Read the first chapter of my new book “Fifty Not Out” on sale now priced at £Donations to BVCC Juniors. Available at no decent book shops and doubles up as good kindling or a table prop!
1 – I’m Franz Beckenbauer
“Too many people grow up. That’s the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up. They forget. They don’t remember what it is like to be 12 years old.”Walt Disney!
I grew up totally obsessed by sport; God knows why because it is a fact that I have never been better than mediocre at my utmost best and generally hovered wildly and inconsistently between poor and (very occasionally) not bad. But that is the beauty of sport, or indeed anything that one chooses to take up as a pastime; simply put, it does not matter how good or how bad you are as long as you give your best and have the character and desire to try to do better next time.
There are so many spin-offs in life that you gain through the highs and lows of sport that set you up to deal with all manner of challenges in later life. In addition, the friendships formed, sometimes in alliance, sometimes in opposition, occasionally as victors and many times as vanquished – chastened accordingly – are the best you can ever have. I still love sport now, although the allure of the very top echelons of most sports is fading fast, tarnished by the influx of television money and the conversion of many sports to sanitised entertainment shows for the titillation of the privileged subscribers
You should not need to be rich or have immaculate facilities at your disposal to enjoy sport; growing up as kids all we needed was open space and whatever “kit” we could beg, steal or borrow. I remember vividly my very first cricket bat passed over the garden fence by our neighbour, Fred Dawson, a lovely, genial old guy with a broad love of sport especially cricket, and at the time a member of the local Bradford League big boys: Undercliffe CC. That’s the bat I am holding in my garden with a grip not from the coaching manual and far too much bottom hand if I allow myself a stern coach’s gaze.
The First Thing I Ever Took To Bed
Fred knew that I had just joined nearby Bolton Villas CC, which compared with Undercliffe at that time was a bit like comparing Bradford City to Manchester United, so was keen to help where he could. One day, into his garage he went and came out beaming with his old pride and joy – a Gray Nicolls bat, the prized brand of all. It was so dark from years of embedded linseed oil that it looked like a wooden Joan Collins. As a somewhat small 10 year old, it almost towered over me as it was a Size 6, a man-sized bat now complete with a pip-squeak new owner.
And so my dad offered to cut it down effectively lopping a few inches off the bottom with his rusty saw (did Geoffrey Boycott start like this?), which meant that I could just about pick it up. It had no gaudy stickers like today’s expensive, high fashion creations; it was just a bat but a bloody Gray Nicolls at that! This was the brand I had dreamed about with that distinctive red stripe down the back and the knowledge that most of the best players in the world used these.
I think it was the first thing I ever took to bed and cuddled; I spent many an hour sanding and re-oiling, topping up its tan, before tormenting my mum late into the night with a constant thud-thud-thud of a ball (in a stolen pair of her tights) “knocking” it in. This was a little bit of overkill as you generally knock a bat in when new and this was probably over 30 years old but it was new to me and we had to get used to each other. And when winter came I duly ruined one of my pillowcases by wrapping up my best friend for the winter complete with another smearing of oil and gently placing my pride and joy into hibernation because Fred told me that’s what you did. He also told me not to store it near a radiator which was okay as we did not have any.
All The Gear, No Idea
In later life as new theories on bats emerged I had to adapt my faithful friend as I did not have the money to go out and buy one of the new bats displayed at local sports shops like Carters and Knuttons in Bradford where you could buy sports equipment from people who knew what they were selling you. Today the independents have been almost obliterated from our high streets by the new nationals such as Sports Direct, JD Sports & JJB Sports (now defunct too).
Reflecting society in general the provision of sports equipment has become big business but these monster sheds are generally staffed by witless kids with no knowledge whatsoever of sport, which is just as well because most of the rubbish they are selling is often barely fit for purpose. Avoid them like the plague if you are serious about sport and support the last few independents for you will miss them when they are gone. I recently shocked Pete Graham, proprietor of the excellent PC Sports with my intention to buy a new bat, aged 50; although grateful for the business I think Pete was half tempted to question my sanity. .
