Wes Hall has good reason to remember Norman O’Neil who died in Sydney yesterday, aged 71, after a long battle with cancer.
“I don’t think any batsman I bowled to hit the ball harder than he did in his innings in the tied Test,”
Hall said of the flamboyant Australian batsman whose 181 against the West Indies matched his own nine wickets, Garry Sobers’s 132 and Alan Davidson’s all-round return of 44 and 80 with the bat and 10 wickets with the ball in Test cricket’s most famous match in December, 1960.
“It was like a lava path through an exploding volcano,” was the typically vivid analogy used by the fastest bowler of his era to describe O’Neil’s strokeplay that accounted for 22 fours. “When he hit the ball back at you, it was frightening.”
It was O’Neil’s maiden Test hundred in an unforgettable series of five Tests in which he was the leading run-scorer on either side with 522 runs at an average of 52.20.
He was then 22 and seemed to be justifying the unenviable tag as “the new Don Bradman” Australians pinned on him since he played his first match for New South Wales at 18.
“As so many others discovered, that was a serious burden to bear,” Hall said. “After all, Bradman had a Test average of 99.84 and no one’s ever going to touch that. It could have explained why he never fulfilled that early promise.”
Hall was “surprised” to learn that O’Neil only managed six hundreds and averaged 45.55 in his 42 Tests.
“He was surely better than that,” he said, noting that he was also a brilliant cover fielder with a baseballer’s throw and an occasional leg-spinner.
Hall, one year younger, remembered O’Neil as a “shadow of himself” in the 1965 return series in the Caribbean. Although he still averaged 44, it was boosted by scores of 51 and 76 not out in a high-scoring draw in the fourth Test at Kensington Oval.
He was dropped for the final Test at the Queen’s Park Oval and, aged 28, never chosen again. Hall and his menacing partner, Charlie Griffith, were at their prime then and several Australian batsmen, not least O’Neil, concentrated more on what they deemed to be Griffith’s suspect action than on the ball he was bowling to them.
It gave rise to a classic verse in the Mighty Sparrow’s classic calypso on the series: “When O’Neil meet real fast bowling, is to see him ducking/Then the very guy, telling so much lie, telling the world how Griffith chucking.”
To Hall, O’Neil was not simply a cricketer but “a genuinely nice man.
“I could call all those Australians who played in that 1960-61 series ‘brothers’,” Hall said. “That was how it was and Norman O’Neil typified that camaraderie.” He related another story about O’Neil in the fifth Test at Melbourne.
“I was batting and swung so hard at the ball it broke at the bottom and pieces of wood went flying everywhere,” Hall said. “Everbody had a good laugh but Norm came over to me and asked me not to let anyone see the kind of bat I was using. It was one of his signed bats.
“I told him no problem, once he let me have five new ones in return. It was a little blackmail, I suppose, but he did fulfil his part of the bargain.”
O’Neil is survived by his wife Gwen and son Mark, who played 76 first class matches for New South Wales and Western Australia.
