At last worldwide fame beckons…total sales to date…one! Look me up on Amazon and enjoy the read:
Critics’ Corner (A Sporting Life (at grassroots level)) [Kindle Edition]
Steve
Musings From The Padded Cell
At last worldwide fame beckons…total sales to date…one! Look me up on Amazon and enjoy the read:
Critics’ Corner (A Sporting Life (at grassroots level)) [Kindle Edition]
Steve
I have often wondered how you feel when finally you have to admit it’s all over and pack that bag away for the very last time. When it’s my turn, will there be a Critics’ Corner to still sit down in and chew the fat over battles won and lost and tell each other how good we really never were oblivious to those stats that you just cant deny?
As I sit there, occasionally having compiled enough runs that particular day to gain approval and not have to walk past head bowed, shamed by another failure, I never cease to wonder how we never won anything in the olden days. How was this when apparently we had batters on the edge of greatness and bowlers capable of bowling like the wind on occasion like a violent tornado with swing, seam and cut as well. The level of former greatness, it seems, tends to improve the longer the day goes on and the whisky bottle drains.
That is one of the unique joys of the game of cricket at grassroots level that the egos who rule at the very top seem oblivious to, with their obsession with the fast food variety they now gorge on. The unwinding of a game; like the plot of a thought-provoking film or a five-course meal, engaging the spectators in conversations, albeit mainly utterly ridiculous ones, as the drama unfolds in front of them, these things matter.
How you also replace that unique dressing room experience is also beyond me as it is unlike any other in sport, simply due to the time you spend there as the game evolves. The mindless pranks we have all played over the years have left us in tears of laughter as have the ridiculous variety of “topics” discussed as the rain pours down and the inevitable early exit to the bar looms in tandem with another stinking Sunday hangover.
Arguably a cricket dressing room is unique in that it brings together such a mix of characters you would never ever see together in normal life. I swear that first Saturday of the off-season leaves us all fidgeting moodily adjusting back to life without the likes of Hawkeye, Spivey, Harry and even the critics up there on the hill. And no more childish pranks till next Spring.
I will never forget Webbo screwing down Ando’s Adidas bag to a wooden bench at Bingley Congs one Saturday and the look on Ando’s face as he struggled to lift it, bench and all, and then the look on our faces as the proposed revenge of a ton of manure at our doors was promised and fortunately never carried out. Or the look on the face of the Asian woman who now lives in Ken and Olga’s old house as she stood at her sink doing the dishes one Saturday evening bemused as I scurried around the back of the changing rooms – naked as a jaybird –having been thrown out of the changing rooms. The novelty of showers in those early days meant that somebody invariably came out of the shower only to find all their clothes in the middle of the field. A few tough yards had to be made and my mother did remark that little seemed to have changed since she last saw me like that.
Perhaps the funniest though was the day Straw finally got “promoted” in the batting order by me – simply to enable Dave Singleton to gain revenge for a previous week’s prank; retribution was never far behind you. Straw rushed in excitedly to change from shorts to whites and prove his batting prowess at long last but as he stuck his pads on there was a blood-curdling scream from within; feeling something odd and lumpy in his pocket, he reached in and pulled out the biggest dead white rat you have ever seen. He could not stop shaking for hours and, as a consequence, bowled like a pillock and we almost lost. Priceless.
Most of us who still play are adamant that when our time comes, we will not sit there and tell whoever may listen that “in our day” we were any better than we were, but who knows? Maybe at some distant point in the future our memories will fade and fanciful notions might develop. For the record, I have been no more than that average club cricketer that rolls up each Saturday in hope of occasional “greatness” , pays his fiver with no guarantee of anything in return and usually has to contend with anything from modesty to mediocrity. As many of my early school reports suggested “could do better”, then this is a fair reflection.
However, the games needs all comers, from the brilliant to the bloody awful and if you sit somewhere in the mix of all that then so be it. Maybe a lack of ambition never allowed me to realise my true potential and the roots unbreakable with the Villas were always going to limit any future development. So I could have been a lot better but I will have to live with what the record books say and hope for a kind word or two from the odd witness along the way … as long as they have not been added to that plaque in Critics’ Corner.
Perhaps it’s fitting though that the last word should go to an umpire. The timing of this was impeccable as I sought to put the finishing touches to my thoughts here taking place as we struggled on a testing wicket to post a total away at Calverley CC during season 2010. In truth I had been scratching away for almost twenty overs and in so doing making batting look as hard as it could ever get.
