The Character of Cricket Read online

  Jesmond

  It was the ubiquitous Winlaw who sent me to Jesmond. While I was researching this book Winlaw was really the only cricket writer I came to know. There are two sorts of cricket correspondent – the grand ones like Woodcock and Marlar who do Test matches and NatWest finals, and your jobbing journalist like Winlaw who is left with the universities or Zimbabwe or mid-week matches between struggling, unfashionable counties when there is a Test match in progress somewhere else. Because I often went to grounds during that sort of match I bumped into Winlaw several times and came to regard him as something of a talisman, a beaming figure strolling round the boundary with a choc ice in one hand. I felt he brought me good luck. Seeing Winlaw was like seeing a second magpie.

  It was at Leicester near the public seats by the car park end, hard by a dozing pensioner, that Winlaw said I must go to Close House, Corbridge, in Northumberland. Winlaw had played there against a team called the Northumberland Wanderers and the chap I should get in touch with was a man called Craig, who used to play for Winchester. Useful cricketer, Craig. Good enough to play minor county cricket for Northumberland. Winlaw rated the Close House ground as one of the prettiest in England.

  I phoned Craig soon afterwards, and he seemed a bit dubious about Close House. It was run by the Newcastle University people these days and didn’t get a lot of cricket. Yes, it was very beautiful, but the house was empty. It was, he implied, a bit sad, an echo of the leisured, moneyed past. But I was doing Jesmond, wasn’t I?

  ‘Jesmond?’ I echoed, rather foolishly.

  For a minute or two he extolled the virtues of Jesmond, headquarters of Northumberland cricket. All the pros loved coming there, he said, it was just like a Test ground with a proper pavilion and seating all the way round, and good wickets. In a week or so England were playing the Rest of the World there. I really ought to come.

  I have to admit that what really sold me on Jesmond was not the cricket but the Real Tennis. There is a court there – one of fewer than twenty in the entire county – and when I mentioned this to Craig he said that he was one of the very few serious playing members. We agreed that we would play a game together and then he would take me over to look at the cricket ground.

  It was mid-August when I drove up the motorway from the family’s holiday home in the Yorkshire Dales. By the time we reached the outskirts of Newcastle the sky had turned an ominous purple and we made the mistake of crossing under the Tyne through the tunnel instead of going into the centre of town over the bridge. Jesmond is the smart, mainly Victorian suburb to the north of Newcastle. It feels leafy and prosperous, as you’d expect of a place with a Real Tennis court and the county cricket ground.

  The tennis court turned out to be in wonderfully good order, though peculiar because it is shared with a badminton club. Before playing we had to remove the badminton nets and put up our own. The floor is also marked for badminton, which is a little confusing at first. Craig, who turned out to be a solicitor called Nick, beat me comprehensively over three sets, and by the time we got outside the purple sky had unleashed a rainstorm of tropical proportions. We drove hurriedly to the lawn tennis club, Northumberland’s answer to Queen’s, with grandstand, comfortable club house and what looked like a large number of very good grass courts fast disappearing under water.

  A beer later we adjourned to the cricket ground, less than five minutes’ drive away, tucked down a side road. There should have been a club match in progress, but the scene in the pavilion was the depressingly familiar one of disconsolate players staring bleakly out at puddles and covers. There obviously wasn’t going to be any play today and, worse still, I was seeing the ground under the least attractive conditions imaginable.

  Even so I was impressed. Even in the storm it felt more like a first– class ground than some of those which actually enjoy that status. Its most severe drawback, as John Farmer, Northumberland’s assistant secretary pointed out, was that the straight boundary is a good twenty yards short. ‘Not a lot we can do about that,’ he said. ‘There’s a road one end and consecrated ground the other.’ If you’re batting at the Osborne Road end at Jesmond you don’t have to be Botham to find it quite easy to loft a six over the bowler’s head into the cemetery.

  It feels pleasantly snug, just as Nick Craig had suggested, like a Test ground in miniature, with seats all the way round and a pavilion with bar and restaurant, clock and balcony, built in 1967, which would certainly pass muster if it was transported to Hove, say, or even Headingley. On a big match day they can cram in three and a half thousand.

