Paul Edwards profiles Lancashire’s Ian Folley, who came agonisingly close to an England cap before the yips overcame him
Paul Edwards21-Apr-2020On June 28, 1988 Lancashire’s manager, Alan Ormrod, was watching a second-team game at Elland CC when he received a phone-call from his England counterpart, Micky Stewart. There was a Test Match against the West Indies taking place at Old Trafford in two days’ time and Nick Cook had failed a fitness test. Ormrod was therefore asked whether he thought his left-arm spinner, Ian Folley, was ready to make his international debut. The Lancashire coach replied that while Folley was bowling very well and worth his place in a touring party, he was, perhaps, not quite at the level he had reached the previous summer. The selectors eventually plumped for John Childs, the 36-year-old Essex spinner.Folley was never to receive a call to England colours. Although he finished that season with 57 first-class wickets, he started the next virtually unable to bowl spin at all. His deliveries might bounce four times or sail high over the wicketkeeper’s head. The yips had claimed another victim and Folley’s first-class career was all but over. Within two years of leaving the professional game in 1991 he was to die under anaesthetic at Cumberland Infirmary, where he was undergoing surgery for a perforated eyeball. He had been hit when batting for Whitehaven but had been able to walk off the ground; the operation should have been relatively routine. And the final sadness is that if you mention Folley’s name today many good-natured folk are likely to recall only the way his career ended and the dreadful tragedy of his death, aged 30.But that’s no way to remember you at all, is it, Ian?For one thing, it leaves out all the fun, such as the times you went in as nightwatchman and tried to score the fastest fifty of the season. Let’s put them right, shall we? Let me start again.”Fol!…Bloody hell, can’t he hear me? FOL!…Next over, this end.”There were many summers in the 1980s when those words brought happiness to Ian Folley; and at least a couple of seasons when they may have sparked particular joy in his heart. The pleasure was shared, too. It was felt by his Lancashire colleagues, who knew their tousle-haired, not-so-slow left-armer was one of the best spinners in the land; and the delight was known in abundance by supporters, who thought, like thousands before them, that they were watching Lancs play title-winning cricket.The 1987 season is just such a time and on July 22, Lancashire are playing Warwickshire at Southport. Folley is bowling from the Harrod Drive End and the ball is turning on the first afternoon. (Mike Atherton describes the pitch as a “sandpit”.) But it isn’t just that; players of the quality of Dennis Amiss and Asif Din are reaching forward to where they think the ball will land, only to find it pitching a trifle shorter, thus allowing the bounce and turn to do their work.ALSO READ: ‘Palairet had style. It stood out a mile'”Fol started as a seamer and you could see that in his action because he ran quite energetically to the crease,” said Atherton, who was making his first-class debut for Lancashire in that game. “He had a fast arm action and I think that’s where he got his dip from. The one thing I remember from my debut was the number of people he beat by getting the ball to drop and having batsmen searching for it. He was landing it on a sixpence, he was spinning it sharply and he had that lovely drop on the ball. He was dangerous.””He had this knack, a little bit like Simon Kerrigan, that when he got into a good place, you thought you were going to get a wicket every ball,” adds the former Lancashire wicketkeeper, John Stanworth “His consistency was that strong. I remember stumping Graeme Hick off Fol and the ball spun that much Hick nearly got back. He had this uncluttered knack of being able to produce really good spinning deliveries.”Ian Folley (front row, second from left) and the 1988 Lancashire squad•PA Images via Getty ImagesLancashire win the game at Southport by ten wickets inside two days. Folley takes 12 for 57 and finishes the season with 74 first-class wickets at a tad over 25 runs apiece, an achievement which had not eluded the notice of the selectors.”At the end of that year I’m pretty certain he was on a list for the England tour to Pakistan,” Atherton says. “I think Fol was on an initial long-list of about 30 players and in those days not many Lancashire cricketers were playing for England. I remember it being a big thing in the dressing room when he got the letter.”Folley’s recognition was all the more remarkable given that almost every county possessed at least one high-quality finger-spinner in that era; and his achievement was vaguely astonishing given that he had only turned to slow bowling the previous winter on the shrewd suggestion of Jack Bond, Lancashire’s manager. There is evidence he had mixed his usual left-arm quicker stuff with a few twisters during his time in Lancashire’s junior sides but the Burnley-born youngster had signed his first contract in 1982 primarily as a swing bowler. For a season or two it worked well enough for him but Bond recognised that the Folley’s career would be limited if he stuck to his first discipline and therefore suggested he try spin. The change would be the making of him… and yes, probably the breaking as well.