Their young opening bowler ran in and bowled an in swinging Yorker that rapped into my pads causing me to fall over somewhat ungracefully. As I picked myself up, the square leg umpire advanced towards me as it was the end of the over. Looking down he simply said: “Good job cameras weren’t here today lad, perhaps not your finest moment eh?”
At last, after nearly forty years playing cricket, sledged by an umpire…is there a free seat up there with the critics?
Any thoughts of a lie-in were shattered by the volcanic rumblings and earthquake-like vibrations coming from downstairs. My mum had fired up the twin-tub again, the most effective wake up call known to man and guaranteed to wake the dead.
In this case the “Dead Man Walking” was I after celebrating a famous win at the Grattan Oval in the Waddilove Cup Final.
It was 1986 and we had just beaten Denholme in a classic and I had booked a day off from life on the road flogging car finance to the motor trade for Mercantile Credit in anticipation of feeling like death, win or lose.
We had celebrated long into the night well before Freddie and the boys took this to new heights in 2005 post the famous Ashes win over the “convicts” and later via the pedalo. But any thoughts I had of maternal pride, love and understanding plus a nice cooked breakfast soon vanished with that unmistakeable look on my mum’s face.
Something was wrong and Dr Grunhalle had erased my mind completely. By the look on her face perhaps a pedalo might be useful.
Holding up last nights pair of jeans she pointed at the muddy knees, picked off some loose bracken, looked up and awaited an explanation. Amazingly, just when I needed him most, Dr Grunhalle’s magic brainwashing powers vanished in a flash and it all came flooding back.
Still, displaying all the true grit that JB had done the previous day to win us the cup, I opted for some of his defiance, defensiveness and obduracy; as it turned out it was largely his fault anyway for a number of reasons.
However, at this particular moment I think I would have rather been fronting up to Spenner and the rest of the Denholme boys than my mother.
“ I fell?” I offered like a nervous jab outside the off stump so early in my “innings”.
“Try harder” she replied with no softening of those features that had terrorised thousands of kids back as a school dinner lady. This was indeed a sticky dog of a wicket…I may not survive till drinks I mused.
Now there are times when you just know you are so far into a corner it is time for the hands up and punishment time. This was clearly one of them, especially as I had the hope of tea, toast and the a full day watching the test match on the telly with regular deliveries of refreshments.
I was after all a winner the previous day so surely deserved to live like a king? And then my mum came out with a question I have always remembered and since then tried to ensure that the right answer eventually occurred.
“When do you think I could actually go in that club and hold my head up with the other mothers?”
She actually then went on to ask if I was on some mission to “mount every daughter in the club” and, to this day, the answer to that one is a touch clouded. Back to the main challenge, though.
We had all gone back the previous evening to the Captain’s parents’ house as guests of Lord Denis. Pretty soon I had attracted the eye of a slightly older woman and immediately sensed the obvious…she was ratted. Like an alligator stalking a wounded prey the hunt was on.
In no time at all we had found a quiet spot under the stars and were deep into the shrubbery unawares at the time that younger son, Andrew, was watching every moment and later confessed that the Betamax tape he nicked from big brother Dave’s room was nowhere near as good.
We must have sensed something was wrong because we moved down the garden. Then in a flurry of branch, bracken and with cricket gear trailing from his white, imitation leather, Adidas bag bursting through the trees like that wild gorilla in the film “Gorillas In The Mist” came JB taking a short cut to his parents adjoining gardens.
And just like Sigourney Weaver, I must have looked like I had shat myself. Was there a curse on any attempt at open-air nookie at the Villas?
Unbelievably he never saw a thing and it’s a good job he had watched the ball a touch better that afternoon. Almost immediately there was a call out in the darkness with the young lady’s mother seeking out her daughter. We dressed quickly, rather too quickly.
Tactics were needed so I courageously opted for the front door and sent the young lady in through the conservatory to the rear where all the mothers, wives and girlfriends were sat around a very large table playing cards chatting amiably albeit, not for long.
In our rush to avoid the return of mini King Kong, my lady friend had not noticed her vibrant purple knickers protruding from a zip that could have done with a bit more care and attention.
Ladbrokes was not taking bets on the perpetrator of such shame, who by this time was downing a cold one over a game of pool, oblivious to muddy jeans and bits of conifer leaf in his hair.