  And they do get big matches. A local travel agency, Callers-Pegasus, sponsored a couple of one-day matches between an England XI and a Rest of the World XI, a ‘festival’ managed for the fifth successive year by Frank Twiselton, who used to be chairman of Gloucester. There’s an element of ‘Golden Oldie’ about the teams, but not that much. Of the ‘England’ side in 1985 only Willis was not playing Test cricket or on the fringe of it. True, one or two like Fowler were suffering from ‘loss of form’ (as perplexing an affliction as ‘writer’s block’ and not dissimilar), but this is not a bad team: Fowler, Moxon, Gatting, Lamb, Willey, Downton, Emburey, Edmonds, Allott, Willis and Cowans. ‘The Rest’ has a slightly more superannuated air about it, but if I lived in Morpeth or Hexham I think I’d have come in to have a look at them. Their team reads: Barlow (Eddie from South Africa), Richardson (Richie from the West Indies), Hookes, Greg Chappell, Kallicharran, Clive Lloyd, Wasim Raja, Roger Harper, Engineer, Holding and Rackemann.

  Other matches stir the blood too. I’m not certain I’d be there for the average championship game, even for a local Derby like the Durham match, but every so often they qualify for the NatWest Cup. In 1984, for instance, they played Middlesex at Jesmond in the first round. Middlesex batted first and Northumberland had five of them out for 84. Four of them – Barlow, Gatting, Butcher and Downton – were Test players, and the other, Wilf Slack, very nearly one. It didn’t last, alas, and Northumberland lost in the end by sixty runs.

  It is a much used ground and many of its matches are less exalted than these. The ‘Club and Ground’ play all levels of League cricket. Alnwick and Morpeth and Ashington, Tynedale and Percy Main and Benwell Hill all feature on the official fixture list. Nick Craig, who plays for Benwell Hill, says the Northumberland League is not to be sneezed at. Not long ago he survived twenty-seven overs, scoring twelve, against the fast bowling of a lithe West Indian named Courtenay Walsh, the same man I saw skittling Australians for Gloucestershire a few weeks earlier. Craig says the dour, competitive struggles of the League have quite ruined southern-style country house cricket for him.

  Truth to tell, though, he has always inclined to the gritty school of batsmanship. Read Geoffrey Moorhouse’s The Best Loved Game for an account of Craig prodding away for Northumberland in a typical minor county match. Craig said someone read out the whole droll account at a cricket dinner one night and ruined his meal. It was, he conceded, quite accurate and very funny, but Moorhouse could expect to receive a stiff letter from his firm when he had time to draft one. And the locals are a bit sceptical about Wykhamists. ‘Listen to this,’ said one cricketer at a social after Craig’s first game in the League. ‘I’ve got someone here makes Prince Charles sound like a Geordie.’

  The club was founded in 1895, and there was cricket played at Jesmond for a long time before that. In 1985, between 22 May and 12 August Jesmond staged fifty-one days of ‘Club and Ground’ cricket, eight of county, and eight of such ‘one-offs’ as the Festival games. There were only ten free days in all that time. Enthusiasm therefore runs high and yet it is a remote outpost. Plans to amalgamate with Durham and apply for first-class status foundered mainly because the costs were prohibitive but also because county cricketers would not regularly travel so far to earn their living. The Treasurer’s Report concluded: ‘There cannot be widespread optimism about 1985.’ My impression is that there has never been widespread optimism about Northumberland cricket, but it
bats on regardless out there on the boundary beyond long-off, in one of the few suburbs anywhere with a working Real Tennis court and a cemetery round two sides of the County Ground.

  Southampton

  I was looking forward to Southampton because the Hampshire County Ground was celebrating its centenary. Mr James, the club secretary, in his final year of office, told me there would be ‘modest celebrations’, centred on the Australian match in June, and suggested I might like to come down a little later when the fuss had died down. The original opening, according to John Arlott, that celebrated old Hampshire hand, now in voluntary exile in the Channel Islands, was performed on 9 May 1885 over lunch. Lord Northesk, the president of the club, was in the chair and afterwards there was a Grand Bazaar opened by the Countess. The present Earl appears not to have any connection with the county. He lives on the Isle of Man and is an authority on Charolais cattle.

