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When Tom Bailey’s mobile phone fell out of his pocket on Saturday as he was turning for a quick second during Lancashire’s Championship match with Gloucestershire, it brought some cheap laughs, as well as a sharp letter of warning from the ECB’s anti-corruption officer. It was also another chapter in cricket’s pocket history: from sandpaper to sandwiches. What, as Gollum pondered, has it got in its pocketses?
For Derbyshire left-arm spinner Fred Swarbrook, the answer was a lucky pebble. After developing the yips, a psychologist had advised him to take a stone on to the pitch and rub it before he was about to bowl. Sadly, it didn’t work and the luckless Swarbrook was forced to retire.
The occasionally tricky John Lever of Essex once stuffed an orange in his pocket and bowled it at Ian Gould first ball after telling him he could get him out with one (he didn’t). While Jack Leach’s glasses cloth, made famous during his one not out at the 2019 Headingley Test, lives on not only in his pocket but also through its own X account (which hasn’t posted since June 2023, but is still followed by nearly 3,000 people).
Neville Chamberlain was not the only man to have had a piece of paper in his pocket. At Edgbaston in 2012, the West Indian Denesh Ramdin reached an excellent hundred against England, before pausing to delve in his trousers and bring out a scrap with the words “Yea Viv, Talk Nah” scrawled on it, after Richards had criticised his batting performances. Sir Viv was unmoved.
The umpire Dickie Bird, whose claim to have stored and taken a call on Allan Lamb’s mobile during a Trent Bridge Test can probably be dismissed as a good story, was once given a set of false teeth by a worried Ashley Harvey-Walker during Lancashire’s snowy match with Derbyshire at Buxton in 1975. David Lloyd, fielding at short leg, and also unnerved by the pitch, handed over his too. Bird wasn’t keen, until the teeth were suitable wrapped in a hanky.
Steve Waugh never batted without his own handkerchief, a red one, poking like a dog’s tongue, out of his pocket. And that red handkerchief, (the Final Word podcast recently revealed) had a second life after Waugh gave Marlon Samuels a piece of his hanky in 2000-2001. Samuels then put it in his own pocket and, after reaching his first one-day hundred, pulled said scrap out to show the crowd. Virender Sehwag and Mohinder Amarnath were also red hanky fans, while Zaheer Khan favoured a yellow one. Tabraiz Shamsi topped the lot during the Mzansi Super League, when he celebrated taking a wicket with a magic trick, turning a handkerchief into a stick.
In 2013, South Africa’s captain Faf du Plessis was fined 50% of his match fee for rubbing the ball against the zip of his trouser pocket during the second Test against Pakistan – by 2015 zips on trousers had been banned by the ICC. Du Plessis was at it again in 2016, during the second Test against Australia at Hobart, when he was accused of rubbing the sugar from a mint on the ball – though it is unclear if he had stored mints in his pocket as well as his mouth. (Marcus Trescothick also admitted to doing this during the 2005 Ashes series.) A censorius David Warner noted gravely: “We hold our heads high and I’d be very disappointed if one of our team members did that.”
A couple of years later, Warner himself would be implicated in a pocket-affair, this time involving sandpaper. It was at the third Test at Cape Town when the South African broadcast team spotted young Australian Cameron Bancroft rubbing a little piece of yellow paper on the ball in an attempt to make it more agreeable for the bowlers. The technicians trained their cameras on him, and the supporting cast, and then posted a video clip on the ground’s big screen for everyone to see. A panicking Bancroft then shoved the sandpaper down his trousers but that subterfuge, as you’ll know, didn’t work and he, Steve Smith and Warner were sent home from tour and given hefty bans from the game.
Another Australian story emerged after coach Justin Langer famously banned Marnus Labuschagne from putting a ham and cheese toastie in his pocket and taking it on to the field with him after lunch during Australia’s Test against India at the Gabba in 2021. “How do you reckon it looks, mate?” Australia lost that game too.
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England have not been immune. In one of the more bizarre tactical decisions, they filled their pockets with jelly beans during the 2007 Test at Trent Bridge and proceeded to throw them at an unimpressed Zaheer Khan. Zaheer accused Kevin Pietersen of being the guilty man (though Chris Tremlett later admitted the culprit was Ian Bell) and, duly fired up, went on to take five wickets in England’s second innings to help swing India to victory.
One familiar pocket story comes from the 1990s and the dirt-in-pocket affair. The then England captain, 25-year-old Michael Atherton, perhaps unaware of how advanced cameras had become, was spotted rubbing dirt on the ball during the 1994 Lord’s Test. Athers, according to his diary, had picked up some dust from a used pitch on the Tavern side of the ground to keep the ball and his hands dry. Whether or not this was permitted by the laws is still debated, but he was fined £2,000 by a fuming Ray Illingworth, half for lying to the match referee and half for the dirt. Stubborn as ever, he fled to the Lake District for a holiday, kept his job, and still puts his hands in his pockets to this day.
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