With its oldest and newest forms seemingly competing against one another, and the other looking lonely and lost, cricket is a sport facing big challenges. Against this backdrop, and in the lead-up to the Boxing Day Test, The Age today begins a series of seven profiles with people who have played and loved the game, telling their stories and pursuing a common theme: what is the State Of Play? Opening the batting, we talk to Australia's oldest living Test cricketer, Arthur Morris.

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ARTHUR Morris is nearly 90, Australia's oldest living Test cricketer, one of only two surviving Invincibles and has not hit a ball in earnest for more than half a century, but his legend still precedes him. One day last week, in a shopping mall near the retirement village outside Gosford where he lives, Father Christmas spotted him, promptly set down a child from his lap and rushed to introduce himself. "Santa remembered me," Morris said.



Notwithstanding a few creaky bones, Morris and his wife Judith still get to the Sydney Test each year. Otherwise, he watches cricket on television, which he says is a boon. "For older people, television is superb," he said. "If only you can get rid of all those dots and lines on the screen, it is better than at the ground." He suspects that there are many like him, and that it is not that Test cricket has lost traction with the Australian public, but that televised cricket has gained it.



But he also blames television for excessive and crass showmanship: batsmen whirling their arms as they walk out, for instance, or bowlers celebrating wickets as if each was Armistice Day.

Morris sees it as immodesty. "The American influence, and particularly colour television: television people expect you to to show great emotion," he said. "Even ordinary people hug now when they say hello. It never occurred to us. My captain in grade cricket was Bill O'Reilly. If I'd put my arm around him, I wouldn't have played cricket again!"



Then or now, no-one ever has accused Morris of ill manners. "Few more charming men have played for Australia," wrote English author EW Swanton, "and I cannot name one who was more popular with his opponents." Affirmed John Arlott: "One of the best liked cricketers of all time — charming, philosophical and relaxed."



He still is. The Sunday Age was met with hearty sandwiches and a glass of lunchtime cheer. He was puzzling over modern batting technique, specifically the universal habit of plunging forward. "When you put your weight on the front foot, unless you're very agile, there's not much you can do after that," he said. "You can't pull or cut properly. You can't work the ball. And you're losing over a metre of watching the ball." This, he said, was evident in Hobart.



He said few were or are nimble-footed enough to play off both feet: Don Bradman in his time, Ricky Ponting in ours. He would retain Ponting until another makes an irresistible case to replace him.



He acknowledges that Matthew Hayden was predominantly a front-foot player. "I still think that he had he played back, worked with his strength and style, he would have got even more runs than he did," said Morris. "But he was a very big boy. You see, we're all a bit different. Hayden's tall and he plays differently from smaller men. You've got to allow for that, as long as you've got the fundamentals."



Coaches have to know when to leave well alone, Morris said. Once, Bradman said to him: "I don't know what you're doing, but keep doing it." "Good coaching instruction!" said Morris.



Matched against men from the age of 12, Morris had to learn to play off the back foot instinctively. The rules, written and unwritten, were different. In Test cricket, he fought a famous and long-running duel with Alec Bedser, who attacked him relentlessly on leg stump, with leg slips hovering. By way of retort, Morris once took guard 15cm outside leg stump.



One day, playing for NSW against Victoria, he was met with six men on the leg side and the wicketkeeper shuffling that way, too. This was a plot of his Test confreres Lindsay Hassett and Keith Miller. Miller bowled him six bouncers in a row. He hooked the first five for four and played a leap-smash to the last, sending it back down the ground for three.



Morris, whose bat and technique were his only defences, said that he was never hit in the head. But he remembered a day when Richie Benaud was, necessitating micro-surgery. Laughing about it with Benaud recently, he said: "Today, you'd have worn a helmet and bonked it for a couple!"



Morris's provenance was classically Australian. He was born in Bondi, but grew up in rural Dungog, later famous as Doug Walters' hometown. He played all sports, including rugby league to a high standard and tennis into his 70s. At golf, he said, "it would have been better if they threw the ball at me". Cricket enthralled him. "I got a love of chasing balls," he said. It stays with him.



At eight, in bare feet, he met Bradman, already a superstar. Morris laughs still to think that 18 years later, they would create so much Australian cricket legacy together.



Morris debuted for NSW at 18, using a bat borrowed from his club, St George. He made a hundred in each innings, whereupon local MP Doc Evatt, later to lead the Labour Party, dispatched him to Stan McCabe's sports shop to get a bat of his own. World War Two intervened, postponing his Test debut by six prime batting years. "They were lost years," he said. "But a lot of people lost their lives."



He joined the army and served in New Guinea, but as a single man was among the last to be repatriated at war's end, and so missed a tour of New Zealand. He has happy alternate memories of sharing Cuban cigars with the American rearguard and burying one box in the ground in a highlands station, thinking he would be back. He presumes it is still there.



