“Cricket – It’s a right good game” says the gruffly amiable Boothroyd, played by the gruffly amiable Brian Glover towards the end of Alan Bennett’s television play A Day Out. And he’s right. It is.

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In Beyond A Boundary, CLR James compares cricket to classical Greek drama and draws a direct parallel between sitting in the sun for days watching Millar and Lindwall bowl to Hutton and Compton to sitting in the sun for days watching The Oresteia. Cricket brings out the aesthetes. Samuel Beckett is in Wisden. Harold Pinter wrote “I saw Len Hutton in his prime. A different time. A different time.” When he phoned his playwright friend and fellow cricket lover Simon Gray to ask him what he thought of his effort Gray supposedly replied “I haven’t finished reading it yet”. Philistines and morons, as philistines and morons are wont to do seized on this as some kind of pomposity pricking put down. I prefer to think that Gray, a man who knew a thing or two about the game, was alluding to the fact that the profundity of the sentiment far outweighed the 13 words that conveyed it.

 

In Bennett’s play, set in May 1911, a group of men embark upon a Sunday cycling trip from Halifax to Fountains Abbey. Filmed in black and white and broadcast in 1972, the play (Bennett’s first for TV) introduced many of his trademark themes. Humanity and social status are writ large in the smallest details.  “If we all went round carving our names there’d be no ruins left” says one character, chastising another for making his mark on the ancient monuments.  Minutes later stumps are chalked on a crumbling wall and the cyclists play an impromptu game of cricket.  There is the inevitable age-old dispute about what constitutes a boundary and about whether hitting the ball in the river is out. (Six and out was generally the rule in our street games if you hit it into someone’s front garden.) There is another disagreement about whether the ball had actually hit the stumps or where indeed off stump was, another one that plays down the ages and is familiar to anyone who ever chalked stumps and bails on a garden wall or garage door.  Towards the end, A Day Out assumes a hazy dream like quality as the cyclists wend their way lazily across a field on their journey home. We see them shrouded and silhouetted in the dappled shade of country lanes in the fading light of early summer.  The dramatic irony of the moment is unspoken and immeasurable. A final short scene takes place on the first anniversary of Armistice Day in November 1919 and shows the small band of survivors from that group, now no more than three or four strong, as they gather to lay wreaths on the steps of the monument in Akroydon Square Park Halifax, where the party had set off from eight years earlier.

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Watching A Day Out recently for the first time in many years I realise that I had misremembered elements of that penultimate scene. In my memory the final shot of the cyclists shows them riding into the overreaching arc of an avenue of trees. But it is me who is overreaching, framing the dramatic irony within a literal rear view shot to suit my own perceptions. Despite my faulty memory the power of those homegoing images remains. We all know what’s going to happen to most of those men. And that false memory of mine of a tree lined country lane, with its melancholy and its hazy late afternoon light, well that’s the melancholy and hazy late afternoon light I filter many things through now. The past is a misty veil we all look though as we try to catch a glimpse of a distant time, a different time when our heroes were in their prime.

“and it could be me/and it could be thee”

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On Saturday August 15th 1964 Dad opened the living room window and called me in from the back garden to come and watch Fred Trueman take his 300th Test wicket. He had taken his 298th and 299th just before the lunch interval and a historical moment and a hat trick beckoned. New Australian batsman Neil Hawke survived the hat trick ball but Trueman got him with the next one. Had I dawdled in the garden or been playing out in the road I would have missed it.  Looking back, what I think of mostly about that day is not so much the 300th wicket itself but that Dad called me in to share the moment.  The bonding. The communality.

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Four years later, in the weather blighted summer of 1968 England went into the final test match against Australia at The Oval needing a win to square the series. This looked to be a certainty until, with Biblical inevitability, a lunchtime downpour on the final day flooded the entire playing area. The deluge seemed to have put pay to any hope of redemption for Ray Illingworth’s England side. On the radio the commentators, having exhausted their small talk, said ‘we now hand you back to the studio’, and that appeared to be that. Me and my teenage mates spent the afternoon playing Totopoly round at Titch Houghton’s house and waiting in vain for the cricket to come back on. By three o’clock we’d given up on any hope of further play. After I’d been home and had my tea I was walking up Bedford Road to rejoin my mates. I turned on my transistor radio, more in desperation than hope, and was amazed to hear that not only had play resumed but that deadly Derek Underwood was getting stuck into the Aussie tail. After the long frustrating afternoon of no play and the heroic attempt of the groundsmen and half the crowd to clear the waterlogged pitch, there was now the prospect of an unlikely last gasp victory. It was five o’ clock on a summer’s afternoon and the sky was so dark in Sandy that houses had their front room lights on. An old guy trundled by me on his bike and, presumably as amazed as I was, called out ‘are they back on, boy?’ Yes, they were I said as I excitedly relayed the score to him. And again, it’s the shared moment that I remember. I couldn’t tell you what Deadly Derek’s final bowling figures were as he demolished the Aussie tail but I can still see that old man in my mind’s eye.  ‘Are they back on boy?’

