The Character of Cricket Page 15

  After Harris came Ivo Bligh. Then Percy Chapman, who won six Tests in succession against Australia. Then Colin Cowdrey, most famous of all Kent moderns. Cowdrey is one of four Kent trustees; his son Chris is the present county captain; and his bat is in the pavilion. Cowdrey was the hero of the last great Kent victory over the Australians in 1975. Set to make 354 at more than a run a minute, Cowdrey brought them home with 151 not out.

  That was Kent’s sixth victory over the Australians, but there was never a hope of a repetition in the summer of ’85. ‘Bit of a massacre,’ I heard one member mutter into his gin. ‘Well, it’s a stupid side to put out,’ said the second member, gazing thoughtfully at the 46-year-old Luckhurst. ‘Tomorrow will be a bit of a waste of time.’ And it was.

  Odd how little things can colour your view of a place. There was a small group of drunks standing by the public seats to the right of the Woolley stand. They drank beer and also passed around what looked like a bottle of rum. By soccer standards they were entirely harmless, but their incessant boorish shouts were, well, boorish. When Jeff Thomson came in to bat they barracked, only they weren’t sober or clever enough to barrack. They just belched out a sort of porcine ‘Oi, Oi, Oi’ noise. And it was irritating that the Kent team seemed so feeble; and that somehow it didn’t seem to be a very important occasion. And I didn’t like that car park feel.

  Yet there was Derek Underwood wheeling away; and Border and Ritchie did bat beautifully; and the Canterbury cricket week has been delighting Kentish crowds since 1842; and it is a unique tree...

  Cannonball Cricket, Hounslow

  As far as cricket is concerned I think I may have seen the future. I found it in a converted warehouse in Hounslow, and it works. The surroundings are hardly picturesque. Jets bound for Heathrow thunder overhead only seconds, surely, from touchdown. There is a certain leafiness about Hounslow Heath, but that is several minutes’ walk away. Green Lane, down which you drive after leaving the Staines Road, also sounds the sort of place for a cricket pitch, but Tamian Way where the future lies is wall to wall concrete and high mesh fencing. This is twentieth-century industrial estate. Dispiriting desert.

  Nevertheless this is a place endorsed by David Gower, the England captain himself, who grins out of a coloured brochure and invites everyone to ‘come and see us for a free trial game.’ This is the home of Cannonball Cricket – ‘It’s Fast! It’s Fun! – It’s For Everyone!’ It was a warehouse, but now it is 25,000 square feet of indoor cricket ‘courts’ – six of them, complete with specially designed wickets that bend in any direction and electronic scoreboards for each court.

  Its popularity is growing so fast that any claim made in this book will be out of date by the time it is published (unless I am hopelessly wrong and the whole thing has gone bust). I dare say to the purist it isn’t cricket. But it is played with the same shots and the same bowling action and the same bat. The advantages are that it is not susceptible to rain or bad light or any of the other vicissitudes of the English summer, and it is all over in about an hour and a half. And, best of all, everyone has to bowl two eight-ball overs and bat for four. No way can you languish in the deep with never a catch to drop, never a ball to bowl and never an innings to play.

  This is a genuine team game.

  When I first went to Cannonball it was midday and the place was deserted except for Colin Lumley who runs it. Lumley is a young Australian Real Tennis professional. The first year he came here he was quite surprised to find that there were no indoor cricket courts in the UK. The second time he came he was still more surprised. And the third time he was so astounded that he decided to remedy the deficiency himself. In Australia there are thirty-five such ‘centres’ in Melbourne alone; more than two hundred nationwide.

  That first day Lumley explained the rules, which like Real Tennis rules sound incredibly complicated off court but become pleasantly logical once you actually start to play. Then he bowled me a few. The ball is a lawn tennis ball in a leather case. Heavy enough to give you a sense of satisfaction if you hit it hard in the meat of the bat; not so heavy that it hurts you if it hits you in the middle. It was the first time I had been seriously bowled at since 1965, when I opened the innings against Great Tew and was out first ball. For the first time in over twenty years I thought this might be my game after all.

  I understood the principle of the thing: sixteen overs a side between two eight-man teams; taut netting off which the ball rebounds to give catches; automatic runs depending on where exactly you hit it; minus five every time you are out, and so on.

