77: Bob Willis

90 matches. 325 wickets @ 25.2. Strike rate: 53.41. 16x 5wi.

13 years. 4x good. 2x excellent. 4x outstanding.

The discussion

Bob Willis was a tough character. Plenty of fast bowlers have niggles, and some endure major injuries during their career. It’s not easy, being a fast bowler. Bob Willis proves that he is no exception to that rule. Following a double knee operation at 26, Willis played on the other side of the pain barrier for the remaining nine-odd years of his career.

Despite playing in almost constant pain, Bob Willis still amassed 325 Test wickets at an average of 25.20. These are impressive figures, and on the surface look like a Hall of Fame resume. His AARP (Average Above Replacement Player) of +5.09 ranks 30th for Hall of Fame candidate bowlers, and his number of wickets, strike rate and 5wi all rank inside the top 30 among Hall of Fame candidates. These numbers surprised me, as my impression of Willis’s career before I started my research was that he was a very good player, but I wasn’t sure that he was one of the top 100 players of all-time.

But let’s dive deeper, for it’s in here that we find the gold.

Several accounts, including Wisden’s assessment of Willis in 1985, describe him as having a slightly unorthodox (ungainly seems too unkind a word) approach and action at the crease. Whatever your adjectives, the outcome at delivery was a result of extraordinary leverage (Willis was 6’6” in the old scale) and resulted in some impressive pace and bounce. So much bounce, in fact, that injuries to both Australia’s Rick McCosker and Pakistan’s Iqbal Qasim were reported to be instrumental in the final disillusion of that great cricketing institution — the fast bowler’s union. Regardless of what you thought about the aesthetics of Willis’s approach to the wicket, the pace and bounce he extracted, plus his angle toward the batter was as awkward to face as it was to witness.

With respect to his peak, there’s really one Test that we should focus on. It might be from a series known as ‘Botham’s Ashes’, but the 1981 Test at Headingley between Australia and England owes a lot to Bob Willis in terms of the result.

Let’s set the scene, shall we?

Willis’s contribution to the first innings wasn’t spectacular — no wickets as Australia amassed 401-9 declared. Botham was strong in the first innings, collecting six wickets. When it was England’s turn to bat, they were humbled: 174 all out, forced to follow-on and they quickly slumped to 105-5 in that second dig. What came next is where the legends begin — an innings of a lifetime from Ian Terrence Botham: 149 not out to carry England to 356. But there was still no need for the Australians to panic. Only 130 to get. England were famously 500-1 odds at some point during the Test. Perhaps the less said about that the better.

And here’s where Bob Willis enters the story. At 56-1, Australia was well on track for victory, the only blemish being Graeme Wood falling to Botham with the score on 13. From there, Willis destroyed Australia, running through Chappell (Trevor), Hughes and Yallop: 58-4. All of a sudden, Australia went from needing 74 with nine wickets in hand to needing 72 with just six wickets in hand. The momentum was turning in England’s favour. Once Old removed the usually stoic Allan Border for nought, Willis tore through the lower order, picking up John Dyson, Rod Marsh and Geoff Lawson to leave Australia reeling at 75-8, still 55 runs short of victory. The wheels had all but fallen off.

There was still some fight in the Australians yet, however. A partnership of 35 between Ray Bright and Dennis Lillee gave Australia hope once more, before a double breakthrough from Willis removed both the set batters and sealed a famous victory by 18 runs. Australia, having lost 55-9, had gone from an almost impregnable position to a pile of rubble: 111 all out. A ‘Nelson’ proving lucky for England in this case. Willis finished with 8-43 from his 15.1 overs in surely what must be the greatest ever bowling performance not to win a man-of-the-match award.

The verdict

Reflecting on cricket’s history, fast bowlers almost always seem (seam?) to come along in pairs. Or, in the case of the West Indies, in fours or fives or sixes. Bob Willis played a lone hand. I wonder what Willis’s fortunes might have been (and England’s) had he had a running mate, or a complementary partner for longer than the brief pairing of Willis and Botham.

Over the course of my research, I completely changed my tune on Bob Willis. The numbers surprised me, plus the narrative of his effectiveness, and his role in an iconic match swayed me. I know it’s only one game, but in the defining moment of his career Bob Willis found another gear to bowl his team to victory in the most unlikely of circumstances. Until 2021, cricketers didn’t get a Grand Final in Tests to provide a platform for a player to showcase their talent in a single winner-takes-all showdown. In this case, an Ashes Test is as close as cricketers in the 1980s got to playing a Grand Final.[1] And Willis delivered a commanding performance in his Grand Final in a fairytale-like comeback.

I now believe that Bob Willis was truly one of the great bowlers of his generation. He continued his legacy as a commentator and pundit. And in a testament to one of the ECB’s all-time XI, England’s County Championship is now named in honour of Bob Willis.

One long-term goal of the Top Order Podcast is to host an annual awards night for the crème-de-la-crème of international cricket, in an Oscars-style presentation of awards across several categories. Our original idea was to call the awards the ‘Wickies’, however we have been reliably informed that this name (or something very much like it) is already in use in the common lexicon. So, we shall settle instead for the ‘Toppies’. So, in 1981, the Toppie award for ‘Outstanding supporting performance in a Test match’ shall be awarded to Bob Willis.

In one word

Headingley

Notes

[1]  At least in Tests. Remember, the World Cup was two iterations old, but even with the introduction and dissolution of Packer’s World Series Cricket, there wasn’t the same diet of one-day cricket in the early 1980s that there is today.

https://www.espncricinfo.com/wisdenalmanack/content/story/152301.html

Bio

Record

Source: ESPN CricInfo

career peak

Source: ESPN CricInfo