 

One bright July evening thirteen years after that, I turned on my telly and watched Ian Botham and Graham Dilley putting up a valiant rear-guard seventh wicket stand at Headingly to delay an inevitable defeat in the 4th Test against Australia. I had to leave my flat before close of play to make my way from Clapham to Ealing where the band I was in at the time were hoping to convince Ivo of 4AD Records to sign us to his label. When I got to Ivo’s music mag cluttered office, Simon our bass player was already there. ‘How many did we get?’ I asked. ‘I think they’re still in’ Simon replied. ‘How many wickets left?’ I said. ‘No’ clarified Simon, ‘I mean Botham and Dilley are still in. They were when I left anyway’. The agreeable and pleasant Ivo politely declined to sign us to 4AD and I went on my way.

 

I was teaching at HM Borstal Feltham at the time and I had to work on the afternoon of the final day’s play. When I set off to catch the train at Clapham Junction, Australia, in spite of Both and Dilley’s heroics only needed a modest 130 to win. By the time I got to work the wickets had started to fall. 2-56. 3-58. 4-58. 5-65. While I taught remedial English to armed robbers and habitual burglars, the Education Dept art teacher Mike Pope had a transistor radio tuned in in the art room. Every few minutes a young borstal trainee was sent along the corridor to give me an update. 6-68. 7-74. The wickets were gradually falling but the target grew ever closer. And still the messages came. 75 for 8 I was told. They’ve reached 100 I was told, and, more ominously, Dennis Lillee is swinging the bat. And then I was told Lillee was out but not told the score. And then the worst thing happened. There were no further messages.  I went for the afternoon break and Mike Pope followed me into the staff room moments later. ‘Has it finished?’ I asked, searching for clues in his sanguine face. ‘Oh yes, we’ve won’ he said, almost absent-mindedly, as if this was the most natural outcome ever. In the elation of those final overs he and his young charges were so wrapped up in the outcome they’d forgotten to send further messages along the corridor to me.

 

Another shared moment. One of the most unlikely come backs in test cricket history relayed to me in a custodial institution by lads trusted to leave their classroom and walk unassisted down the corridor to deliver bulletins to a man who only the previous evening has been more concerned with signing with 4AD Records than he was with England not being completely humiliated in a match they looked destined to lose.

 

“the fabled men and the noonday sun”

 

My year zero for music is 1963. My year zero for cricket would be about the same. With music it was the ascendancy of the Beatles. With cricket it was Ted Dexter. I must have seen him in one of those Sunday afternoon Cavaliers XI or Lords Taverner’s exhibition matches that ITV (yes ITV!) occasionally showed. Or it might have been the inaugural Gillette Cup final, which ITV also showed. Whichever it was it featured Dexter prominently. Perhaps it was the word cavaliers with its connotations of bravery and swagger, but there was something about the dashing Dexter’s style and general air of braggadocio that appealed to me. Fred Truman reminded me of Wilson The Wonder Athlete in The Hornet. He looked like he lived on the moors and ate grass for breakfast. Dexter looked like he knew James Bond. Before Dexter pretty much everybody and everything else was names in the history books, marked by reference to record breaking feats achieved long ago, reputations handed down from previous eras. WG Grace in my comic book drawings was a large man with a long beard, from the bottom of which a bat emerged. Len Hutton was the mantric 364. Jim Laker, who I only ever knew as a commentator, had once apparently taken 19 wickets in a Test Match. By the time I came of age Peter May was a test selector and Dennis Compton advertised Brylcream on the telly. Dexter was my first modern.  And once Dad explained the county system to me and that Dexter played for Sussex I became, purely by random criteria a lifelong Sussex supporter. It seemed a promising place to start. Sussex won the first two Gillette Cups in 1963 and 1964, setting me up with high expectations that were to be constantly thwarted for the next several decades.

 

It was customary at that time, when the Championship table was printed in the paper, for the county’s final league position the previous year to appear next to their name. As Sussex usually seemed to finish in the lower reaches it was tantamount a season long taunt. They finished bottom of the 17 counties in 1968 and 1975, second bottom in 1965 and 1972, and 13th in 1967. Not once between 1963 when they finished fourth under Dexter’s captaincy and 1977 when they hit the heady heights of eighth under Tony Greig did they finish in the top half. To be a Sussex supporter was to settle for County Championship mediocrity, leavened occasionally by a losing appearance in the Gillette final, a cup they did not win again until 1978, by which time I was a singer in a punk band and living in a house in Bristol, owned by playwright Peter Nichols, uncle of our bass player Tom. The backdrop will shift constantly in this story, Sussex’s fortunes, for four decades at least, will not.