If my mum’s shame was obvious the poor girl immediately became known as “Conifers” and barely returned to the club. Somehow, JB found his way back and we celebrated on.
I suppose that what I am trying to convey is that there were many similar incidents when madness reigned and my mother must have doubted what would ever become of me. And I was not wholly oblivious to this.
If there was one singular motivation behind taking on the clubhouse redevelopment and enduring those endless sleepless nights and five years of grief, stress and general apathy it was simply that this is where my parents enjoy a beer and, whilst it is not everybody’s cup of tea, it is where they enjoy being and I hope they will continue to do so for many years to come.
As a mother she never seeks any fuss and she may cringe when she reads this but, if I’ve never said it, I owe it all to you.
Thanks for your patience, never ending tolerance, belief and for not fussing too much that you never got to wear that big hat splattered in confetti. You know it would all have ended in tears and a council flat down Thorpe Edge.
For you.
If I rake over a few topics already touched upon I make no apology; sadly, in my humble opinion, the game as we know and love is under threat at all levels and no more so than at club level despite whatever statistics the ECB come up with.
Look around the leagues and witness the declining number of teams, the undeniable slide in standards and the weekly struggles to get teams of a full complement. If you see a game in rude health you must be watching somewhere else.
For all the national initiatives like the ECB’s flagship Chance to Shine scheme, we have become a nation of watchers rather than participants and cricket is not alone in suffering the consequences.
Only recently, inactivity was deemed to be as bigger killer as alcohol and tobacco nationally; cricket cannot escape such a shift on social trends.
The great and the good recently celebrated five years of Chance to Shine at Lords with one million kids claimed to have been beneficiaries from some 3,000 state schools.
Whilst this is a start there are an estimated 27,000 state schools so inevitably, it’s a huge game of catch up here and once again the ECB have created an elitist scheme.
To participate you have to be an ECB Focus Club but a club can only be considered for this if it has attained Clubmark.
Clubs with excellent junior set ups are simply excluded because they don’t have an army of administrators. Removing this requirement would be a major step forward.
I accept that society has changed massively in the years since I first strolled through the gates at the Villas and as sport is an essential part of the fabric of that society then change is inevitable.
Most of the issues facing cricket are not unique and other sports are also suffering especially those games that require more complex technical skills coaching into the very young on a regular basis.
A key issue for junior sport these days and a regular feature of debate, is the state of the nation’s kids, which is indisputably appalling as for most kids, school sport is non existent.
It started and continues with the notion that competitiveness is not good and that everybody should get a medal and a pat on the back.
Well get real because life is just not like that and there are winners and losers so being able to handle both outcomes is every bit as important; somebody has to come last that’s life.
Whatever happened to the school PE teacher of old, someone you respected and taught so much more than could ever be gained in the classroom?
When we were younger the PE teacher did much unpaid, voluntary work but over the years that goodwill on the part of teachers has vanished starting way back in the 1980s with increasing militancy. As teaching unions have spent decades fighting successive governments the only losers have been the children.
The solution is obvious in that specialist PE teachers need to be an essential part of all primary and secondary schools. The cost is not an issue because in the longer term the savings to the likes of the NHS would far outweigh the investment in young children’s health and fitness. It is not rocket science but politicians never look further than the next election.
The new government has also made soundings about cutting through the forest of political correctness that has strangled so much of modern day life never more in evidence than with sport.
Somehow, the politically correct parasites have spread like wildfire creating an enormous industry that is seemingly unstoppable these days and doubtless employing layers of invisible, unaccountable, unproductive and overpaid morons.
It will be interesting to see if the government are true to their promises. Sacking most of this lot would surely put a dent in the national deficit if we could only find them because every new announcement never has a face or a name to it just some phantom “thou shall obey” decree.
The growth in the child welfare “industry” has been simply staggering to behold. You would have to be a complete lunatic to volunteer to run a junior team at any sport simply with a view to abusing little kids, in fact in most cases the kids abuse the coach.
They have created the notion that the Boogie Man is around every corner and it’s a cynical abuse of volunteers up and down the country simply trying to keep the game they love alive and to give something back to sport.
The amount of bureaucracy and useless, mind-numbing courses you now have to endure is slowly killing off volunteers. When the working week is increasingly demanding who needs this at the weekend especially as the idiots that generally roll out these courses would not make third-rate teachers.