“Pressure affects people in different ways and I think it was a real big burden for Fol because people were talking him up as the next England spinner”Former Lancashire captain Warren Hegg
The players at Old Trafford accepted Folley’s decision and waited to see what he would make of his new trade. In truth, they were already accustomed to a large dollop of eccentricity from him. “Fol was away with the fairies at times” says Warren Hegg, Lancashire’s former wicketkeeper and captain. And one can see what Hegg means. This, after all, was the lad who had been Graeme Fowler’s runner when he made two centuries against Warwickshire in 1982 game at Southport and had raised his own bat to milk the applause of the large crowd when Fowler reached three figures. “I’ve never scored a century before,” he told his mates in the dressing room.Folley’s innings as nightwatchman also mocked expectations: they were noted for a flurry of boundaries carved through the slips or for calls to take quick singles early in an over, invitations which his partner, often Gehan Mendis, brusquely declined. But this sense of fun never strayed over into the sort of self-indulgent indiscipline that blights a team. Indeed, Folley was so renowned for retiring to bed early in his first few years with Lancashire that his most popular nicknames were “Vicar” or “Reverend”. The extrovert Fol arrived at more or less the same time as he turned to spin.But gradually, maybe even during that last golden season, the fun began to stop. Rather than hoping Folley would take wickets, his team-mates and spectators started to expect him to do so. This is, of course, a perfectly normal response to a colleague’s success but Ken Grime, Lancashire marketing executive in the late 1980s, offers invaluable testimony that Folley felt pressured by it.Micky Stewart (left) was mighty close to handing Folley a Test call-up in 1988•Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix/Getty Images”When Ian started to struggle with a loss of confidence, my mind went back to a lunchtime conversation we’d had during the winter of 1987,” he says. “I’d always found him to be approachable, outgoing, with an impish sense of fun and happy to chat cricket. But somehow that day we got talking about playing under ‘pressure’ and he recalled the first time it had really crystallized in his mind. It was during that charge for the title in 1987.”‘You want to know about pressure?’ he said. ‘You turn up at a ground and realise if it’s a spinning track everyone’s looking at me and Simmo [Jack Simmons] to win us the game,’ he said. ‘That’s real pressure.’ He mentioned the game in question but I can’t recall it now. Although that situation is probably true for many spinners, and indeed many cricketers, it showed a serious side to Ian I’d not seen before. And I got the impression it was something that was on his mind.”In 1989 the ball was going everywhere and anywhere when Folley bowled spin. He could put his fingers down the seam and land it on a putting marker but he knew he was never going to make a career in professional county cricket doing that. Once he tried to tweak it again the yips would have him by the throat. And such was cricket’s sadistic generosity in those days that a head-high no-ball or wide delivered by a spinner merely gave the bowler another opportunity to experience the agony.”It was the most heartbreaking thing to see from a guy who was only that far from playing for England,” Hegg says. “When the pressure was on he’d lose it, but even in the nets he’d lost it a bit. Pressure affects people in different ways and I think it was a real big burden for Fol because people were talking him up as the next England spinner.”Folley did not play another County Championship match for Lancashire after 1988. There were four first-class games for Derbyshire in 1991 but he was released at the end of that season and had to build a new career in the licensing trade while playing cricket in the leagues. In the years since his death there have been serious academic studies of the yips, including a chapter in the philosopher David Papineau’s excellent book and an outstanding paper written by Mark Bawden and Ian Maynard in the (January 2002). The latter identifies “15 general dimensions” that are “descriptive of the overall ‘yips’ experience.”But to a layman or even to an amateur sportsman who has suffered from the yips the whole business is raw agony and not many recover from it. When the body cheats on the mind reconciliation is rarely achieved. “It’s like a worm in your brain that’s hard to get rid of,” says Atherton.You would be 57 today, Fol. No doubt, you would be attending Lancashire’s former players’ reunions, admiring the talent of Matt Parkinson and hoping he does well. But the simple pleasures of the ex-pro were denied you. What you could enjoy, though, was those few seasons when you were very near the top of your profession. What’s more, the folk who saw you bowl shared your pure delight that life could be so much fun. And when they recall such days, to borrow from Michael Frayn, the past becomes the present inside their heads. A choir of close catchers lies in wait and you are once again bamboozling Warwickshire’s batsmen on a July afternoon in Southport. Odd Men In