Dogs of Warr

When twenty-three-year-old Cambridge fast bowler John Warr arrived in Sydney with Freddie Brown’s MCC side of 1950-51, a Sydney wharf labourer hailed him. ‘Hey Warr, he shouted, ‘you’ve got as much chance of taking a test wicket on this tour as I have of pushing a pound of butter up a parrot's arse with a hot needle.' The labourer was wrong. Warr took exactly one, for 281 runs. Mind you, it was a close run thing: the umpire looked like giving Ian Johnson not out when he nicked to Godfrey Evans at Adelaide Oval, before Johnson decided he could not ignore the pitiable sag of Warr’s shoulders.

This summer, the parrot and butter standard faces another test, from Jimmy Anderson. His figures were one for 280 today when he managed to dismiss Glenn McGrath, and halve his average. The haircut is the same as four years ago; perhaps in recuperating from he stress fractures that kept him out of the last English season, he has lost the whip that gave him pace and away swing. Pitches with bounce but without pace have led him to bowl too short – a costly error. He is in danger of becoming a cipher in this series, if indeed he bowls again. It is a bad sign when a bowler’s presence reminds you of another’s absence, as Anderson’s does Simon Jones with every innocuous over.

Warr famously never had difficulty recalling his Test figures, able to rely on his memory of Hymn #281: ‘Art thou weary, art thou languid/Art thou sore distressed?/
“Come to Me,” saith One/“And coming, Be at rest”.’ Anderson can draw inspiration at the moment of Hymn #140: ‘Great is thy faithfulness.’ He’s going to need it.