My new bat is a simple, no-frills affair, albeit the stickers are bright. When Gray Nicolls brought out the Scoop bat with its distinctive hollowed back many years ago, the theory was that the design allowed the surplus weight to be distributed to the edges; with the amount of edges I get these days this makes sense? My reaction years ago was simply to get my dad’s wood chisel and planer out, risking losing a few fingers, to replicate the new innovation as best as my non-existent wood-working skills allowed. When I finally graduated to a new bat I kept Fred’s old Gray Nicolls like a dead body for post-mortem experiments, slavishly copying new innovations from time to time.
Bob Willis And The Cheese Grater Bat
One such experiment copied the Bob Willis endorsed bat of the time. As most will know Willis was a fast bowler for Warwickshire and England and now commentates for Sky Sports in a manner guaranteed to knock you out faster than a dose of sleeping pills. How he ever got to endorse a bat is beyond belief because he was, from memory, little more than the traditional number 11; in other words he was what we all term a “walking wicket” and, at best, a good old “slogger”.
His bat makers Duncan Fearnley brought out a new concept with holes drilled through the middle of the bat to allegedly increase its aero-dynamics, thereby increasing the critical bat speed at the point of impact. Where the design fell down was that because there was so little wood left on point of impact, bat speed often resulted in bat explosion with the owner left holding only a handle. To test it on a proven number 11 was perhaps a touch optimistic as well, as they are not known for middling many balls.
No matter, I decided to subject my faithful bat this time to my dad’s drill and, miraculously, emerged still with all fingers intact and a bat that looked like a holed piece of brown cheese. If this appears a touch cavalier, I had moved on by then as I was the proud owner of a new Senior Counties bat, handmade at the factory near Dewsbury and well known as “unofficial” suppliers to many on the county circuit including, allegedly, Sir Geoffrey.
Senior Counties And The Cushion Grip Handle
These were seriously good because they were individually made with care and high skill – I still would have preferred an SS Jumbo at that time simply because Viv Richards had one, but he could lift it and that’s where the comparison fails to even start. With Senior Counties though you got to visit the factory and choose the bit of wood that would be the controller of your hopes and dreams for the next few seasons. A week later you would come back to collect with another pair of stolen tights wrapped around an old ball awaiting the pre-season knocking in, which would begin around November.
Commercially cricket was light years behind where it is today and generally the only logos in sight were those on the bats. The whispered rumour of the time was that Sir Geoffrey, although contracted to and wielding a Slazenger bat, actually got his from Senior Counties – just like me – and simply applied Slazenger stickers. I suppose they could have detected this as the Senior Counties bat had a unique cushion grip handle; most that did not have one simply replicated this by slipping several extra rubbers on the bat handle and the older lags said it was a bit like wrapping your hands around a donkey’s dick – not that I ever tried.
Over time, Senior Counties simply vanished under the commercial pressure from the wave of new, mass-produced bats that were inferior in every way to the marvellous blades they had manufactured for generations. Progress this was definitely not, and today’s bats have more stickers than a Formula One Car and tend to react like one when they hit anything solid; a definite case of style over substance.
The Dirty Game
If cricket kept me obsessed in the summer then football did the same in winter and the two seasons seemed to respect each other in the way one ended and the other started almost seamlessly. Today, in large part thanks to Sky TV money, football is a year round assault on the senses and is never away from our screens. Growing up, football seemed to be much more of a sport and far less of a circus than today’s over-paid and over-rated peak time drama shows with a foreign legion of B-list actors.
True enough England still flattered to deceive, believing with a degree of deluded arrogance that only we English can truly muster, that we deserved much more than a place amongst the also-rans at each major tournament. And although there were plenty of shady characters in those days, comparing them with the seedy, sometimes invisible crookedness that stains the game today is difficult to do, especially because of the obscene amount of money that modern day football is awash with.
