bob willis...
blue is the colour
How the legendary England fast bowler's love of Manchester City first began...
Despite Bob Willis's accomplishments in the world of cricket, he also loved football and was a big Manchester City fan. This article was published in July 2023 during the Ashes test series.
As England lock horns with Australia in The 2023 Ashes series, memories inevitably coming flooding back of the test match where it was a Manchester City fan who bowled the innings of his life to take England to the unlikeliest of victories over their old adversaries.
Cricket and football cross paths surprisingly often in England with the seasons of both overlapping for a few weeks either side of summer and a number of high profile cricketers having a passion for football.
Phil Salt and Jos Buttler are City fans, Jimmy Anderson a Burnley supporter and Stuart Broad follows Nottingham Forest – to name but a few.
Anderson and Broad are currently featuring in the third test began at Headingley in Yorkshire which began on 6 July.
It was at that venue where England fast bowler Bob Willis – and all-rounder Ian Botham – turned a match that bookmakers at one point were offering 500-1 for England to win, given the dire situation the hosts found themselves in.
As Australia began their second innings, they needed just 129 runs to win and take a 2-0 series lead.
The tourists had posted 401 in their first innings, then bowled England out for 174 and that 227-run lead meant England had to follow-on and bat immediately again.
At one stage in that second innings, England had scored just 135 runs and had lost seven of their 10 wickets.
Trailing by 92 runs, the game seemed as good as over with the Aussies unlikely to need to even bat again, such was their advantage.
But Botham had other ideas and though he eventually ran out of partners, his 149 not out at least gave his team a slender 129 lead and a faint glimmer of hope.
In reply, Australia, at one stage, were 56-1 – just 73 runs shy of victory with nine wickets in hand. They were sleepwalking to victory.
Enter that heroic Manchester City fan Willis and one of the most devastating spells of fast bowling ever seen, as he removed eight Australian batsmen for just 43 runs to inspire England to victory as the tourists were dismissed for a total of 111.
It was a remarkable turnaround and the stuff of legend, with the heroics of Willis, who sadly died in 2019, still talked about today, more than four decades on.
But just how did a boy born in Sunderland begin following City?
Speaking to The Cricketer in 2016, Willis explained: “I was only there (in Sunderland) six weeks! My old man was a journalist, on the Sunderland Echo, and he moved to the Manchester Evening Telegraph, so we spent six years there, where I developed my passion for Manchester City.”
Bob’s brother David was two years older when the Willis family moved to the north-west and he recalls the new life in Manchester and how he and his younger sibling’s shared love of cricket and City first began.
“Our dad married a war bride from Canada and returned to Sunderland after the Second World War,” he said.
“I don’t know what Sunderland looked like at that time, but I think mum had greater aspirations than life on Wearside, so dad got a job on The Manchester Guardian, and we moved to Nicholas Road in Chorlton-cum-Hardy.
“Bob and I were only small, but we’d make the short walk to Longford Park to play cricket, and this was a time when there were tremendously thick fogs, and it would take us 10 minutes to get there and about an hour or more to get home.
“We could have walked to Old Trafford to watch Manchester United from our house, but thank goodness the old man decided to catch a bus to Maine Road instead.
“I was probably six and Bob was four and my first memory of Maine Road was lots of flat caps and pipe smoke and once we were in – at what would have been the Scoreboard End (later North Stand) – we were passed over the heads of everyone down to the front to a small white wall behind Bert Trautmann’s goal where all the other kids were sat..."
David Willis
“I’d suggest you only need to experience that a handful of times before you are a Blue for life and that was the start of the whole thing for both Bob and I.”
The Willis brothers and their parents eventually left Manchester after about six years when their dad got a job at the BBC but both were by then fervent City supporters and though they moved to a house opposite Chelsea’s Cobham training ground, it was the sky blue that was the colour – there was to be no geographical switch to the darker blue of Chelsea.
Bob went to school in Guilford and his fledgling cricket career was already showing great promise.
Unmistakable with his big mop of curly hair, the straight-speaking youngster showed a glimpse of his life outside sport by adding ‘Dylan’ as one of his middle names by deed pole in honour of his musical hero Bob Dylan.
He and David followed City from afar, catching games in the south when they could and by the age of 18, Bob had joined Surrey Cricket Club, following his dream of being paid to play the game he loved.
He was also a more than decent goalkeeper and in-between his early cricket years, he played for Guildford City and then Isthmian League side Corinthian Casuals.
