Ilyas Khan does not remember the year but he knows it was some time in the mid-to-late 1970s. He was a teenager, a shy boy of Kashmiri heritage, born and raised amid the Lancashire mill towns, a habitual victim of casual racist abuse, a kid who loved cricket.
Now and then, he would go to watch the indoor winter nets sessions held at a local leisure centre by Accrington Cricket Club, one of the teams in the famed Lancashire League, which attracted international stars in those days, both as coaches and players.
It cost 50p or a pound each week for subscriptions. ‘My family didn’t have two pennies to rub together,’ says Khan, who went on to own Accrington Stanley Football Club and is a respected multi-millionaire technologist and philanthropist. The players were usually all white boys anyway. Asian kids rarely featured. It was an intimidating culture for a boy like Khan. He hung around the margins, watching the players practise.
‘One evening, I was peering through the netting as usual,’ Khan says, ‘and David Lloyd saw me. He was already a legend. He’d scored a double century for England. He called over and said, “Come and have a go”.
‘He was putting on coaching sessions then and I told him I couldn’t afford it. He said, “Don’t worry about that”. I was still unsure. He said, “Come on, pad up”. It happened twice. That welcome that Bumble gave me, it made a massive impression on me.
David ‘Bumble’ Lloyd throughout his career has helped raise the profile of English cricket
Since retiring from coaching, he has become one of the sport’s most renowned broadcasters
At his home in Yorkshire, the 76-year-old has made a cricket ground with a full working wicket
‘To me, Bumble was the one who made everything good. That was a time when skinhead gangs used to roam around. He was a beacon of light for me. I was a victim of racist abuse every day but on those evenings in the nets, I was just a little boy playing cricket.’
Half a century on — half a century of Bumble being an evangelist for cricket, of drawing people into the game, of spreading the joy of the game — he smiles at the mention of Ilyas when I recall the story one day over breakfast during the third Test earlier this month.
It is 9am on the second day at Headingley and Bumble is sitting outside the Ugly Mugs Cafe opposite the ground. He has got a plate of fried egg, bacon and sausage in front of him. ‘Good start to the day, this,’ he says.
He points out that Ilyas repaid that small act of kindness later in his life many, many times over by stepping in with a hefty financial donation to rescue the cricket club when it was in trouble. Ilyas rescued Stanley, too. He took what Bumble had done for him and he paid it forward.
Inside the cafe, on the menu on the wall, one of the dishes is called after Lloyd’s nickname. In the 1950s, the comedian Michael Bentine created a show called The Bumblies, about three little aliens from the planet Bumble who land on Earth to learn about Earth children and their games.
The players in the Lancashire dressing room thought the characters resembled Lloyd and the name stuck. So on the menu, there is Bumble’s Bap: three sausages, three rashers of bacon, and an egg. There is a Tuffers Sarnie, too, although it is not as substantial.
At his table, Bumble is chatting about the day ahead and what the pitch may hold in store. Anyone who loves cricket — and a lot of people who don’t — could listen to him all day, even if it’s just sitting here at a rickety table on a pavement in a Leeds suburb.
‘Get a bat and hit it on the pitch,’ he says, his voice low and rich and sonorous as if he is letting you in to a secret, taking you into his confidence, his enthusiasm rising with every word, ‘and at a club ground it goes “bom, bom, bom”.’
Lloyd got his ‘Bumble’ nickname after players in the Lancashire dressing room thought he resembled characters out of a television show. It followed him well beyond his days as a player
Whenever Lloyd is at cricket games, supporters clamber over to get pictures and speak to him
Lloyd began his presenting career as a cricket commentator after he quit as ex-England coach
Now his voice quickens. It is as if he is back on Sky again, a master of his art. ‘But hit a bat on a Test pitch,’ he says, ‘and it goes “bang, bang, bang” because it’s that hard. It won’t be easy for the batters today. The pitch will get faster.’ He’s right: 11 wickets fall that day.
He gets up to walk over to the press box and begin his day’s work with Mail Sport. A couple of people scrape back their chairs from neighbouring tables and ask for selfies and he chats and smiles with them and talks about England’s chances of fighting their way back into the series.
He spots Mark Wood and Chris Woakes, soon to become England’s latest Headingley heroes, as they wander past on the other side of the road on their way to the changing rooms, and applauds them. The other diners applaud, too, and Wood and Woakes give a wave.
A woman, who has had her back to us but has been listening to the conversation about the pitch and the Lancashire League and has heard the knowledge and the warmth pouring out of Lloyd, looks up as he is leaving. ‘We miss you, Bumble,’ she says.
Everybody tells him that. Wherever he goes. Everybody wishes he were still part of Sky’s brilliant cricket coverage with Michael Atherton, Nasser Hussain and Ian Ward, colleagues who had become dear friends. And even though it is lovely to hear, it twists at his insides, too.
It is more than 18 months since Lloyd’s world changed when his name was mentioned by former Yorkshire cricketer Azeem Rafiq at a DCMS select committee hearing into the racism scandal that had engulfed the county and which continues to reverberate around the game now.