 

“the hallowed strip in the haze”

 

I bowled left arm over the wicket and batted right handed. From very early on I could keep a tidy line and length, accuracy I attribute entirely to the fact that the distance between the strip of tarmac across my road that marked out the bowler’s crease and the lamp post we used as a wicket was exactly 22 yards. From the moment I could bowl I was bowling on a full-length pitch. I never learned to do much with a cricket ball in the way of swing or deception in flight but I could put it on a sixpence.

 

My first batting role model was not the cavalier Dexter but Rohan Kanhai. I first encountered Kanhai as one of the warlords of that visiting West Indies 1963 touring side, the last captained by the great Frank Worrell, he of the legendary three Ws. That side also included Gary Sobers, Conrad Hunte, Seymour Nurse, Basil Butcher, Wes Hall and Charlie Griffiths. Kanhai was even better when he came back again with the Sobers led side of 1966. He made a huge impression on me, particularly with his extravagant leg side sweep which frequently involved going down on his right knee to execute the shot. I readily adopted the technique as my own. This was purely an affectation on my part but I used it to great effect in the road, particularly when dispatching a leg side six and out into Mrs. Hendry’s hedge, a distance of some 7 or 8 yards.

 

We played in the road or up the rec. The seasons were strictly demarcated. Football in winter, cricket in summer. We never came off for bad light and rarely for rain. Up the rec there was a row of trees which acted as stumps. Several of the tree trunks even had obliging knobbly ridges at about bail height to eliminate the need for dispute. At my rugby playing grammar school I soon developed a total contempt for prescribed team sports. I played in the B group in Games lessons, never got a sniff at the A group or the annual house matches. Meanwhile on summer evenings and at weekends I was playing up the rec with secondary modern boys 2-3 years my senior, some of whom were already playing for Sandy’s first or second team, and one or two of whom would go on to play at Minor Counties level for Bedfordshire.

 

Team games up the rec were played with passion and no little expertise, particularly during the school holiday. We commandeered a huge portion of the recreation ground playing field, just a few yards from the official cricket square (usually roped off the day before a match but which no one ever ran onto anyway.) Proper stumps and bails were usually available. Field placings were learned and precise.  There was one particular ritual which I came to love and which I am nostalgic for still, where during the final week of the summer holiday the older secondary modern lads would hold a match which was tantamount to a school trial. Two full teams turned out and you felt honoured when as a 12 or 13 year-old you would be picked to make up the numbers. The game lasted for the best part of an afternoon. There was even a score book, a proper green official ledger which was meticulously filled in. I can clearly remember the anticipation of waiting for the older boys to arrive on that final holiday afternoon and the disappointment I felt in the summer of 1969 on learning that this was to be the last match owing to the school leaving age being raised to 16 the following year and all the boys getting out and into full time employment while the going was good, which it still was then. There was a reunion match of sorts in 1970 but it was a bad-tempered snarling affair as I recall. A year out in the world of wage earning in those days rapidly turned working-class boys into working class men and there was a general air of competitive hostility during the match. There was even a fight, probably over a girl.  I batted at number 11 and didn’t get a bowl. Actually, I’m not sure I even got to bat either.

 

“on a dusty pitch with two pounds six”

 

For the whole of my teens and early 20s our local town cricket team in Sandy was one of the best club sides in the county, winning several trophies into the bargain, including the East Beds Shield four years in a row. They batted in strength, down to number nine most weeks and had three, arguably four genuine all-rounders. My cousin Tommy batted at number three and was a very good wicket keeper. It was from him that I gained a short-lived nickname. When I first hung around the older boys hoping for a game somebody said ‘who’s this then?’ to which somebody else said ‘that’s Tommy Chapman’s cousin’. ‘Come on then young Tom, you can be on our side’.  And so, for the best part of my senior school days, to my town friends at least, ‘young Tom’ became Tommy, became Tom. Not at my Grammar School obviously. Strictly surnames only. I think if I’d been killed in a tragic road accident it would have been announced in Assembly that Chapman of General V/11 had died.

 

From 1968 Sandy CC were led by the redoubtable Richard Banks, son of the local grain merchant and race horse trainer Sid Banks. As I was on the short side Sid asked me one summer evening, as we all stood idling by his premises, whether I’d like to come and be an apprentice jockey for him. As I was doing appallingly at school this seemed like an attractive proposition for about five minutes until I sounded out an uncle who replied, ‘fine boy, as long as you don’t mind breaking every bone in your body by the time you’re 30.’