  A few nights later I came back to see the real McCoy. Every court – rather bigger than a Lawn Tennis court but smaller than a Real one – was occupied. The leagues were already over-subscribed and I was watching a Real Tennis eight called the Under Arms. Their motto, the work I suspected of the assistant Hampton Court professional Lachlan Deuchar, was ‘We’re the pits’. They were all Real Tennis players – Deuchar; his boss Chris Ronaldson, the world champion; David Johnson, the pro from Queen’s, wearing a Mumm champagne T-shirt; David Cull, the Lord’s pro; Julian Snow and Thane Warburg, two of the leading amateurs, and others.

  They were up against a team of tough-looking Pakistanis from Dulwich or thereabouts, and they lost. It was an endlessly fluctuating contest. Just as the Under Arms seemed to be on top the Pakistanis would hit a couple of sixes (full-toss into the back netting); just as David Johnson seemed to have the measure of the other side’s bowling he would serve up a couple of catches and there would be ten less on the board. In the end Deuchar and Ronaldson had too many runs to make, slogged away in a vain pursuit, and paid the price.

  You don’t even need a box, but each batsman must wear one protective glove. ‘The umpire shall determine if dress is unacceptable for play.’ If so, you won’t be allowed on court. And if you’re not wearing a matching team shirt, then it’s minus five.

  It was very noisy on court that night. The appeals were magnified by the echo in the huge warehouse. The atmosphere was exuberant – more like baseball than cricket.

  ‘It’s not a spectator sport,’ said Colin Lumley. ‘That’s the point. It’s meant to be fun to play.’

  Not cricket. But, ‘It’s Fast! It’s Fun! It’s For Everyone!’

  Some of the best players, says Lumley, have never played cricket. Even those who have are not necessarily any good. He wants it to be called simply ‘Cannonball’, with all reference to the ancient outdoor game on grass to be eliminated. He could be right. At all events the full colour sheet offering the free trial under the David Gower seal of approval does not mention the word cricket once. Instead it says, ‘CBC: A whole new ball game.’

  Maybe so.

  Taunton

  It was R.C. ‘Crusoe’ Robertson-Glasgow, best so far of the distinguished company of Somerset cricket writers, who said that ‘if you wanted to know Taunton, you walked round it with Sam Woods on a summer morning before the match.’ Sam, best so far in a distinguished company of Somerset cricket characters and all-rounders, was, in Crusoe’s words, ‘Somerset’s godfather’. There is a picture of him in the new, blood brick pavilion at Taunton: an enormous, jovial man, sitting rather far back on a small donkey. The caption does not explain the picture at all. C.B. Fry told Robertson-Glasgow that Sam, when a young man, ‘was the finest build of an athlete stripped that he ever saw.’ And: ‘He was convivial; too convivial, some thought; but I could never see that it mattered.’

  I was far too young to see Sammy Woods. Even Robertson-Glasgow only saw him ‘trundling a few down, in waistcoat and watch-chain when he was fifty-two.’ I was too young to see Robertson-Glasgow, even though he played on my prep school ground at Bishops Lydeard in the days when it was owned by Sir Denis Boles. While placing a field he once surprised his host, then on the boundary in earnest confabulation with his butler, by shouting at him, ‘Up a bit, Boles.’ Jack MacBryan the Somerset batsman was so amused at this lese-baronetcy that he had to sit down on the grass and laugh.

&
nbsp; My first glimpse of Somerset was in the summer of 1957 when they played the West Indies. It was the first time I had actually been on the Taunton ground, though the maroon coaches from Berry Brothers passed by every Thursday when we went swimming at Taunton Baths. My mother’s family came from Martock, where the vicar was Crusoe’s great-uncle, Prebendary A.P. Wickham, who kept wicket when W.G. Grace scored his hundredth hundred, 288, for Gloucestershire against Somerset. Wickham told his great-nephew that only five balls passed the doctor’s bat in the entire innings. Much the same is said of Archie Maclaren’s 424. Prebendary Wickham was behind the stumps then, too.

