Чак Флитвуд-Смит: Австралиялық крикетшінің трагедиялық тағдыры

Australian cricketer

Leslie O'Brien "Chuck" Fleetwood Smith (30 March 1908 – 16 March 1971) was a cricketer who played for Victoria and Australia. Known universally as "Chuck", he was the "wayward genius" of Australian cricket during the 1930s. A slow bowler who could spin the ball harder and further than his contemporaries, Fleetwood Smith was regarded as a rare talent, but his cricket suffered from a lack of self discipline that also characterised his personal life. In addition, his career coincided with those of Bill O'Reilly and Clarrie Grimmett, two spinners named in the ten inaugural members of the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame; as a result he played only ten Test matches but left a lasting impression with one delivery in particular. His dismissal of Wally Hammond in the fourth Test of the 1936–37 Ashes series has been compared to Shane Warne's ball of the century. He has the unwanted record of conceding the most runs by a bowler in a Test match innings. Holding little regard for the other disciplines of the game, batting and fielding, he attracted a lot of attention with his rare style of bowling: left arm wrist spin. Few bowlers of this type have appeared in senior cricket; certainly, Fleetwood Smith was the first such bowler to influence Australian cricket and play for the Test team. Fleetwood Smith was ambidextrous and could bowl with either arm during his youth. His choice of an unconventional bowling style reflected his reputation as an eccentric. After his playing days finished, Fleetwood Smith succumbed to alcoholism and spent many years homeless on the streets of Melbourne, sometimes sleeping rough a few hundred metres from the stadium where he played many of his best matches, the Melbourne Cricket Ground. His arrest in 1969 brought attention to his plight and a number of influential people rallied to his cause.

The third child of Fleetwood Smith and his wife Frances (née Swan), Fleetwood Smith was born at Stawell in the Northern Grampians area of western Victoria. The family was well known in the district for their long involvement with the local newspaper, and for Fleetwood Smith's association with the organising committee of the Stawell Gift. During his infancy, Fleetwood Smith was given the nickname "Chuck", a contraction of the polo term "chukka". The team won the Victorian Public Schools premiership in 1924, but Fleetwood Smith left the school soon after. It is believed that he was expelled, although the school records are incomplete and do not mention this. Fleetwood Smith, and fellow Old Xaverians, Leo O'Brien, Stuart King and Joe Plant later represented Victoria v South Australia in a Sheffield Shield match at the MCG in February 1933. Returning to Stawell, where his family had relocated a year earlier, Fleetwood Smith completed his education locally and turned out for the Stawell cricket team in the Wimmera league. In three seasons from 1927 to 1928, he captured 317 wickets for Stawell and took seven wickets in a representative match, playing for the Country Colts against the City Colts. He came to the attention of cricket clubs in Melbourne while representing the league in a Country Week tournament. Around this time, his father decided to combine his first and last names, and the family styled themselves as Fleetwood Smith.

Fleetwood Smith moved to Melbourne to play with St Kilda in the district cricket competition for the 1930–31 season. It was a challenging choice for a young bowler as the team possessed an outstanding spin attack—Test bowlers Bert Ironmonger and Don Blackie were members of the club. The remainder of the summer was meteoric for Fleetwood Smith. He made his first class debut against Tasmania and captured ten wickets; in his first international against the touring South Africans he returned 6/80 in the first innings; and on his Sheffield Shield debut, he took 11 wickets for the match against South Australia. He led the first class bowling averages for Victoria and capped the season by playing in St Kilda's premiership team. In the winter of 1932, Fleetwood Smith joined a private tour of the United States and Canada, organised by the former Test spin bowler Arthur Mailey. Playing 51 matches, he totalled 249 wickets at an average of less than eight runs each as his unique style bewildered the local batsmen. his bowling received rough treatment from Don Bradman in a match against New South Wales. In the tour match against England that followed, Wally Hammond was given specific instructions to attack the inexperienced Fleetwood Smith and remove him from consideration for the Test matches, which he accomplished during an innings of 203. The England manager, Plum Warner, later wrote that too much attention was given to this performance and he was sanguine about Fleetwood Smith's potential as a Test bowler. Despite Grimmett's absence from the Australian team—he was dropped after the third Test—the Australian selectors opted not to gamble by choosing Fleetwood Smith. Instead, they called on the all rounders Ernie Bromley and "Perka" Lee. The following season, Fleetwood Smith transferred from St Kilda to the Melbourne club as they had found him employment. He collected 41 wickets for Victoria in seven matches, with a best match return of 12/158 against South Australia. Against Sussex, Northants and HDG Leveson Gower's XI, he took ten wickets for the match. In the latter game, he bowled an inspired spell to Maurice Leyland, the most prolific English batsman of the Test series. Leyland had great success in dealing with O'Reilly and Grimmett, but could not fathom Fleetwood Smith's various deliveries. During the 1934–35 season, Fleetwood Smith set a new Sheffield Shield record of 60 wickets in six matches, which remained until Colin Miller claimed 67 wickets in 11 matches in 1997–98. He dominated Victoria's bowling—the next best was Ernie McCormick with 22 wickets—as the team won the Sheffield Shield. In the match that effectively decided the title, Fleetwood Smith took 15 wickets against a New South Wales team that included nine Test players. He guided the Melbourne club to the premiership in the district competition with seven wickets in the final against Collingwood. Chosen to tour South Africa during the following summer, he made his belated Test debut in the opening match of the series at Durban. Taking the wicket of Ken Viljoen in his first over, Fleetwood Smith finished the match with five wickets. He played the next two Tests (for four wickets), but injured his hand while fielding his own bowling in a tour match against Border. This forced him out of the remaining matches on the tour and caused him problems in the forthcoming months.