 

The cricket club had its fair share of colourful characters including Rex King, a brewery drayman by occupation, who batted at number five and preferred to get his runs in sixes, something he did regularly given the short boundaries on both sides of the recreation ground. Many a ball ended up on the Con Club bowling green one side or in Harvey’s Haulage yard the other thanks to Rex and his impressive range of agricultural shots. As befitting his profession, he was large of girth and wielded a bat like it was a matchstick in his hand. He swatted balls away as if they were irritating flies. During the punk summer of 1977 I had a vacation job at the local brewery and there was Rex, still ample of girth and still swatting sixes for Sandy by all accounts.

 

We also had a demon bowler called Roy Fage, a whippet thin larrikin who bowled with genuine ferocity and pace. Roy usually had to be dragged out of the pub on match days and it was not uncommon to see him hurriedly rushing into the dressing room bang on 2pm and clattering his kit bag onto the floor while everyone else was already out in the middle. He’d often walk in for tea a couple of hours later having taken eight wickets. As a tail end batsman coming in against the odds he would either throw the bat Botham style and win a match for you or swing wildly and be out first ball. In a tightly poised Hospital Cup semi-final against Bedford at Bedford Park in July 1968, I remember him surveying the ring of boundary fielders with amused disdain, milking the situation for all it was worth and hoiking us to victory with a few well-placed sixes.

 

Roy often used to come into the bookies when I was manager there in the summer of 1975. He gambled as impulsively as he batted. If he had a big win early in the afternoon, like most punters he’d rarely have the sense to walk out while he was still financially up on the deal. You’d usually have it all back off him in dribs and drabs by the time he had to drive his market garden produce up to Covent Garden in the late afternoon. And even if he did have the sense to walk out, which he did once in a while, the evening dog meeting at Harringay or Walthamstow would usually be the lucky recipient of his bounty.

 

When my first marriage ended in 1983 I moved back to Sandy for a bit.  The summer was pleasantly sunny, and one August evening I cycled over to Biggleswade to watch the town team playing another of its cup finals. I recognised a few faces in the crowd, bearded and crease lined in some cases, but none on the pitch, save for one. There in the covers, notably more rotund, was former demon bowler Roy. It looked like the years of drinking had caught up with him, the whippet thin figure of yore long gone. But there he still was, evidently still enjoying the game and evidently still good enough. Just. At one point a Biggleswade batsman hit a confident drive towards him and Roy got down a second too late to stop it. As he stood up again he attempted a pride restoring rub of an imaginary back tweak but he was fooling no one, certainly not the wise old bird in the crowd who in immaculate withering Bedfordshire vowels issued a telling ‘you can’t do it anymore, can you boy’? That ubiquitous East Anglian ‘boy’  echoes through the rural ages, applicable in my day to anyone from 8 to 80. “Are they back on boy?” Passim.

 

By all accounts Roy did carry on doing it for a few more years. “You never know whether they’ve gone”, and sometimes the players don’t either. Sometimes they are the last to know.

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Sandy CC. Hospital Cup winning side 1968.  My cousin Tommy front row first left. Captain Richard Banks. front row middle. 

Demon bowler Roy Fage back row second left. mighty drayman and six hitter Rex King back row second right.

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 “and it could be Geoff and it could be John”

 

In September 1975 I forsook the joys of being the manager of a small-town turf accountants and moved to Bristol to commence my BA in Humanities. The Ashley Down site at Bristol Polytechnic backed onto Gloucestershire’s County Ground and there were many mornings during that first undergraduate year when I was having a seminar in one of the portacabins at the back of the main building when I could hear the teams being announced over the pa system. I developed a rapport with the easy going attendant at the back entrance to the ground and would often hand over 20p or so on the understanding that ‘I’m just popping in for an hour between lectures.’ Sometimes this just popping in would last a lazy afternoon. I’d position myself just to the right of where David Shepherd was invariably blocking out the sun at third man and enjoy the best of that fine Gloucestershire side of the mid 70s. This was the era of ‘Proctorshire’ and of Sadiq Mohammed and Zaheer Abbas. Runs were rarely in short supply. This was also the era of the Benson and Hedges Cup and I clearly recall sitting in the Mound Stand in May 1976 watching the home side beat Ray Illingworth’s Leicestershire in the group stages while young women in branded brown and gold uniforms walked round handing out free packets of B&H, often to kids who barely looked like they were out of junior school let alone of legal smoking age. “A different time. A different time.” Zaheer scored an effortless 77 not out in that match and seemed to have the ability to hit a four without you actually having heard the contact of bat on ball. I have to this day never seen a player who stroked a cricket ball so sweetly.