Back then it was largely all about a ball, a few mates and a couple of coats down as goal posts. Old sleazy himself, Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s President and self appointed Dictator of World Football would have loved our approach given his aversion to goal line technology. If a ball was adjudged to have crossed the non-existent line you simply adjusted the offending duffle coat on the ground and made sure the line was wonkier next time. The fact that a character like Blatter is the game’s figurehead sums up football and all it represents these days.
We played most of our football on a spare bit of grass at the cricket club and occasionally, if we were brave, on the actual outfield itself awaiting the arrival of the groundsman and ready to grab our coats and exit through the closest garden. Our old “pitch” is now the clubhouse car park but given our ability back in those days the windows, which would have been situated behind one of the goals, would have been in little danger.
In truth most of us were useless but I doubt whether the likes of Messi and Ronaldo would have been able to dribble on our lunar landscape of a playing surface. And so rather than idolise the more crafted and skilled players of the age, we all became defenders, keen on mastering the assault from behind and the invisible tug of the shirt to haul back somebody much quicker, which in my case was most people. I never forgot those early lessons in later life.
The ball we played with would vary from one of those horrible plastic things that burnt a mark on your thighs for weeks if it hit you – which was okay if you fancied “Mitre” being tattooed on your leg for free – to very occasionally, a shiny new “leather” ball that looked great until it actually rained and very quickly dropped to bits, gasping like an asthmatic old man as it died a rapid death. Out came the inner bladder (few questioned what became of these), the laces were salvaged and at least somebody had a new “leather” hat.
Billy’s Goalposts
Then one year we actually got real goals courtesy of my best mate’s dad: Billy Stockdale. This was fine until we realised that when son Allan, aka Duck, had to go in so too did the goal posts and it was back to the coats. Imagine Man United having to dismantle the goal posts with Fergie still checking the minutes of extra time remaining? Often it was wet, muddy and cold but nobody cared because we were outside having fun, competing hard and although we did not realise it, forging friendships as well. And as I said, no matter how bad you were, you just wanted to get better and would try anything to achieve this.
Although you could not classify us as street kids, we were so poor that, at times when our equipment failed us, we had to get inventive as Duck described to me many years later.
“One thing I do remember was the time our plastic football burst. We were that keen to carry on playing, I had this bright idea of setting a small fire in the cricket milk crate to try and mould the plastic over the hole. If you remember the only thing we achieved was to totally melt the milk crate into a plastic puddle and for Jonathon Elliott to grass me up to Billy resulting in clip round my ear in front of all my mates. This also delayed milk crate cricket for some weeks until we could nick another one.”
Rain, Cold, Mud…the Age Of Innocence
Even though we had a total “meltdown” of our equipment, a “grass” in the camp and evidence of parental “brutality”, little could quench our passion for sport and the great outdoors. And so it was that I convinced my mum to buy me a pair of new boots in my last desperate attempt to convert to a striker – rather than be consigned to the defensive lines for the next thirty plus years – aged eleven.
One cold and rainy Saturday afternoon, well after the cricket season had ended, I knocked on Duck’s door complete with brand new Adidas Beckenbauer boots endorsed by the eponymous, legendary West German captain. These were the first real leather boots I had ever owned and I had unceremoniously dumped my old Woolworths “Winit” boots back in my mum’s bin. The Woolies boots had three stripes in a copy cat attempt at mimicking the famous Adidas trademark and could be disguised with a heavy application over the stripes of black dubbing; but they were such a bad fit and so non-breathable they gave me blisters and made my feet smell like a sewer.
It was now time now to see if these boots would change my destiny – oblivious to the fact that old Franz was a high-class defender not a lethal goal machine – and I was likely to be neither. Duck had also got a new pair of the same boots as well – this was serious stuff – so off we went to the field. Three hours later, two crestfallen lads were resigned to being picked last for the rest of their lives. We trudged off the mud heap, looking down at our muddy new boots and trying hard to find some blame to attach to them, but we both knew, deep down, we were both hopeless cases, unable to hit the proverbial barn door from two yards.
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