“Mr Wilson? It’s Sky Sports here and we’d like to come and film your Under Seventeen team if that’s possible?” Our juniors who played at Under Eighteen level when I were a lad now played in the Bradford Junior League so manhood came a year earlier these days. Good one I thought; who on Earth could be winding me up today? Of course it’s easy to be tempted to reply with some form of language usually reserved for an Aussie bowler but I relented and listened on. After all it was another slow day in asset finance and it is not as if I had anybody else to speak to as the cat had just poked it.
“We understand that you are playing a team from an Asian part of Bradford and as we are up in Yorkshire for the test match we’d like to film the various communities happily mingling and competing with each other”, said Home Counties Harry, clearly never having left the Great Wall of London otherwise known as the M25 corridor and visited the People’s Republic of Bradford. Which bit of Bradford could he mean I thought; does he really know what he’s letting himself in for?
Lord Charles Colville Of Sky Sports: Contender For Most Miserable Man On The Planet
Once we’d determined which part of the crumbling city he was referring to – hey I live here so I can rubbish it all I like – and that it was not one of my Southern mates from Head Office winding me up – it was confirmed. Sky Sports wanted to come up to the Villas and film a game. I could picture Donald inserting the stump mike and lining up Hawkeye perched on top of Mr Khan’s bungalow at the Willow Gardens end. Beefy and Gower striding across the outfield to do a pitch report – good job Stevo had passed the mantle back to The Don – and Bumble sat there interviewing Critics Corner getting slowly hammered with Haighy, Browny and all.
And so it was that one freezing May evening Charles Colville – the quintessential Home Counties Harry – rolled down our drive resplendent in his Sky jacket and chinos looking as miserable as anybody possibly could be, dragged all this way to a dump like Bradford whilst his colleagues had just come back from England’s tour of the Caribbean. I suppose I could have offered him a better welcome than a hand covered in whitewash and sawdust and avoided enquiring as to how Nass and the boys had enjoyed the Caribbean where, by the way, I’d had a very good time there too Charlie boy. It must be tough on Charlie, relegated to the late night slots with Bob Willis to cover tours that none of the big guns wish to go on having ruled the roost at Sky; but surely there must be worse places than the Villas?
A Tale of Two Cities
Now once our opponents had got wind of the Sky visit we had been under all sorts of pressure to switch the game to their ground, presumably so they could show Sky just where £1.3m of Lottery/Local Authority/EC grant funding had gone; this whilst the rest of the hundreds of amateur local sports clubs in a city with absolutely no strategy for sport and recreation struggled to keep alive opportunities for all. Having been a touch vocal in the local press about this subject I considered it safer to retain home advantage preferring four wheels on my wagon and so, despite some attempt at coercion, we told their coach to sling his hook. It was Villas or nowhere.
In fairness to both sets of lads the game was a tremendous advert for junior cricket although Sky’s agenda was pretty clear cut. They interviewed absolutely nobody from the Villas and, once they had got a bit of padding for the forthcoming lunch break slots at the test match, off they flew oblivious to the result and, frankly, disinterested. Amazingly though, in their hurry to get off they left behind the production schedule for their whole week long tour up through the Midlands and into Yorkshire. This was around the time when there was still considerable -and unwarranted – attention to the lack of front line Asian players being produced by Yorkshire.
Half Truths And Even Bigger Lies
Reading it, I was struck by the patronising and idiotic theme that ran through it, summarised by one line, which read along the lines of:
– Drive into Bradford and take pictures of smiling Asian shopkeepers
You see there has long been a misconception that Yorkshire, because of it is ethnic diversity, should almost be exclusively an Asian team, which is rubbish. Yorkshire is no more diverse than Londonand you never hear Middlesex or Surrey being patronised in such a manner. Indeed in recent years Yorkshire, through sheer hard work, has begun to produce some very good, England class cricketers of Asian descent. I cannot belive thatYorkshire, as with little old Villas, judges anybody with a cricket bat or ball other than on what they can do with it rather than their ethnicity or background.
The Sky team was just hunting a tired old story and, had we been less scrupulous and handed the papers to the press, they would have copped a fair bit of flak. Well probably not because the local rag could not spot a scoop if it was handed on a plate to them. It would have been the scoop of the century for the dismal, dull local rag and maybe they could have changed the headlines from the usual drivel that generally ranges from Odsal Super Dome On Again/Harvey Nicholls Eyes Bradford Site/City Sign Ronaldo. On reflection we may have got Rupert Murdoch to cough up for a new clubhouse but then again we did the right thing and rang Home Counties Harry the next day and posted the papers back.
Hell…we never even charged them for the stamp!
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