 

That summer I also saw a request on the college noticeboard for players, and so for the first time since the scratch sides I’d played for during my school years I turned out for a Polytechnic XI.  We had access to Gloucestershire’s indoor school and nets and played our matches at Coombe Dingle, a facility we shared with the University. (Well of course Coombe Dingle. We’re in the West Country. There was always going to be a place called Coombe Dingle at some point in this story.) Me and my housemate Nick, who was doing a Town and Country Planning degree at the Poly’s Unity Street site, turned out for a couple of matches. My chief memory is joining Nick at the crease in one of them when he was on 50 and accompanying him to his century, my contribution to the partnership was two.

 

On July 30th 1977 I took my younger brother Geoff, who was 13 at the time, to see Imran Khan make his Sussex debut in a County Championship game against Gloucestershire at Cheltenham, a beautiful college ground, overlooked by an equally splendid college chapel. Sussex won the toss and batted first. Future captain John Barclay made a century and current captain Peter Graves scored a half century. There was great anticipation when Imran strode to the wicket at number 5 with the score on 244-4. He was out for one. He did however open the bowling just before the close of play with Sussex having declared on 309-7. He bowled four overs with considerable zip and immediately had Sadiq out for nought. This early breakthrough was offset somewhat by the imperious Zaheer scoring a double century the following day and another century in the second innings. Gloucestershire went on to win by 8 wickets. What I remember most about that match though was John Snow, during his opening bowling spell late in the day, coming over to field at the boundary right next to where we were seated. The more boorish home supporters, emboldened by rough cider, started to give him some proper west country stick. Snow’s response was to bend forward slightly and pat his backside in an immaculate kiss my arse gesture.

 

John Augustine Snow is my all-time cricket hero. He took 31 wickets in the 1970-71 winter tour of Australia where he helped England win back the Ashes from Australia and wound up the home crowd something rotten. In the final test, again fielding on the boundary, he was pelted with missiles and manhandled by a drunk, an incident that led to captain Ray Illingworth taking his players off the field. Snow was a constant thorn in the side of everyone, especially the Sussex committee which he rightly regarded as fools and incompetents. When he signed copies of his autobiography, the aptly named Cricket Rebel at George’s Bookshop in Park Street Bristol I waited patiently in line.                   

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“when an old cricketer leaves the crease”

 

I first saw Roy Harper in Hyde Park in July 1970 on a bill that included The Edgar Broughton Band, Kevin Ayers and The Whole World and Pink Floyd performing Atom Heart Mother with a small orchestra. Harper played early in the afternoon. The Hells Angels had already acted like arseholes by revving their convoy of bikes through the crowd to the front of the stage. Harper made a pointed reference to them when he performed I Hate The White Man and towards the end of his set he dedicated a song to them. Everyone assumed he was going to sing Hells Angels from the recently issued Flat Baroque and Berserk LP. He played South Africa. “Better to use soft words than a fist” he once said of a song that eventually appeared on the Life Mask album.

 

I saw Harper a few times after that, usually as a support act, and I was in the front row at the Colston Hall in Bristol in 1976 when suffering from heavy flu he was the headliner. A week or so later I went down with the flu. Aside from giving me the flu Harper composed the greatest cricket song of all time. When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease is one for the ages. Like Pinter’s ode to Len Hutton it contains multitudes.  It lays bare the beauty of the game in images that are both universal and quintessentially English. It namechecks and is dedicated to John Snow and Geoffrey Boycott and to the recently deceased “Neville Cardus, who I hope would have enjoyed this song.” Cardus was a name barely known to me at the time but in the intervening years, thanks chiefly to Harper’s initial prompt, I have tried to read every word of his that I can lay my hands on.  When I moved to Manchester in 1991 I often used to gaze at the upper floor of 64 Bridge Street in Manchester and think ‘young Neville Cardus worked in the Insurance Office up there between 1904 and 1912.’ It was still an insurance office ninety years later but it’s not now. But then again steam trains no longer run from Manchester Great Central to Old Trafford cricket ground either.

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Like Alan Bennett’s A Day Out, When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease nails the poignancy of impermanence and the bittersweet allure of halcyon days. And, as befitting the pen of a dope smoking hippie, it conveys a touch of the mystical too. The fleeting glimpse of the ‘twelfth man at silly mid-on’ could be any or all of us. Or as Harper says,  it might just be the beer talking. Others will have their own interpretation. I think the apparitional twelfth man at silly mid-on the game’s own eternal, its history, its past participants, its ghosts.

