Fast and furious - Fiery Fred still bowls them over

The great fast bowler shakes his head at the pace of change as he stares down from the 25th floor of the Mandarin Hotel in Central, hoping to recognise what he used to know as the Hong Kong Cricket Club - until it became Chater Garden in 1977. Freddy Trueman will no doubt be just as baffled today when he sees the intricacies of cricket simplified into the Hong Kong Sixes at the Kowloon Cricket Club. The famously outspoken former player and commentator says he appreciates that the sixes format is crucial to introducing China to the game he loves, particularly the Asian Cricket Sixes Tour, organised by local players Mark Burns and Brad Tarr for club cricketers around the continent. However, as arguably the best English fast bowler and the first in the world to claim 300 Test scalps, Trueman expects little joy in watching bowlers toil on synthetic wickets that give all the advantage to crowd-pleasing batsmen. 'It's not my type of cricket, but it might get people interested,' says Trueman. Still, the trip to Hong Kong is a good chance to promote his new memoir, As It Was (Macmillan), and watch some of the game's emerging talent. 'There's a boy who's playing here, Mathew Maynard. Why he hasn't been in the England side playing 40 or 50 Test matches I'll never know. Where has he been? Some other people seem to able to walk into the side. 'Like Graham Thorpe. Fine player, Graham. But he didn't want to play for four years. Then he made his mind up and he came back. 'When I played, if you didn't want to take part, you were told, 'Well, get lost'. The highest honour you can have is be asked to play cricket for England and wear the three lions on your chest, for my taste.' The political intrigue of cricket selection is a recurring theme in As It Was. Trueman estimates that he has written 14 books, on everything from straight statistics to the best walks in the Yorkshire Dales, where he lives in a village of 22 people. As It Was is a legacy for young players who need to know what it was like to leave a secure life in a Yorkshire mining district to pursue an uncertain career in a game run by lesser players with blue blood and Oxbridge educations. Trueman says his willingness to speak his mind and his working-class roots cost him a spot in 30 Tests and at least 100 international wickets. 'I certainly would have been the first man to pass 400 wickets,' he says. But at least he was able to find a living afterwards, unlike his great friend and bowling partner Brian Statham, who as elderly man in the late 1980s 'couldn't even find the money to buy a newspaper'. 'I came in at the back of the era when there were professionals and gentlemen,' says Trueman. 'You were treated like a little boy. Professional cricketers were not supposed to answer back. That was the kind of attitude that you had to put up with all the time. That's why I called the book As It Was, because a lot of the young cricketers today would never believe it happened. It did. 'Even in the early part of my career in the late '40s coming into the early '50s, there were still two dressing rooms,' he says. 'Amateurs in one room and professionals in the other.' One of the main targets of the book is Sir Len Hutton, England's finest batsman and its first professional captain. According to Trueman, Hutton was a conservative man who conspired to keep him out of the last 15 Tests he captained. 'Hutton said his biggest mistake was not taking me to Australia in 1954-55. He said that. He admitted it later,' Trueman says. 'Leonard was the greatest batsman I ever saw. Make no mistake about that. But you ask all cricketers and you'll find out that 99 and nine 10ths per cent of world-class batsmen are selfish.' Trueman seems to be only half joking when he suggests that the title he would have preferred for the book was The Best Bloody English Fast Bowler That Ever Drew Bloody Breath. In between quotes from Euripides and Voltaire, as well as allusions to Franz Kafka and a suggested improvement to one of the poet Philip Larkin's lines, Trueman takes aim at the officials, players, spectators, waiters and hotel staff who falsely accused him of being a troublemaker in the past 55 years. Even today he says he has to 'restrain myself from thumping somebody in the gob' when people write him off as hell raiser. Trueman say he no longer smokes his famous pipe, has only a glass of wine with dinner and insists that his wife accompany him when he travels abroad for speaking engagements. His claim to have always lived cleanly is supported by his bullishly healthy appearance. At 73, Trueman could shave 15 years off his birth certificate without raising an eyebrow. But as recently as 2002, he was signing books after a sporting dinner when a man introduced himself as the son of publican whose bar was across the road from the Bramall Lane ground. According to As It Was, the man told Trueman that his father remembered him entering the pub during the lunch interval to down eight pints and take one glass to mark his run-up. The next autograph hunter assured Trueman he knew the first man was wrong. ''I know it were rubbish,' he continued, 'cos I know you used t' spend t' lunch interval having three women on t' go in different rooms in t' pavilion!'' The book is light on observations about the modern game. Since the BBC dropped him three years ago in a push for younger listeners, Trueman says he watches little cricket. He is surprised when told that Australia's Glen McGrath and Jason Gillespie last month passed he and Statham to move into fourth on the list of prolific opening bowling combinations in Tests. 'Don't compare them to Brian Statham, because they're not in the same class,' he snaps. Trueman says he would fail to recognise a single Australian player if the team walked through the door. 'People keep saying to me that this [Australian XI] is the best side ever, which is a load of rubbish. There's no Bradman in there. There's no Lindwall in there. There's no Keith Miller in there.' There's a Warne and a McGrath and a Hayden, though, Mr Trueman. 'You can have them. There's no Neil Harvey. There's no Arthur Morris. How can they be the best side ever? I don't think I'd have been going to bed early if I'd been bowling against them. 'I reckon the best all-round powerful side would have been Australia 1948. Don't forget you had Sam Loxton coming in to bat at seven or eight and he could bat. Wonderful man, Sam. Love him. 'He said to me about two years ago, he said to me, 'What do you make of them these days, Freddie, wearing these helmets?' I said, 'I don't know, Sam. Why?' He said, 'I didn't even wear a helmet at Tobruk'.' Trueman is less cynical about the prospects for cricket in China, having played against many cricketers with Chinese heritage in Trinidad. Ellis Achong, the Test bowler of the 1930s who inspired the cricketing term Chinamen - for left arm wrist spinners - umpired in one of Trueman's first Tests in 1953-54. When told that Chinese officials have predicted that the nation will have cricketers of international standard within years, Trueman says: 'That wouldn't surprise me. Don't forget that when the West Indies first came to England, in 1928, they were described as a bunch of beach cricketers. Then in 1950 they gave England a right hiding,' he adds. 'Beat them out of sight, and have been a powerful force ever since - except in the last few years, which is the worst West Indies team I've ever seen, by far.' The emergence of China as a cricketing force might help restore sanity in the home of the game. Trueman says he can't even get parking space at Lord's, let alone a word of sense on the game. 'With perverts and everything around, the good Lord above is the only one who knows what's going on these days. And sometimes even He might be flummoxed.' As It Was: the Memoirs of Fred Trueman is available in Hong Kong for $280 At stumps Full name: Frederick Sewards Trueman Born: 6th February 1931, Stainton, Yorkshire, England Batting: Right-hand batsman Bowling: Right-arm fast Teams: England (Test: 1952-1965); Yorkshire (Main FC: 1949-1968); Marylebone Cricket Club (Main FC: 1953/54-1964); Yorkshire (Main ListA: 1963-1968); Derbyshire (Main ListA: 1972); All teams Cricket Writers' Club Young Cricketer of the Year 1952 Wisden Cricketer of the Year 1953