“I was goalie for Corinthian Casuals and played the first 12 games in the Isthmian League in 1970/71 before I went to Australia and also Guildford City reserve goalie in 1969/70. I retired when I got the England call …” recalled Bob in The Cricketer.
“I didn’t dive as much as Joe Corrigan. Narrow the angle, that’s the secret. Don’t get your shorts dirty unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
Also playing for the Corinthian Casuals was Bob’s flatmate – future Sky Sports commentating legend Martin Tyler.
Recalls Tyler: “Yeah, Bob and I shared a flat in Streatham for about 18 months between 1970 and 1971. We played non-league football together and he was a decent keeper. But that ended when he was called up as a replacement for a tour to Australia where he helped England regain The Ashes.”
That would be the first of 90 England caps during which he would take 325 international wickets – but it was that Headingly test in Leeds that would be the highlight of a magnificent career.
After Surrey he moved to Warwickshire where he would remain for 12 years.
David Willis recalled, “Bob and I would catch games whenever we could and when he moved to Birmingham he would go to the games in the Midlands whenever he could blag tickets! He’d get to see City a few times a season or more if he could and he attended a London City Supporters’ Club several times after he retired from playing.
“At one of those events he met Mike Summerbee and they got on famously. Mike invited Bob to the Etihad to watch a game a few times after that. He was a loyal Blue all his life. He was also a huge fan of Pep Guardiola, and he never missed a game on TV so long as he it didn’t clash with his work. He would have been thrilled to bits when we won the Champions League.”
One of Bob’s closest friends was the legendary Ian ‘Beefy’ Botham, who also enjoyed his football – so much so he signed for Scunthorpe United for a short time with Bob attending a couple of games his pal played in.
Following his retirement in 1984, Bob, a natural broadcaster, began commentating and summarising for the BBC’s cricket coverage before joining Sky Sports in 1990 alongside former team-mates David Gower and, of course, Ian Botham.
There, his no-nonsense punditry and directness won him millions of fans over the next three decades – a Bob Willis tongue-lashing was the last thing a player or official ever wanted!
In 2016, asked if that was what most people wanted to talk to him about when they met him, Bob replied that it was almost always the 1981 Headingly test: “Of course, that was a fairytale, a kids’ comic. It was an extraordinary day when everything went right.”
What was even more extraordinary about his exploits in 1981 was that he hadn’t been picked for the original XI.
Recalled brother David: “I was working in Australia when Bob took those eight wickets, and the funny thing was that many felt this was the end of his career because he’d been struggling with injury and ill-health so he hadn’t been selected for the Headingley test.
“Derbyshire’s Mike Hendrick had got the nod instead, but Bob had just had a run out with the Warwickshire Second XI and so he rang the Chairman of Selectors – Alec Bedser - and said he was OK to play. Once he’d convinced him, the Chairman had to call Derbyshire County Cricket Club and tell them a letter had been sent for Hendrick telling him he’d been picked to play – only they had to make sure he didn’t receive it!
“Bob only sneaked into that starting XI and the first innings hadn’t gone terribly well because his figures were 0 for 72, but in the second innings, he came down the hill and England captain Mike Brearley had said, ‘Don’t worry about no-balls – there’s a few spots on the pitch that anything could happen if you hit them – so just bowl as fast as you can.’ So he did.
“What followed was the most extraordinary couple of hours of his career.”
Bob sadly died after a long battle with prostate cancer in December 2019, aged 70.
Bob Willis (left) and David Gower
The Bob Willis Fund was set up as his legacy, to help raise awareness and research into prostate cancer which kills 11,500 men in the UK each year.
Run by Bob’s wife Lauren, his daughter Katie and brother David, one of the honorary patrons is also, of course, Bob Dylan.
“We’ve just had an astonishingly successful ‘Blue for Bob Day’ at the opening Ashes test at Edgbaston where we have raised £1.2million over the past two years,” says David Willis.
“We’ll keep pushing on with that. Of course, there is no coincidence that the blue we use on the logo is the sky blue of City, something Bob’s wife Lauren was very keen to have.”
Former close friend, flat-mate, team-mate and Sky Sports stablemate Martin Tyler adds: “For me, the Blue for Bob charity day should really be ‘The Sky Blue Day for Bob’, because he loved City so much.”
If you would like to donate to The Bob Willis Fund, click below the logo.
For more about the charity and the fantastic work they do, click below
Thanks to David Willis, AdamAskew and Martin Tyler for their contributions to this feature.
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