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“there’ll be one mad dog and his master”

 

By the time John Snow’s Cricket Rebel was published in 1976, Sussex themselves were the rebel county. A year to the week after I’d watched Imran’s county debut, Sussex were the subject of a cover story and six-page feature in Time Out magazine. ‘The savage failure of Tony Greig’s Sussex revolution’ it said on the cover with a Mick Brownfield caricature of Greig receiving a cricket ball to the left eye. Inside there was a grotesque depiction of Grieg avoiding a bouncer, inked by Ralph Steadman. The six foot seven Greig was impossible to ignore. From the moment he scored 159 in his County debut against Lancashire I’d had him down as one to watch. I have a clear memory of sitting on a bench up the rec in the summer of 1971, the year I left school, and betting a mate that he’d be playing for England within a year. In fact, he’d be captain within four. He shook up England. He shook up Sussex, he certainly shook up the county’s antediluvian committee. He walked it like he talked it, tall and brash and he shot from the hip. He was absolutely my kind of guy. He didn’t make Sussex any better (we finished bottom of the County Championship under his steerage) but god, he was the antithesis of everything that made them mediocre. He and Snow were always causing trouble. They were always being fined or censured for this or that misdemeanour. And when we tapped up Imran from Worcestershire there were calls for Sussex to be expelled from the County Championship. Sussex were suddenly punk rock cricket.

 

That Imran-era side should have won the County Championship and probably would have done in 1981 had it not been for a series of ifs, buts and maybes. If Nottinghamshire hadn’t prepared their wickets so effectively for the formidable pace attack of Rice and Hadlee, maybe if we hadn’t had one more game abandoned than them, but for that reckless run chase against Kent and one dodgy umpiring decision against Notts in the top of the table clash, who knows?  John Barclay was an inspired all or nothing captain. but with hindsight he perhaps made a mistake in dispensing with Kepler Wessels in 1980, believing it illogical to try and juggle three overseas players (Imran, big Garth Le Roux and Wessels) in the squad when only two could play. This was a period of great overseas imports into the Sussex side. Javid Miandad, the supreme irritant and wind up merchant had helped us win the Nat West in 1978 but a year before that I’d noticed a new name, K Wessels, making a triple century in a pre-season second XI friendly - this at a time when the sports pages still printed details of second XI games or indeed printed any cricket coverage at all. “Never mind the elusive 1000 runs in May”, one cricket reporter noted, here was a player who seemed intent on scoring 1000 runs in April. Three into two didn’t seem to matter when the three were Imran, Javid and Kepler. Miandad played the majority of one day matches, Wessels the county games and Imran played in just about everything. Wessels was a magnificent opening batsman. He was the county’s leading run-scorer by a mile each season he was with us and in that last summer before his services were harshly dispensed with he scored 254 in a match against Middlesex. It seemed daft not to keep him.

 

Sussex played with a wonderful spirit in 1981 but any hope that they were going to overhaul Notts seemed to be dashed in the title run in by the seeming willingness of everyone Notts played to roll over for them, often by the end of the first day. While we went on nail-biting run chases, the likes of Northamptonshire were being skittled out for 85 by Hadlee and Rice.  No matter how many draws we turned into wins thanks to John Barclay’s inspired declarations Notts carried on cruising. I became so incensed by what seemed like pro-Notts bias in the morning radio sports bulletin that I phoned up the BBC one day to remind them that there were still two teams in this Championship chase. Someone must have taken note of my crank call because the very next sports bulletin commenced with a conciliatory “we should remind everyone of course that it is still mathematically possible for Sussex to….” We went into the final match two points behind in the table and needing the struggling Glamorgan to do us a big favour and knock Notts off their perch. Glamorgan were all out for 60 before lunch on the first day.

 

“the clock turns back to reflect.”

 

Between 1980 and 1983 I lived 100 yards from Clapham North tube station, just two stops down the Northern line from the Oval. I went there often, mostly to Sunday League matches but on Friday July 25th to the second day’s play of the fourth test match against the West Indies. We were supposed to go on the opening day but my brother was late in getting from Kings Cross to our flat and was ringing our doorbell just at the moment Richie Benaud was commencing the BBC morning commentary with the words ‘it’s a sell out today’. I’d put off a job interview for some teaching work at HM Borstal Feltham to go to the match, and so while I hastily rescheduled the interview for that afternoon my wife and brother popped along to the Oval to buy tickets for day two. I started the job at Feltham three weeks later. In the interim my world changed utterly.

 

We sat in the baking heat in front of the gas towers and watched England bat. Within a few overs West Indies captain Clive Lloyd pulled up suddenly with a hamstring injury while chasing a ball to the boundary. It was like watching a gazelle being shot. Later in the day, as the West Indies batted, the row of Aussies behind us grew increasingly boorish with beer and hot sun. “White West Indians, are you?’ was one of the less unsavoury jeers as we sportingly clapped a well struck four by Alvin Kallicharan. We were glad to get home.

