Sydney Barnes - Style and Personality

Style and Personality

Barnes was described as more than six feet tall and maintaining an erect posture with wide shoulders, a deep chest, long arms and strong legs – in John Arlott's view, "perfectly built to be a bowler". He bowled right arm fast-medium but also had what Arlott called "the accuracy, spin and resource of a slow bowler". Barnes' high delivery provided him with a lift off the pitch that forced even the best batsmen to play him at an awkward height. He was clever at concealing his pace and could produce deliveries that were both appreciably faster and slower than his usual fast-medium pace; and could bowl an effective yorker. Barnes considered himself essentially a spin bowler as he bowled both the off-break and the leg-break. Although technically formidable, Barnes allied his skillset to a hostile persona and great stamina which, Arlott says, "were reflected in constant, unrelenting probing for a batsman's weakness and then attacking it by surprise, each ball fitting into a tactical pattern".

Harry Altham wrote of his bowling: "At appreciably more than medium pace he could, even in the finest weather and on the truest wickets in Australia, both swing and break the ball from off or leg. Most deadly of all was the ball which he would deliver from rather wide on the crease, move in with a late swerve the width of the wicket, and then straighten back off the ground to hit the off stump".

Bernard Hollowood played alongside Barnes for Staffordshire in the 1930s and quoted his father, Albert Hollowood, who had been Barnes' Staffordshire captain before the First World War, as saying: "Oh, yes, he could bowl 'em all, but he got his wickets with fast leg-breaks. Marvellous, absolutely marvellous, he was. Fast leg-breaks and always on a length".

Bernard Hollowood drew two cartoons of Barnes, which appear in his book Cricket on the Brain. One depicts him leaping in the air as he appeals for a dismissal and with his index finger raised as though he himself is adjudicating on the appeal. It is entitled 'A.N. Other lbw Barnes.... 0'. John Arlott wrote in his review of the book for the 1971 Wisden: ...his two caricatures of S.F. Barnes would seem transcendent if they were not outweighed by his chapter on that great bowler which is a fine passage of cricket literature... this is a book of many and well-cut facets.