Morris made his mark on the immortal 1948 tour of England, outscoring Bradman and sharing with him 301 of the 3/404 that delivered Australia a famous last-day win at Headingley. Morris said it helped that England captain Norman Yardley, believing his team's position impregnable, kept the field up, which meant Morris hit 20 fours in his first 100. "Once it got through, it was four 'penneth," he said. Still, victory came almost as much of a shock to Australia as England.



Morris did not celebrate with the team: he and Ian Johnson caught a train that evening to London to watch the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. But he recalls hearing that the next morning, playing Derbyshire, the suddenly poorly co-ordinated Bill Johnston reached for a catch with one hand, only for it to stick in the other! Not everything was different.



Morris was at the other end in the next Test, at The Oval, when Bradman, in his last innings, made Test cricket's most famous duck. "He got two very good balls," he said. Morris made 196, an innings so overshadowed by Bradman's 0 that years later, Morris lunched with a business acquaintance who was surprised to discover that Morris even was there, let alone at the other end. Morris says he has few images of himself at play, and they are mostly from behind, as the non-striker!



Morris was a stylist, initially criticised as "loose", fearless against quick bowling, but prepared also to loft spinners. He can tell you without false modesty that in the first 100 years of Anglo-Australian cricket, he is second only to Bradman for centuries made. He can also tell his 79-minute 100 against Queensland one day at the SCG is a pre-lunch record, nudging out Bradman by two minutes! The match finished soon afterwards, so he went back to work!



Upon Bradman's retirement, Morris became vice-captain and, momentarily, captain. He retired at 33 because his first wife, Valerie, an English dancer, was dying of breast cancer. He served on the SCG Trust for 22 years, and in 2000 was named in Australia's team of the century. "The acme of elegance," wrote Gideon Haigh in cricinfo's tribute, "and the epitome of sportsmanship."



Asked once what he had gained from cricket, Morris replied: "Poverty!" It was a quip, not a complaint; it is not in his nature to be bitter. "The cricket board in those days didn't pay as much," he said. "But they gave us enough. We stopped in the best hotels." He remembers that even at the Windsor in Melbourne, bathrooms were shared. He insists on his own now!



Simply, it was another time. Sectarianism still was rife: Morris swapped Sydney clubs to demonstrate solidarity with O'Reilly and Ray Lindwall. Niceties mattered: Morris once sacrificed himself on 99 to avoid running out 17-year-old Ian Craig on debut. Formalities were observed. Morris remembers that Harold Larwood, a regular guest at Trust luncheons after migrating to Australia, invariably referred to Bodyline captain as Mr Jardine.



Sledging was minimal, impersonal and such as it was, spontaneous. Morris remembers non-striker Lindsay Hassett in England in 1953 intoning as suspect spinner Tony Lock delivered: "Strike one ... strike two ..." He remembers O'Reilly "doing his block" a few times. "Someone once asked him if he'd ever run a bloke out at the bowler's end," Morris said. "He said he'd never seen a batsman who was that keen to get down to face him!"



Morris puzzles over aspects of the game's evolution, outlawing runners, for instance. "Who would think that one up?" he asked. "And why do they keep changing the terms? I always think of batsman. Now they tell me they're batters. Batter is something you put on fish. Little things like that irritate me. It's passed leg stump, not 'the' leg stump. They all talk like Yorkshiremen. And it does amuse me that a fast bowler can have a drink out on the ground. Really, that's a bit much."



He is concerned about the game's moral fibre. "It's an unusual game in its sportsmanship," he said. "It's the things you don't do. You don't run a bloke out at the bowler's end, for instance." He remembers Denis Compton staggering out of his crease after being hit by a bouncer, and how Hassett merely rolled the ball back to the bowler. "Today, they'd probably push him out of his crease and take the bails off," he said. "Then send it up to the third umpire."



Morris believes Test cricket still provides "marvellous entertainment". He does not doubt that he could have played short-form cricket, since he was naturally aggressive. But he wonders if it would have excited him. Fifty-over cricket, he thought, restricted bowlers unfairly. As for T20, he would watch it "as long as it didn't clash with The Bold and the Beautiful."



"It's just swinging from the backside. If the public enjoy it, I'm all for it. But don't sacrifice the game."

Morris chuckles constantly. He wonders whether, for all their luxuries, modern players truly enjoy cricket. He recalls taking Larwood to meet Geoff Boycott in the SCG nets. "You enjoying yourself out here?" Larwood asked. Replied Boycott: "I didn't come out here to enjoy myself, Harold. I came out to play cricket."

Arthur Morris. Credit:Natalie Grono

Tomorrow: rising star Meg Lanning.