Bob Taylor interview: ‘Ben Foakes should keep wicket for England in India’

Bob Taylor springs out of his seat, joins his hands together, catches an imaginary ball and tosses it to first slip in a movement as smooth at the age of 82 as it was when he was standing back to Bob Willis.

Taylor is in his study at his delightful stone cottage, on the edge of the Peak District and just outside Stoke-on-Trent and where he has lived with wife Cathy for 35 years. His office is crammed full of signed bats, balls, caps and photographs of a life spent in the sport but there is one item missing.

Does he have any wicketkeeping gloves to pose for the photographer? “Sorry, I don’t. They are in the Lord’s museum.”

Of course they are, and rightly so, because Taylor holds the world record for the most dismissals in first-class cricket, 1,649, and it is a mark that will never be beaten. “They don’t play enough games these days do they?”

Over the course of an hour’s interview, before Cathy serves up lunchtime soup that was bubbling away on the Aga (sandwiches for the journey home were later gratefully received), Taylor chats about his views on the modern game; the most important skill for a top keeper; empathises with Ben Foakes about his treatment by selectors; reminisces about Headingley 81 and a cricketer’s life far removed from those they lead these days.

‘I thought the Bazball hats looked silly – then I remembered mine’

Taylor doesn’t really know anything about Bazball. “Heard it mentioned in the summer, I’m still not sure what it means but Harry Brook, he’s a very good player with great technique who can whack sixes but when you see in Test cricket the reverse sweep and scoops and all that…older players must be turning in their graves.” Bob may not have played the reverse scoop but he does share one thing with Ben Stokes’s team: a love of a bucket hat.

We joke that he was ahead of his time, choosing a bucket hat to keep in rather than a blue England cap. Stokes and the Bazballers made the bucket hat a must-have item for fans during last summer’s Ashes. When they sold out they were changing hands for several hundred pounds on Ebay. But when Taylor played for England players had to be a bit more imaginative. No hats were supplied beyond the formal cap so he used a golf hat bought in South Africa (it has a band for keeping tees) and Cathy sewed a St George and Dragon emblem on the front. Holding it now, it is about as crisp as a Ritz cracker, which Cathy explains was because of the amount of starch she had to use to remove the sweat stains.

Keepers are notoriously fussy about kit and the hat was no different. “I wore it because the cap would get tight on your head in the heat but this just felt so comfortable. When I saw the England lads wearing them in the summer, I thought they looked a bit silly, but then I remembered mine.” It hangs in the front hall, occasionally donned for gardening, which along with daily walks in the fields around the village keeps him trim and fit.

Taylor’s directions to his cottage said to look out for the Union Jack and flagpole on the front lawn but really it was obvious which house belonged to an old cricketer: the Father Time weathervane on the roof. “I got the local blacksmith to do it. Been there 35 years.”

It was at Lord’s of course that Taylor played probably the most famous walk-on role in Test cricket when he was hauled out of the hospitality tent to stand in for injured Bruce French in a Test against New Zealand in 1986. Two years retired, Taylor was by then working for Test sponsors Cornhill when he answered a call from Mike Gatting, then England skipper, who asked if he had any kit. He kept immaculately for a session before Bobby Parks arrived to step in formally.

“Shame I never got a catch but I was pleased how it went. The best part was meeting Her Majesty again. When she came along the line to meet the players she said ‘I understand you work for the sponsors, Cornhill Insurance.’ ‘That is correct Ma’am.’ She then said ‘Would you pop round? I need a bit of house insurance.’”

‘In India, I’d pick Ben Foakes’

For someone with the nickname, Chat, there were never going to be many awkward silences in our interview but it is on his beloved subject of keeping that Taylor finds his real flow. He was a throwback: a keeper with a batting average of 16 and just one first-class century in 639 matches. A one-club man, who spent his career at Derbyshire where money has always been tight, Taylor was Alan Knott’s understudy for years. He credits two men for his Test career: Ian Botham and Kerry Packer. The former for being an all-rounder which meant England could pick the keeper with weaker batting skills, and the latter for World Series Cricket tempting away Knott.

Taylor played 57 Tests, the first aged 29 as a one-off for a rested Knott, the other 56 between 1977-1984, ending just short of the age of 43.