 

“The old boy was pretty sunburned when he got back,” said Dad of my brother when we spoke on the phone the following Tuesday. Mum and Dad had arranged to come and see us that weekend and I instructed him on the tube route to take from Kings Cross. Southbound Northern Line. Morden train. “Get return tickets” I instructed him in case he wasn’t familiar with Red Ken’s new fare policy. “Get return tickets” were the last words I ever spoke to my Dad. He died of a heart attack two nights later.

 

I’ve written about this life changing period in great detail in my memoir Ad Lib : Repeat To Fade, and about how my Dad’s death, followed by my Mum’s a year later, effectively brought to an end Act One of my life. I also wrote about how John Arlott’s retirement at the end of the summer of 1980 was consumed within the greater heartache. I won’t reprise any of it here, except to remind myself again that the morning after Dad died I hitch hiked up the A1 to Sandy. I was grateful for the lift and for the exchange of pleasantries and small talk as I hauled my numbed and empty shell home to a fatherless house. And what did we talk about, me and my driver, as he carried a cargo of grief he won’t ever have been aware of? We talked about the cricket of course. The shared moment of all shared moments.

 

For the two remaining years that I was living in Clapham North, CLR James was living 20 minutes’ walk away in Railton Road. I knew people in the Railton Road squats and I always intended to go down and visit the great man, if only to get him to sign my copy of Beyond A Boundary. I was never normally shy of knocking on doors, or pushing them to see if they would open. On this occasion though, semi-detached from purpose and drive as I was, I never did make that short walk to Brixton. I regret it still. Life’s too short not to act on your impulses.

 

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“more than just yarns of their days”

 

In my early to mid-teens in the late 1960s we usually did one of two things on Bank Holidays. Either we’d go to Huntingdon races or the family would head over to Wickstead Park in Kettering. If it was the latter and there was a home match on I’d ask to be dropped at the County Ground at Northampton to watch Colin Millburn, Roger Prideaux (later to play for Sussex) Mushtaq Mohammed and young David Steele and co in the County Championship. A bottle of pop, a sandwich spread sandwich, and money for crisps would last me all day. I’d hang about by the pavilion after lunch with all the other young autograph hunters and get the players of both sides to sign my scorecard which I’d invariably throw away as soon as I got home. I don’t ever remember being bored.

 

In 1984, a year after my marriage broke up I moved into my sister’s council house in the St James area of Northampton and took a job teaching General Studies to disinterested day release students at Booth Lane FE college - the absolute nadir of my teaching career. In the summer months I’d often stop off at the cricket ground after work to watch an early evening hour or two of play. I didn’t have the same free and easy arrangement with the gate man that I’d enjoyed in Bristol, but it was reduced admission after tea anyway and the cricket was usually agreeable. I’m probably imagining this but it invariably seemed to involve watching David Steele and David Capel scoring a steady half century each before stumps were drawn.

 

If this all gives an impression of bucolic mid-80s evenings in the setting sun’s glaze, with a confident call for ‘two’ as the two David’s built their partnership, let me counteract that with a memory of a Benson and Hedges Cup Quarter Final I attended in June 1985 between Northamptonshire and Kent. I remember taking my radio Walkman along as I wanted to listen to the women’s French Open final at Roland Garros between Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert – a repeat of the previous year’s final and a match which turned out to be a classic. The cricket not so. The match had limped into a second reserve day due to rain. Inadequately dressed as I was for an English June, I was so cold after an hour that I didn’t even make it to lunch before heading home to ward off hypothermia. Dickie Bird and John Jameson drew stumps not long after that. The game was abandoned as a draw and Kent went through on whatever it was they used to do before the Lewis-Duckworth method.

 

On a sunnier Northampton day I remember sitting next to a group of volatile ladies at the football ground end, who earnestly and in great depth discussed with no little outrage how the current laws of cricket might be altered in order to stop the West Indies test team using so many fast bowlers. And on another day not long after that I remember a spectator throwing a banana onto the field of play as Andy Roberts, one of the finest fast bowlers I ever saw, walked out to bat for Leicestershire in a Nat West Trophy match. It was August 1st 1984, four years to the day since my Dad had died. The incident happened right by the pavilion and players balcony, within sight of the press box. I looked in vain in the papers the next day to see if anyone had mentioned this shameful incident. I remember the little lad in front me of rocking with laughter and looking up at his Dad who was rocking with laughter too, and all around me there was shared approval at this hilarious act. “And so, in an instance the die is cast for another generation of blinkered unquestioning racism” it said in the letter recalling the incident that I sent to the Guardian some time later in response to another racist incident where Viv Richards waded into the Western Super Mare crowd after a similar moronic outburst. “Lots of people are racialist inside cricket grounds because lots of people are racialist outside cricket grounds too” I said in that same letter, which the Guardian printed prominently.

