The notorious 1974-75 Ashes saw Australia’s pacemen terrorise the touring English batting order with a barrage of short-pitched bowling, precipitating the use of protective helmets for the first time.
Fifty years ago this winter, an unassuming fellow from Birmingham walked to the middle of Brisbane’s Woolloongabba Stadium.
“I said to him, ‘You know that first ball at Brisbane, that went past my nose off a length? That really scarred me, for a long time afterwards’. He said, ‘But Den, you got out the way. When I bowled those at anybody else, I hit them on the head’. I said, ‘Had that hit me on the head, I wouldn’t be here now.’”Amiss had arrived in Brisbane as the flower of English batsmanship, with a Test average of 52 and five hundreds already that calendar year.
Jogging in without apparent menace, he would make a sharp sideways turn, point his left toe at the batsman’s nose, and bring his right hand – previously obscured by his back leg – into view at the last nanosecond. His coil and release was compared by an envious Bob Willis, then on his second Ashes tour, to a nuclear explosion.
For Cowdrey, who averaged 18, the 1974-75 Ashes felt like a quixotic flourish at the end of a great career. Amiss took England’s 4-1 defeat more personally, because he had arrived as their batting cornerstone.Yet no sensible observer could blame him for his disappointing numbers . In the words of Australia’s middle-order man Ross Edwards, “This was cricket beyond your experience. I was fielding in the covers, and I was scared for them.
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