Following his return to Australia, Fleetwood Smith had surgery to a tendon in his finger and missed the early stages of the 1936–37 season. Grimmett, now considered by the selectors to be too old for Test cricket, was not selected during the series. Therefore, Fleetwood Smith recorded career best figures at an opportune time. Playing against Queensland he captured 7/17 and 8/79, then secured his selection for the Test team with a five wicket haul against New South Wales. In the third Test at Melbourne, he contributed to Australia's victory with a valuable innings as a nightwatchman and 5/124 in England's second innings as they were bowled out for 323, chasing a victory target of 689 runs. Immediately after the match, Fleetwood Smith, O'Reilly, Leo O'Brien and Stan McCabe were summoned to appear before four of Australia's leading cricket administrators, who read a prepared statement accusing the team of excessive drinking, inattention to fitness and disloyalty to the captain. The meeting ended in confusion when the four players were told that they were not being held responsible for the matters raised. This incident has been the subject of conjecture for many years. It is often interpreted as an illustration of a sectarian divide in Australian cricket during the period. Fleetwood Smith attended Xavier (a Roman Catholic school) with O'Brien, while McCabe and O'Reilly were raised as Catholics in rural New South Wales; at least two of the administrators present were members of Masonic lodges. Several of the senior players wanted McCabe as captain in place of Bradman, whose relationship with O'Reilly was strained. However, Fleetwood Smith's presence is puzzling as he missed the first two Tests, to which the administrators specifically referred. Greg Growden, his biographer, records that Fleetwood Smith had an unlikely friendship with Bradman (in that the two men were of opposite personalities), which later cooled after an unknown disagreement not associated with this incident. Fleetwood Smith took four wickets in England's first innings of the fourth Test at Adelaide. Set a target of 392 runs to win, England reached 3/148 in their second innings by stumps on the fifth day, with their leading batsman Wally Hammond 39 not out and the match evenly poised. At the beginning of the last day's play, Bradman gave Fleetwood Smith the ball and told him, simply, that the fate of the match was in his hands. Before Hammond could add to his overnight score, Fleetwood Smith delivered a perfectly flighted off break that drew Hammond forward as it curved away in the air. It then pitched and spun in the opposite direction to its trajectory, went between Hammond's bat and pad, and bowled him. The rest of the English batting fell for the addition of only 94 runs as Fleetwood Smith advanced his figures to 6/110, giving him ten wickets for the match. Australia had levelled the series at two all. Neville Cardus wrote:
Australia would have lost at Adelaide but for Fleetwood Smith. Chuck took four years to gain revenge. He was suddenly visited by genius. Moreover he sucked the sweet blood of vengeance against Hammond. A lovely ball lured Hammond forward, broke at the critical length, evaded the bat and bowled England's pivot and main hope This achievement set a crown on the most skilful artistic spin bowler of the day. O'Reilly described it as the best delivery he ever witnessed in a Test match. Bradman wrote, "If ever the result of a Test match can be said to have been decided by a single ball, this was the occasion." However, he played in every Test of the series for the only time in his career. His seven wickets in the fourth Test at Leeds gave crucial support to O'Reilly, whose 10/122 was the key factor in the victory that enabled Australia to retain The Ashes. In the final match of the series at The Oval, England went in first on a pitch ideal for batting and made a record total of 7/903, with their opening batsman Len Hutton making 364 to break Bradman's Ashes record score. England won by the overwhelming margin of an innings and 579 runs. Fleetwood Smith conceded a world record of 298 runs in his 87 overs, for the wicket of Wally Hammond. By contrast, O'Reilly's 85 overs cost him 178 runs. This had a dramatic impact on his average. Before the match it was 31.02; after, it was 37.38. Therefore, he rarely engaged in an extended strategic battle with a batsman in the manner of Grimmett or O'Reilly. The danger to the batsman lay in his unpredictability; he bowled all of his variations with no discernible change to his bowling action and needed no help from the pitch to extract turn. Bradman summarised:

On 28 February 1935, Fleetwood Smith married Mary "Mollie" Elliott at St Mary's Catholic Church in East St Kilda. The wedding was a society event widely covered by the newspapers. Her family was well known in Melbourne for owning a prosperous soft drink business; her father was an alderman of the city. After less than a year's service, he was given a medical discharge in February 1941. Fleetwood Smith married Beatrix Collins (the sister of a teammate at Melbourne) at a registry office on 9 July 1948. He worked intermittently at menial jobs and his drinking increased; his second marriage also failed. His arrest for vagrancy and theft in March 1969 was widely covered by the media. Appalled by his circumstance, a number of influential friends from his cricketing days, such as the former Australian Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies, aided him by organising him legal assistance. The hearing was later adjourned, and he reconciled with his wife Bea after committing to remain sober. They lived together again for the last years of his life. However, the years of homelessness left him in poor health, and he died from cancer at St Vincent's Hospital in Fitzroy a fortnight before his 63rd birthday.