Rafiq, whose career at Yorkshire had been blighted by institutional racism, was under pressure to name names. Lloyd had swapped a few direct messages on Twitter with an account called Cricket Badger, run by a journalist called James Buttler, who Lloyd had never met. Lloyd had repeated stories he had been told about Rafiq’s personal life and had suggested it was difficult to integrate Asian cricketers into some local clubs because they were alienated by the drinking culture that dominates much of English sport.
Lloyd was named by Azeem Rafiq at a DCMS select committee hearing into the racism scandal
Lloyd had repeated stories he had been told about Rafiq’s personal life to a journalist and had suggested it was difficult to integrate Asian cricketers into some local clubs because they were alienated by the drinking culture. Pictured: Rafiq addressing the House of Commons
He had also suggested that ‘getting subs out of Asian cricketers is like getting blood out of a stone’. Cricket Badger told Rafiq about the conversations and Rafiq repeated them in front of the DCMS committee. He talked about ‘closet racists’ within the game. Sometimes, the wronged, on their mission to put things right, hurt good people on their journey. The die was cast.
Lloyd phoned Rafiq immediately and apologised. He released a statement and also apologised to the wider Asian cricketing community. A month later, it was announced he was retiring from Sky Sports, where he had worked for 22 years as a much-adored commentator.
The job, and the fact he had been an England player, England coach and an umpire as well as a brilliant analyst and a natural, instinctive broadcaster had turned him into a national treasure. ‘I’ve decided the time is right to pass on the microphone,’ his statement said.
The Lancashire-born cricket icon would later leave his role as a Sky Sports commentator
Amid the many, many tributes that flooded in, there was this from Rob Key, now England’s director of cricket. ‘What a sad day,’ he wrote. ‘The best person I know, by some distance as well. Love always, Bumble. No one does it better.’
We walk from the cafe along into Headingley. Bumble stops again and again for fans to take selfies. Australia fans stop and talk to him, too. He’ll talk to anyone. That hasn’t changed. Eventually, we get up to the media canteen and sit down in a quiet corner and talk about what happened.
‘After the DCMS hearing,’ Lloyd says, ‘I rang Azeem and apologised and we had a good conversation. As far as I was concerned — and I think he has said the same — we were fine. Azeem had a grievance and it wasn’t dealt with by his employers. The top people at Yorkshire were incompetent at dealing with his grievance and it escalated to a position where he had nowhere else to go.
‘The comment I made about getting blood out of a stone was stupid. I think there are issues about raising money for clubs through the bar but there are other ways to generate finance because we are a multi-racial country and we should be able to find a solution to the support a club needs to keep going. That shouldn’t be too hard.
‘I don’t bear any bitterness towards Azeem. None at all. I think some of the MPs on the DCMS committee were a bunch of chancers and grandstanders. Where is Julian Knight now? I think we know. Where is John Nicolson now? They were looking for a fall guy and I dropped straight into their lap.’
When Lloyd announced his retirement, he was 74. The end of a job that he had given so much of his life to and which had become wrapped up with his identity, which he loved and which he knew he had been good at, was desperately hard for him to come to terms with.
‘I was in a complete whirl,’ Lloyd says. ‘I felt unbelievably isolated. My wife and I were moving house to North Yorkshire. The house was being done up and the builders were in and are mates and they could see there was a problem and I just immersed myself in the move. That’s how I try to deal with things. Any problem, just as soon as you wake up, work, work, work. Just never stop until you go to bed and that’s how I dealt with it.
‘I was lucky that it needed a hell of a lot of work. I got stuck in and that saved me because I would have done something stupid.
‘My self-esteem was absolutely dreadful. I wouldn’t answer the phone to anybody, even people like Atherton, who was ringing constantly. He wanted to come and see me and I said no. I just locked myself away. I didn’t engage with anybody.
‘My life was upside down and in turmoil. I have put a veneer on it when I’ve been hurting inside like you wouldn’t believe.
It was desperately hard for Lloyd to come to terms with his retirement from commentary
Lloyd (right) was previously a coach for the England team during a spell from 1995 to 1999
‘I come back to Accrington. I am very comfortable with who I am. No worries at all. I don’t need anybody to tell me who I am. I’m a decent bloke. I know that. Because I have been brought up properly. And I know it’s a bit big-headed, but I could do it.
‘Going back to my dad, who was a lay preacher, he always said “just be yourself”. What you see is what you get. I’m not a fine-dining sort of bloke. End of play, have a curry, couple of pints, see you tomorrow, pretty basic.
‘I’ve been in a hell of a tunnel. In my life, I have never had any resentment with anyone and I’m getting back to that state again now. I’ve had one or two rows with Geoffrey Boycott in the past but I absolutely love him to bits.
He has been a great standard bearer for English cricket because of the way he played and the way he commentated. I have had some flipping rows with Boycs because of who he is but it doesn’t last. I have been in a big tunnel but I am out of it.’
And so we talk about happy things because there are so many happy things in his life and because he spreads, still, so much joy throughout the game and through the force of his personality and because he has achieved so much and has so much still to achieve.
