“If you make every game a life and death proposition, you’re going to have problems. For one thing, you’ll be dead a lot.”
Dean Smith
Thommo
If we ever needed reminding that life was short it came again this week with the very sad news of the passing of my old junior teammate Paul “Thommo” Thompson, aged far too young.
Thommo was Man of the Match in our Bradford Central Junior League T Joy Cup win one hot and heady day way back in the summer of 1979.
He scored 32 out of 171 in a forty over game. Then, when we were under the cosh, he took a blinding one-handed catch to dismiss Northowram’s star man adding two more catches and a stumping.
He won’t mind me saying – because he reminded me for years after – that this was probably his best day on a cricket field though he did go on to play senior cricket for both teams and had many more good days.
We grew up living not far apart from each other; we played the same games; we chased the same girls; we got dumped by the same girls! Our parents were good friends and good people so we knew a bit about right and wrong.
We gave no quarter competing against each other, especially playing darts using boards hung on the insides of our parents’ doors. There was much evidence via stray dart holes and blistered wallpaper that this was not our game.
He was a good footballer too though knowing him he would have claimed to be the next Ronaldo these days.
When Thommo got married, his new wife left him for a short while soon after the wedding – not my fault I hasten to add – so I moved in and we lived off their wedding presents.
A few days of a diet of M&S shortbread and lager were suffered till he saw sense and swapped me for his wife. It was a wise move.
He moved across town and they had a beautiful daughter, Emma. Inevitably, with family life came fewer appearances on the cricket field.
Occasionally we would have a Thursday night out in Clayton where he now lived though these became further apart as if the four miles that separated us were a continent. Lives take different courses but I knew my liver would not survive anyway.
Thommo had found a pub that was clearly pioneering all day opening long before Tony Blair introduced this. We would stagger home, world pool champions for one night only, oblivious to respective journeys needed into work only a few short hours away.
I woke one morning in no state to drive to Leeds let alone do a day’s work – should that fate occur – as his beautiful eight year-old bounced on my aching limbs, moulded to the sofa, head banging and me one more bounce away from covering a kid in puke.
The next time I saw her she was in her early twenties in a nightclub, dancing with her mum, who kept uttering “stay away from men like that!”
The old boy had produced a beautiful daughter with a bit of help, of course, from Donna.
I’m not sure whether Donna was still angry at me eating her wedding presents or our failed teenage romance when Thommo was a far better suitor, way back at the cricket club disco somewhere in the 1970s.
Flash forward to around a few years ago. I’d heard he had hit hard times.
As we sat there watching another summer Saturday unfold, there was no mistaking his inimitable loping walking style as he approached the changing rooms with yet more batting advice for me, wasted at that point on that Saturday, pads off and another failure in the book.
One young lad innocently poked fun at my old mate, struggling as he so sadly was; it was that afternoon that I saw he was beyond the help of anybody. They will wonder if they could have done more but the brutal truth is nobody could.
I rebuked the young kid by asking him how many Man of the Matches he had won; it was as cruel of me as the demons that now controlled my old mate.
Life is complicated, far more than any game of cricket or troubled teenage romance. Perhaps they are right when they say that our days of youthful innocence are the best it ever gets?
Rest in peace Thommo, no need to fight those demons anymore. A snick off the bat, you throw that right glove out, propelled by those lanky legs, eyes undimmed by darker days ahead as the ball nestles in your outstretched glove.
We all converge on the wicket knowing something special just happened.
You can sleep a winner.
One Hundred Years Ago
Proving some things never change a tale from a hundred years ago about local club Tong Park signing an England test player.
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