  I mention all this to indicate that as far as Somerset cricket and the Taunton ground are concerned I am one of nature’s fogeys. I want no changes at the Taunton ground, because it is a place I knew as a child. My Somerset cricket links go back way beyond my birth, and when I first lived in the county they were easily the worst team in the championship. Wisden said ‘general slackness’ was their greatest problem, and ‘it was no surprise when they finished bottom.’

  When I visited Taunton at the fag end of the summer of 1985 they were again clearly about to finish last in the championship, and yet this time it was a matter for almost universal surprise. With Ian Botham as skipper, and Garner to help him with the bowling and Richards to help him with the batting, how could they fail? Modern Somerset teams are seldom underdogs. In the old days they nearly always were.

  If Sammy Woods had been alive he would have found not only the team but much of town and ground unrecognisable. I am not sure I would have enjoyed walking round Taunton with Sammy Woods in the summer of 1985. Were it not for the fact that he seems to have been incorrigibly cheerful, I am not sure he would either.

  What would Sammy have made of the two Tandoori Restaurants on the short walk from railway station to ground, or the Microwave Oven Centre or the Video Shop or ‘West Country Aquatics’? Why had someone written, on the side of the bridge that crosses the River Tone, ‘Where are the Taunton Trendy Boys?’ What could it mean?

  And yet the important fixed points remain. The Quantocks still straggle away towards Minehead. Sam Woods used to hide bottles of beer about those hills, producing them with a flourish when his walking companions got thirsty. Maybe some of them are still there. St James’s church, hard by the old pavilion, still leads the little flotilla of three church towers angled away to the south-east. But here too there have been changes. The memorial tablets to the Yea family are still there, including the one to the Colonel Yea who died leading his men at the siege of Sevastopol. (He was mentioned in Raglan’s dispatches.) But there is carpet on the floor and in the Church Magazine the editorial, under a photo of a smiling priest, is headed ‘Malcolm Writes’. One wonders whether this is where the Taunton trendy boys are to be found, and why Auberon Waugh, who lives just up the road in Combe Florey, has not made a target of the Rev. Malcolm.

  At the entrance to the ground are Jack White Gates, in memory of another great Somerset cricketer. Unlike so many of the Somerset names, Jack White was a local farmer and not an import. Sometimes, on our way to the swimming baths in the fifties, our prep school bus used to get stuck behind his hay lorry. He didn’t play for England until he was thirty-seven, then went to Australia and took four for seven in six overs in the first Test, following with a match-winning thirteen in 124 overs at Adelaide. It was very hot. ‘I used a few shirts and several whisky and sodas,’ he said.

  It wasn’t like that this time in Taunton. Proper parky it was, and the rain had got under the covers round the square. Our gallant band of spectators were more optimistic than the players. Joel Garner was in jeans and Viv was in civvies too. Umpires Oslear and Hampshire kept announcing pitch inspections and spent long depressing moments with Vic Marks, the home skipper, and John Barclay of Sussex, peering at the damp around the square.

  It was a shock seeing the ground for the first time since 1976. That year I went there on Ascension Day with Christopher Hollis, sometime MP, poet, publisher and villain of that famous prep school match between Horris Hill and Summer Fields. It was the first time either of us had seen Botham. He came in when Somerset were 70 for five against the West Indies, with Wayne Daniel and Andy Roberts bowling very nastily. He wasn’t in very long, but made 56, including a six over long-stop, and 48 of them in boundaries. It was the fearlessness and the joie de vivre which were so attractive. He seemed to be absolutely in the tradition of Woods and Earle and Wellard and the great Gimblett, who hit that extraordinary maiden century in his first ever match at Frome and took sixty-three minutes over it.

  The Taunton ground in 1976 was as my aunts and great-aunts remembered it. Rickety old pavilion up at the St James’s End, screens and a few seats down the other, where the river was an invitation to the big hitter. But now all is changed. Old pavilion condemned unfit for use, new pavilion down by the Tone: result unrecognisable.

  I felt slightly as I did when I went back to my old college only a year after going down and found that my staircase had been bulldozed and replaced by a piece of sixties brutalism. Even where old institutions had survived I was reminded of time’s passage. ‘Follow Somerset County Cricket Club with Berry’s Executive Coaches’ said one hoarding. In the good old days there were just the two Berry buses. Old Mr Berry drove the pre-war charabanc and young Mr Berry – bit of a Brylcreem boy – drove the state of the art brand new coach. That was how we got to St Dunstan’s and St Peter’s at Weston-Super-Mare, struggling up Cothelstone Hill and over the Quantocks in our blue blazers. ‘Executive Coaches’ indeed. What would the headmaster, Randall Hoyle, have said?