  There was no match on the ground until five weeks after the lunch, when MCC came down. They out-gunned the county by two Majors (Wallace and Booth) to one (Fellowes), although Hampshire opened with a Bonham Carter. The county’s undoing was not a Major but a real Gunn, William, the Nottingham opening bat who bowled unchanged through both innings and took eleven for 85. Hampshire lost by an innings.

  Under Mark Nicholas, the young captain of the England B side, the present team are a stronger proposition. In fact, if there was a prize for the most generally successful side in 1985, Hampshire would probably have won it. Yet it went down as a season of near misses. They were just pipped for the championship and just lost to Essex in the semi-finals of the NatWest. They made the quarter-finals of the Benson and Hedges and were third in the John Player League. Ever since I can remember they have had attractive foreign opening batsmen down in Southampton. For almost twenty years from 1953, when I first took a serious interest in cricket, it was the West Indian Roy Marshall, then came the South African Barry Richards, and finally the West Indian Gordon Greenidge. I’d as soon watch Greenidge in full flow as anyone now playing. They lean heavily on him and on his compatriot Malcolm Marshall, but there are some good Englishmen there too these days.

  I was looking forward to seeing a crucial game in the closing stages of the championship when I was unexpectedly felled by – of all things – mumps! I therefore went to Southampton at the end of October when the weather was, in fact, rather better than it had been throughout August. It was a bright sunny day, ideal for cricket, but the only activity on the grass was the heavy mower roaring around the outfield while Tony Smetham, the ground maintenance manager, worked away on the ‘scarifier’, making holes in the ground. It is amazing how much grass clipping you produce when you mow a cricket field. There were two skips full of the stuff. The outfield had been cut very low but the square was growing lush and green – a curious reversal of what it looks like in summer.

  Matthew Engel, the Guardian’s cricket writer, says Hampshire are a running certainty for the Diabolical Press Box award but otherwise praises Southampton for being the most typical of the county grounds. ‘Not too posh like the Test grounds,’ he says, ‘not too red-brick and depressing like some of the Midland grounds, not too obviously – and self-consciously – pretty, like Worcester or the Kent grounds, and certainly not too drearily run down, like Bristol.’ So what does it have to offer? ‘Middlingness,’ suggests Engel. Ho Hum!

  Mr James, an avuncular figure in a Royal Artillery tie, met me at the station. He says there are two bus routes which pass reasonably close to the ground, but it is about a mile from the City Centre and the luminous yellow AA signs which are up all summer had been removed. You can gauge the sort of neighbourhood it is in from the proximity of the Bannister Park Bowling Club. On that side of the ground behind the pavilion and grandstand, white and Edwardian in style, with a new red roof, there are substantial Victorian villas. John Arlott says of the pavilion: ‘With its bright red tiles and brickwork, white woodwork, and open to the air, in perpetual optimistic expectation of sunshine, it is – or is it merely the nostalgia makes it seem so? – a generous, essentially summer place.’ Nostalgic, possibly, but not far off the mark. And there are only three executive boxes in the top of the building. Very unobtrusive too.

  There used to be a greyhound and speedway track here, but that has vanished, and along one side of the ground are some modern maisonettes with huge plate glass windows affording one of the best free views in modern county cricket. Along another is what looks like a modern council estate. Apart from the pavilion area the stands are exceedingly utilitarian. The plastic bucket seat has not yet come to Southampton. The stands are little more than scaffolding with wooden benches. Mr James says it’s a grand place when it’s full. But it has to be admitted that it is a bit dull when it is empty. The most amusing building is the old mock-Tudor home team dressing-room. The least amusing is the office block, opened by H.S. Altham in 1956 – ugly without and cramped within.

  The most spectacular new development has been the squash and social centre near the main entrance, built at a cost of £300,000 in an attempt, as Mark Nicholas says, ‘to redress the wrong – and red – side of the county’s balance sheet.’ Mr James was keen to point out that it was the ‘County Cricket Club Squash and Social Centre’ and very much part of the club – not a sort of interloper. Indeed he was adamant all the time that the Hampshire CCC was a private members’ club. It is a point not always emphasised elsewhere.

