Player Profile: William Watson

Profile by William Jobling

There is an old question often asked in East Lancashire – what is the only good thing to come out of Yorkshire? Whilst most locals will have you believe the answer is the M62, there can be little doubt that when it comes to producing opening batsman of strength, poise, resolve and style, few parts of England’s green and pleasant lands can have contributed more to the pages of Wisden. Growing up in a remote Pennine boarding school, William ‘the Guns’ Watson has always been keen to live up to his heritage. Having considered modeling his game on Michael Vaughan (rejected for the need to play the pull shot) and Len Hutton (rejected having calculated how many weeks it would take him to score 364 runs), Watson has found his perfect idol in the guise of the archetypal professional Yorkshireman, Geoffrey Boycott.

Watson bases his batting around a simple technique. Front foot forward, bat next to pad, ball stroked beautifully towards the covers with a delightful high elbow, held in position for the watching purist, a polite yet firm call of “no” so as not to inconvenience his partner into the unnecessary exertion of a quick single. For Watson, to stand in the middle of a ground with all eyes focused on him, the centre of attention, to feel the fielders pressing in around him ever more closely as they walk in with the bowler’s run up, to take part in the friendly bonhomie of the slip cordon, is the true pleasure of cricket. Watson is a man from a different era, when twenty-twenty was nearly half past eight and time for dinner. The world may have passed his game by, it has certainly passed his hair style by, but for a man of such indomitable spirit, nothing can dampen that inner, innate spirit, that pride in preserving one’s wicket and that unwavering belief of how things should be.

Watson’s other major cricketing influence has been the Indian legend Sunil Gavaskar, who famously responded to the need to chase 334 in 60 overs against England in the 1975 World Cup by carrying his bat for 36 runs from 174 balls. In the summer of 2008, Watson opened the batting for NTMCC chasing a challenging total of 225 off 40 overs (see match report here). He responded with 25 successive shots of the highest calibre. Each was a forward defensive; each a dot ball. But how they were played!