  It is the new pavilion which has most transformed the place. Apart from that dreaded architect’s brick it is the most successful of all the new pavilions in appearance: deep balconies, high roof, clock in the middle, and a good view of the churches. I heard complaints that it looks straight into the afternoon sun. Also it is at an angle to the wicket whereas the old one was – is, unless very recently demolished – right behind the bowler’s arm.

  Inside it is light and spacious and manages to seem prosperous. Although Somerset have still to win the championship, they have been more successful in one-day competition and in 1979 carried off both the Gillette and John Player League trophies. Despite being a largely rural county they have a membership of around six thousand, including well over five hundred from Devon. As the club was founded in the Devon town of Sidmouth in 1875 after a match between the Gentlemen of the two counties, there is an appropriateness about this, and I was pleased to see a note in the pavilion which said, ‘Are you a Somerset Supporter? Do you live in Devon? Travel by Coach from Okehampton.’

  Not only is there a supporters club, there is also something called the Somerset Wyverns which is an organisation of expatriate Somerset men under the presidency of Jeffrey Archer. (One way or another Somerset has become very showbiz in recent years – a bit like Fulham in the days of Johnny Haynes and Jimmy ‘the Rabbi’ Hill.) I was approached on their behalf at Arundel by the chairman Royse Riddell and am now a member and possessor of the club tie, a vivid maroon number with a gold Wyvern – though purists apparently insist that it is a Wessex Dragon and not a Wyvern at all. I always thought they were one and the same. I am not sure about belonging to a club whose president is Jeffrey Archer, although I admit his Somerset links – he was at school at the Somerset Wellington – seem stronger than mine; but we are a good cause. Last year we gave the county a new Moto-mop. It cost five hundred pounds.

  There are some new pictures in the pavilion, notably of the great Vivian Richards. Rather good ones. He looks like a black Mr Punch, though no picture can quite convey the irresistible quality of Richards on song. The earlier team pictures have a more raffish air about them than at any other county I found. Look at Sammy Woods in 1890 in his trilby, or Sir H. Ponsonby Fane with boater, frock coat, cane and rosette. Upstairs in the committee room are one or two old scorecards. There are two from 1925. One is of the Essex match when Jack Daniel, the S
omerset skipper, made 174 in one innings and 108 in the other. He was forty-six at the time. The other is of the game when Jack Hobbs equalled and then surpassed Dr Grace’s record of 126 centuries by also scoring a century in each innings. Robertson-Glasgow took one for 144 in the first and nought for 42 in the second innings. But, as always, he described the occasion beautifully. Hobbs had been on the brink of the record for weeks.

  ‘It was a Saturday, and the rubicund face of Mr Secretary Davey smiled to its limit as he saw the crowds roll in, but turned a little paler as he watched the motion-picture experts, with their impedimenta, climb on to the tin roof of the old pavilion. Most of the West Country, and several segments of London S.E., seemed to be present; clergymen, schoolboys, cockneys, farmers, Jack White’s father on his favourite bench, and the still excited but visibly tiring cohort from Fleet Street. Even the ladies, without whom all cricket matches grow dull, forbore to discuss husbands and the contents of shop-windows, and joined in the single question – “Will he do it?”’

  He did.

  Whatever one’s views on the new pavilion, it is clear that there are plenty of Somerset people with a proper respect for the past and its heroes. J. Archer has presented the club with a Spy picture of Lionel Palairet who, with H. T. Hewett, put on 346 for the first wicket against Yorkshire here in 1892. Yeovil Town Football Club presented a silver salver in recognition of the triumphs of 1979 (‘Congratulations and our thanks for putting Somerset sport on the map’); and there is a red and gold Wyvern embroidered by Jack MacBryan of Somerset and England, the same who had to sit on the grass and laugh at Robertson-Glasgow when he said, ‘Up a bit, Boles.’ MacBryan did the embroidery in his ninetieth year.