to Kerry Packer in his negotiations with  the Australian Cricket Board between 1977 and 1979, even though he bid farewell to cricket much earlier.

Gideon Haigh wrote that, ‘Cowper was a  stockbroker and merchant banker too intelligent and ambitious to linger long in a game offering such modest financial rewards.’ Now-a-days, he spends most of his time in Monaco, where he works in finance  but he makes it a point to return to his home at the time of the  Australian summer and watch the game he once played with passion and is in close contact with David Sincock, the chinaman bowler and Brian Taber, the wicket-keeper in the late 1960s. The Sunday Morning Herald reported in 2003 that Cowper is on record to have said from Monaco,  ‘...But cricket is a past chapter for me... I'm proud of what I achieved. It was totally different in those days . . . everyone had another career running alongside cricket. It would have been a great honour to be there but, as you can imagine, it's a little far to go. I hope they all have a terrific night and all those players of yesteryear will be better tomorrow than they were yesterday. For me, it was just a bit too far to go.’  It was interesting to read that in those days, as opposed to the present time,  the custom was that the players were offered  baggy green caps in every new season and Cowper has distributed  all of them,  except the one which he received during his  tour to England at the time of his debut and it is now in the custody of his daughter.

Rohan Kanhai, in his autobiography, ‘Blasting for Runs’ wrote that Sir Frank Worrell once commented about Cowper, ‘… he simply creeps on you’. It only goes to suggest how undemonstratively, quietly, and surreptitiously Cowper gathered his runs,  somewhat like Alan Border or Steve Waugh in more recent times,  and it must be born in mind that Worrell never played against Cowper; at the most he saw him from a distance in the pavilion.

The Australian Cricket Society organized a reunion ceremony in honour of Cowper on the 50th anniversary of the victory of the Victorian cricket team in the Sheffield Shield in 1969-70. In a write-up, Lunch with Bob Cowper, Keiran Croker wrote that  Victoria  launched the Bob’s Boys, Kelvin Club at that time. The victory was all the more gratifying since six of the frontline  Victorian cricketers like, Bill Lawry, Keith Stackpole, Paul Sheahan, Ian Redpath, Alan Connolly and Ray Jordan  were away in India, Sri Lanka, and thereafter, South Africa during the season, playing for Australia. Many of the invitees were of the opinion that Cowper and Keith Miller were two of the most outstanding Australian cricketers who unfortunately, could never lead an Australian team, and Stackpole and Sheahan were effusive in their praise for him.

Much later in his life, Cowper was appointed as  a match-referee for 2 Tests during  Pakistan’s  tour to England in 1992 and officiated  in  14 ODI matches. He played in 27 test matches, hit 5 centuries and scored 2061 runs at an average of 46. 84. He also captured 36 wickets at an average of 31.63 runs. He played in 147 First class matches, scored 10,955 runs with 26 centuries at an average of 53.78  and took 183 wickets at an average of 31.19 runs.  Hardly ever did a batsman of such great promise play for such a short time and  decided voluntarily to hang his boots, mostly out of frustration,  when he was in high demand.