  The squash and social centre is not a thing of great beauty but it is very well appointed. There are four squash courts, two cricket nets, a gym and jacuzzi, restaurant, bar, dining-rooms and a disco exercise studio ‘incorporating California Workout, Disco Exercise Classes, Aerobics and Fitness Programmes’. They even boast ‘Beauty Treatments and Health Advice available for both members and non-members’. I am not sure what ‘Lordship’ Tennyson would have made of that.

  His photograph, together with that of all the other Hampshire captains, is on the stairs. He looks enormous and the epitome of pugnaciousness. A group of dark-suited executive lunchers passed by while I was there and one of them remarked, blasphemously, ‘Funny how once their career is over, they just sort of vanish.’ Vanish indeed. One former captain, Ronnie Aird, is now joint patron of the club with Lord Denning, while another, Cecil Paris, is the club’s president. Lord Tennyson, grandson of the laureate, was captain from 1919 to 1933, which means that he must presumably have captained the side which beat Nottingham on 23 May 1930 and produced the most eccentric sight of the entire Nottinghamshire side fielding in lounge suits, with Barrett and Voce in overcoats and several men in hats. At the beginning of the last day Hampshire only needed a single run to win with five wickets standing. Notts couldn’t be bothered to get changed. A.W. Carr bowled and had the winning runs struck off his second ball to Kennedy. The photograph is proudly displayed outside the Desmond Eagar Room.

  The prominence given to Eagar’s name around the Southampton ground is scarcely surprising, because for years he was the most significant cricketing figure in the county. His batting average was only just over 21, and his bowling average 62, but he was captain from 1946 to 1957, combining the captaincy with the role of secretary and continuing as secretary until his early death in 1977. It was he, more than anyone, who was responsible for building the side that won Hampshire’s first ever championship in 1961.

  There is a jolly montage of photographs of that famous occasion, which happened down the road in Bournemouth (now technically in Dorset). The rather fuzzy black-and-white pictures show action and celebration, in both of which activities Ingleby-Mackenzie, a captain in the Tennyson mould, is taking part and looking immensely cheerful. The photographer credited with capturing these moments is one E.P. Eagar, Desmond’s son, and now the most successful cricket photographer on the circuit. He has improved as a photographer since then.

  ‘This is a story I have been waiting fifteen years to write,’ said ‘Nomad’ in the Southern Evening Echo, while The Times described them as ‘the heirs of Hambledon
’ and those ancient Hampshire heroes who beat everyone in sight ‘on Broadhalfpenny Down so long ago’. The inimitable Swanton wrote: ‘It is a slight exaggeration to imagine the Hampshire dressing-room as a focus for trainers and tipsters with private wires to Newmarket and Burlington Street. At the same time, Ingleby-Mackenzie rules with a light touch and plays cricket with a smile that is reflected in his team. This is not the worst reason why Hampshire will be hailed as the welcome and popular champions of 1961.’

  It is sometimes said that nothing very momentous ever happened on the county ground here, and yet it has not all been ‘middlingness’. In the administration block they preserve the scorecard of the 1952 game when they got Kent out for 32 and 91 and Shackleton took twelve for 67 and Cannings eight for 55. John Arlott recalls the day Bradman went to his thousand runs in May with a four off a Jack Newman full-toss. In 1912 the county beat the Australians here by eight wickets, thanks largely to Mead’s 160 and Kennedy’s eleven wickets. No other county beat the Australians till Surrey in 1956. But the best day ever must have been in 1928, when the West Indies came to Southampton. Constantine, bowling very fast, took the first four for 24, and at 86 for five ‘Lordship’ came in. He and Newman proceeded to put on 313 and Tennyson made 217 in four hours with a six and 27 fours. Oddly enough the sixth wicket has been the most prolific in Hampshire records. At the top of the stairs by the secretary’s office is the silk scorecard from 1899 when Captain Wynyard and Major Poore put on 411 against Somerset. There is still a handsome silver cup inscribed with Major Poore’s name. It sits in a corner cupboard in the secretary’s office looking unwanted.

  That was at Taunton, though, and it is true that too many of the great Hampshire achievements have been away from home. Witness the scorecard of ‘A match is never lost until it is won’ presented by ‘Friends in Winchester’. It was June 1922. Warwickshire made 223 and bowled out Hampshire for 15. When Hampshire followed on they made 521 and then got their hosts all out for 158. Funny old game!