You only need to say ‘Bumble’ and people who love sport smile. It is a precious gift. ‘I never walked away from a dinner with Bumble not feeling better about the world,’ Atherton told me recently.
‘I had so many wonderful times at Sky,’ Bumble says. ‘In earlier days, Bob Willis and Paul Allott were my best mates. That was the last of the summer wine. We’d go on steam train trips to north Wales. We were inseparable. When they left, the younger lads came in — Nasser, Atherton, Ward.
And again, we were inseparable. I worked with David Gower and Ian Botham and they did their own thing, which was fine. I had a great working relationship with Bryan Henderson and Mark Lynch was a massive influence as a director. The whole production team was pushing all the time, young people with lots of energy and that rubs off on you.
‘It was a massive blow to me when Bob died. The most affectionate bloke you could ever come across, as a true mate. A very caring chap. The England lads hated him until they met him because he could be very critical with his dour act which he took over from a former England player and journalist, Robin Marlar, who was known as “Marlar the Snarler”. He’d do a hatchet job on everybody. Bob took that mantle on.
‘He was mortified once because he had to write a letter of apology to Chris Woakes for giving him 0 out of 10 for one performance because “you don’t get a point for turning up” and Woakes is the nicest fella you could ever wish to meet. I miss Bob every day.
‘There are so many cricket broadcasters I admire. Nowadays, I’d say Ian Bishop and Simon Doull. Atherton and Hussain are a cut above. Ian Ward is a fabulous presenter. Mel Jones, too. She is the real deal, a great voice. Ebony Rainford-Brent is excellent.
Lloyd admits that there are so many wonderful broadcasters in cricket that he admires
‘I worked for TMS for 11 years before I worked for Sky and Jonathan Agnew is a fabulous broadcaster. I like Simon Mann’s understated style. And I was driving home earlier in the series, listening to an excellent passage of commentary from Daniel Norcross. I tapped him on the shoulder in the lunch queue the next day to tell him how much I’d enjoyed it.
‘Further back, Fred Trueman is one of my all-time heroes. He was a curmudgeon and of course no one ever bowled as fast but he was a brilliant broadcaster. Geoffrey was a box-office listen. You have to listen. You don’t have to agree. Tony Cozier, CMJ, Jim Maxwell and my all-time hero, Bill Lawry.
‘I admired Lawry’s enthusiasm, his one-eyedness, his passion for Australian cricket, inflexions in his voice, he gets the big moments. You can do all your little stories and your pastimes but don’t miss the big moments. He nailed it every time.
‘He had a great rapport with Richie Benaud and Tony Greig. You saw that with Michael Holding and Ravi Shastri and Sunil Gavaskar. You get familiar with each other and you bounce off. You just have that telepathy.
‘It’s like opening the batting. You don’t call. You just look and go. As a duo, you knew “he’s done, I’m in” or “he’s done and so am I”. And just let it go. It’s an English thing that less is more.
‘We were always told at Sky, “less is more, shut up”. Dan Maskell and Peter Alliss, two of the all-time greats of British sports commentary, let the pictures tell the story. Sometimes, you have to have the judgment to think, “I’ve nothing to add to the pictures”.
Nasser Hussain is one of the broadcasters and cricket commentators Lloyd enjoys listening to
‘Back in my TMS days, I was nobody and I asked the show’s legendary producer, Peter Baxter, why he used me. He said my voice was perfect. And that has stood me in good stead, the tenor of my voice. It’s quite deep. If you’ve got enthusiasm, your inflexions will take you up and down and you can’t just be monotonal. And you always start down because if you don’t, there’s nowhere to go.’
Perhaps, for a while, Bumble felt he had nowhere to go, too. But he’s past that. He is a hugely valued contributor to Mail Sport, he does a few appearances for talkSPORT without payment, because ‘they’re a fantastic bunch’.
‘When I go on with Ally McCoist and Alan Brazil and Laura Woods, when she was there, it’s just a brilliant lift,’ he says. ‘It’s good fun.
‘I need to work. Cricket’s second nature. I’ll go and watch Lancashire women against Yorkshire women.
‘I went to watch Lancashire Seconds and Yorkshire Seconds. I do Lancashire TV, which is like going home.
‘Just to walk into Old Trafford… I’ll be able to do more work from May next year. I’ll be 77 then but I’m not 77. I’m in my 50s, probably. I want to get back to doing more.’
Until then, he has plenty to occupy him, watching Earth children and their games.
Now, he works as a contributor to Mail Sport and also enjoys appearing on other sports shows
At the home he and his wife have now moved into, north of York, he has even created his own Field of Dreams.
‘I’ve got a few acres,’ Bumble says, ‘and I have got machines. I could go four and a half hours on a tractor and I love it.
‘Switch off, tending to fields. One of the fields, I have made into a cricket ground, I have put a pitch in the middle and a scoreboard and cut the grass.
‘You can’t play on it. It’s just a spoof pitch. You’d need ambulances everywhere if you had a match on it but it’s a big field and we’ve put stumps in and I cut it every day.’
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