His autobiography, published in 1985 and ghosted by the BBC’s Pat Murphy, is entitled Standing Up, Standing Back. “That tells you how I rate keepers,” he says. “Can they do it standing up?” It takes just 10 pages for him to wonder why keepers are picked on batting ability, rather than keeping. “It seemed that batting of a wicketkeeper was more important than his abilities on the other side of the stumps,” he wrote. One chapter is entitled Keeping and Batting.

“It didn’t mean to say I wasn’t trying with my batting and I’m not making excuses but nobody, either at Derbyshire or England, encouraged me to try and improve my batting,” he says. “I never lost sleep over my batting. But I did lose sleep if I missed stumpings or dropped catches because that was my job. It’d be a different story today I suppose but it still happens. Ben Foakes, James Foster, Chris Read and Jack Russell all got picked, dropped, picked and dropped. I think that’s wrong.”

It is a debate that will be an issue in India. Will Foakes come back for Jonny Bairstow who dropped catches in the summer, or will England go for Bairstow’s batting? In India, standing up to the stumps on hot days and turning pitches is a devilish challenge. “I was there watching at Galle when Ben Foakes scored a hundred on debut. I would have persevered with him but then the next thing you know, he’s been dropped. The one thing I did notice last summer was that Jonny Bairstow was not fit. He had a bad injury and came back and had put a bit of weight on and that can affect your concentration. I would go with Ben in India where you keep all day in heat and humidity.”

He uses an anecdote about Javed Miandad as an example. In the final over of the day in a Test in Pakistan, Taylor noticed Miandad batting out of his crease and advancing down the wicket at John Lever. “He was swivelling his spikes on a length, to rough up the pitch for Abdul Qadir.” Taylor decided to stand up the rest of the over to Lever, who was sharp. “I took one down the leg side, whipped off the bails and Javed was well out of his crease but the square leg umpire was Shakoor Rana.” Taylor smiles. “We know what he ended up getting involved in [a stand-up row with Mike Gatting in 1987]. When I stumped Javed, Shakoor Rana wasn’t even looking. He was looking the other way so he gave it not out. But I still had the concentration to do it. That’s what you have to do as a keeper, be on it and make something happen.”

Taylor likes Bairstow, whose father David was one of those better batsman-keepers once picked ahead of him for England, but there is something about Foakes that puts him on a different level with the gloves.

He keeps coming back to the word ‘concentration’. “When I coach wicketkeeping to kids I’d say to the young boys, forget what you see on TV with keepers shouting and carrying on. You’ve got to concentrate. It is ok geeing up your own lads but I said if you’re too busy chatting to the opposition, or all this business, you’re not concentrating and you will let your team down.”

‘Spitting on the ground is revolting’

Taylor keeps in touch with old cricket friends through a messaging group set up in lockdown by former England spinner Pat Pocock. “It’s called raise a glass. We just say that and swap old stories, it is a great way to keep an eye on each other,” he says.

He has loads of stories of course. One is Headingley 81 and hung on the wall of his kitchen is a commemorative plate given to the players who appeared at Leeds in that great Ashes Test.

“I can still see it now. The new electronic scoreboard flashed up 500-1. I had two pounds in my pocket and a £1,000 was a lot of money in those days.” But he never made it to the bookies. Autograph hunters prevented him from reaching the bookie tent before he had to go back out on the field. “If I hadn’t been signing the autographs I would have got there. I didn’t want to ask anyone else to put the bet on. Rod Marsh and Dennis Lillee did. Rod told me that they put the money on just as betting men who thought 500-1 in a two-horse race was too good to miss but you know because of Ashes history they would not give it away against us.”

Taylor is a self-confessed traditionalist. He is not keen on white-ball cricket and doesn’t really know much about the Hundred. He still watches Test cricket, and his post playing career with Cornhill and then the company that makes the Dukes cricket ball kept him in touch with the game for decades after he retired. He coached Jack Russell and worked at several private schools as well. He likes the entertaining way England play Test cricket now but is less keen on some of the modern behaviours. “I was brought up in the old school and one of the filthy habits I see now is wicketkeepers spitting on the ground. They must know they are on TV but still do it. It is revolting. It was one of the things I tried to tell kids not to do.”

His grandson Jack, who lives in New Zealand, is 12 and, naturally, a keeper. “When I was there last year I took him down to the nets catching and keeping wicket and got one of the Nelson Cricket Club batsmen to shadow bat for him.” And the message? “Just watch the ball all the time, keep your head down and just when a batsman plays the ball be physically ready to go through the motions of taking the ball. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready.”

Time to stop although we could go on for another hour. Soup is served.