“Or it could be the sting in the ale”

 

In the late summer of 1987, around the time that Ibiza returnees, Rampling, Oakenfold, Holloway et al were plotting acid house, I started playing competitive cricket again for the first time in over 10 years. I was living in cosy domesticity in a grade two listed cottage in the village of Brigstock in Northants with my girlfriend, and doing the M.Phil which would lead to my first published book.  Often on a Sunday afternoon walk around the village I’d grow wistful as I passed a match being played in the hollow of a meadow, owned, as much of Northamptonshire was, by the Spencer family. One day in late August inquisitiveness got the better of me so I walked down to the pavilion and made tentative enquiries. ‘We’ve been short of players all year’ they said, and I was in. I made my debut in the penultimate game of the season, bowled unspectacularly but competently and strained my groin – not in the match itself but the day afterwards when still tender from my exertions I stepped off a high kerb with my leading right foot and twisted my body left to look for oncoming traffic, thus replicating my bowling action. That’s when I did it. I clearly hadn’t disgraced myself in the match (or they were still woefully short of competent players) because my name appeared on the team list in the newsagent’s window for the final match of the year, as it did for most of the following season too.

 

I had great fun playing village cricket. Brigstock was typical of many a local side in that it was made up of a pleasing miscellany of incongruities all united by a desire to put on grass stained whites on a Sunday afternoon and have a few drinks afterwards. As well as arrivistes like me there was a dreamboat young bowler with piercing blue Terence Stamp eyes called Nathan who was off to art school once he got his A levels. There was a junior exec in his early 20s, a fine opening batsman, with a top of the range car he had been caught doing a ton in and who had probably already earned more money than my Dad did in a lifetime. There were the obligatory three brothers (all good, all different in temperament from each other.) There was a head in the cloud aesthete and a hard-nosed Saturday team talent who curbed his competitive nature just enough to fit into a Sunday side. And there was the already good enough school kid who only spoke to me once and that was to tell me my umpiring was shit when I betrayed the local biases of adjudication by giving him out LBW to a yorker. It was plumb. There was a clear red ball mark on his white boot.  One Sunday the ball whizzed past one of the brothers in the slips and he didn’t move a muscle. “Last night’s drugs haven’t worn off yet” he deadpanned. When the 1989 Glastonbury Festival happened, we had to cancel that weekend’s match because half the team was going.

 

We were captained by the splendidly named John Smoker, the local Liberal parish councillor who true to his surname had the lived-in face of a man who had devoted a fair proportion of his life to removing the seal from a packet of 20. John had a ruthlessly democratic approach to Sunday cricket. The batting order was chosen purely on merit, but apart from deciding which of the brothers was to open the bowling, everyone who could turn an arm got their requisite two or three overs. And when I say ‘ruthlessly democratic’ I mean you got precisely two or three overs regardless of how well you were bowling. After ten years away from the game I found I could still put it on a sixpence and at that level of cricket people are going to play and miss occasionally so the occasional wicket was assured. Sure, there were cold wet days when I could barely grip the ball and bowled woefully. John would throw me a sympathetic towel and I’d still get my allotted overs, albeit off a timid and chastened two-pace run up as I prayed for the agony of long hops and wides to be over. On other days I’d be sufficiently in the zone to get a mention in the Evening Telegraph. (I used to live for those ‘Chapman 3-18’ moments.) I’d still get taken off after my allotted spell. Everyone was.

 

One week, John got even more democratic than usual and asked me to open the bowling. I felt suitably sheepish and heard the brothers muttering under their breath. However, it led to the village cricket moment I have dined out on ever since. The young competent looking lad at the other end took guard and I bowled him clean through the gate first ball. I was as shocked as I was pleased. John felt vindicated. Even the brothers offered their begrudging praise.  I took another wicket and finished my spell. Halfway through the innings there was a change of umpires. “Here Rob” said the incoming official. “You didn’t half piss off their opening batsman.” As everyone gathered round to listen he told us the tale. “Yeah, he smashed his bat against the wall and kicked the chairs and benches. Played merry hell.” Turns out he was ‘a ringer’, common enough in the small-town game, when someone is bussed in, usually from a higher level of cricket to bolster a side’s chances. In this case the young ringer turned out to play for Northamptonshire Colts, the county’s third team, and had clearly fancied a bit of Sunday batting practice again the village yokels. Let the score book record the evidence. Bowled Chapman O.