I cite a recent course I had to attend – the title escapes me as it is content and theme were almost identical to two courses I had just completed – but I knew when I saw the three hour duration this was not going to be the best three hours of my life.
It was run by a retired police officer who probably could not believe his luck in landing a job in addition to his pension to recreate the pantomime villain – “look out he’s behind you” went the theme.
It started with a doubtless expensively created ECB board game where you had to match extracts of the numerous pieces of legislation that are in place relating to child welfare – it was called the Learning Tree. What the point of this was who knows but it was not enhancing my understanding of the leg break delivery.
However, it got worse as PC Plod started to read out a series of newspaper cuttings designed to make us believe that around every corner the Boogie Man was lurking waiting to spirit away some of our junior players – after the season we had just had he could take the lot I mused.
It was unbelievable and after about forty-five minutes I slowly raised my hand, suggested he had made his point, most of us had had a long day at work – honest I had – and could we please go home, Boogie Man or not?
Amazingly he concluded the night in a flash presumably having intended to keep on with this plethora of good news clippings till we all were far too scared to go home anyway. It is just repetitive, overdone nonsense and it is killing the goodwill of volunteers.
The combination of the demolition of opportunities for youngsters to play sport and the loss of all the positive attributes to be gained from it such as health, team building and social integration will see us continue the slide towards an unhealthy, reclusive, inward-looking society shorn of it is former fabric.
Until we get a sporting culture as part of the fabric of real life again, accept that there are risks involved with any activity and ditch the ambulance chasing legal parasites, we are all snookered.
We have to get sport back into schools and even if we have to pay the teachers given that in the past this was on the back of a teacher’s goodwill the pay back is enormous and in the long term the savings are immense.
The alternative scenario, given the issues building up around obesity, boredom plus the reality that when Little Johnny finally joins the real world he is in for one hell of a shock; there is no such thing as non-competitiveness out here.
So if we as a game cannot change the broader scope of society and, indeed, wait for it to begin to change then we have to find a way to ensure cricket remains a game open to the masses and not the preserve of Giles Clarke and his ECB cronies at Lords.
How do we give it back to the people?
Surely the ECB has to take a more inclusive approach and one way would be to open up Chance to Shine to any club that wished to participate. Switch the funding gobbled up by the administration of all this rubbish and invest this in coaches so we can get cricket back into the schools and fast.
Another hot topic is the lack of cricket on terrestrial television available to boost the profile of cricket to a new generation. As a Sky customer, I have to nail my colours to the mast and admit the coverage afforded to cricket over many years has been fantastic.
Yet there has to be a way to get the nation greater access to cricket even if the BBC seems uninterested and Channel 4 appears unable to afford it.
Recently the ECB Chief Executive, Giles Clarke, was interviewed on radio and contended that without the Sky TV money the club game would disappear, such is his disgraceful lack of understanding of the grass roots game.
This is rubbish, after all how did we survive for the hundred plus years before the Sky deal. As I have said previously the ECB money that does eventually drip down past the professional set up is sparse to say the least – and less than equitably distributed.
Brokering a deal with Sky to return some degree of international cricket to terrestrial television need not be devastating to the ECB coffers. Sky has many free to air channels and they should be sufficiently confident in the excellence of their coverage that they could actually gain subscribers rather than lose out here.
If I could drop football from my Sky package I would do so in a flash, but I would not give up my subscription just because the odd test series was on free to air, nor, I believe, would the genuine cricket fans that still look forward to England’s winter trips. I realise that Sky pay a king’s ransom for cricket but, come on Mr Murdoch, show some faith in the quality of your offering.
Cricket is flagship sports of Sky’s offering so do not believe Clarke when he bleats on about how dependent the game is on the Sky money, which is a very poor business model if this is actually the case. Sadly the politics of self-interest continue to rule cricket and they will slowly destroy it.
Witness now the beginnings of the financial fall out at the top level of cricket as evidenced recently by Yorkshire, as counties have to invest massively to stay on the international fixture list. If the Sky money is so critical where is it all going?
Away from the very top of the game the leagues can and should be much more proactive in response to a changing world. I don’t believe that the elite give a jot about grass roots so we have to become progressive from the bottom up in trying to attract and retain the next generations of players and administrators.
In league cricket very little has changed in the almost four decades I have been playing and administrators have to wake up to the fact that we are not attracting nor retaining enough new entrants to the game to keep it alive.
Somehow we have to make the game more attractive to younger people and I am not here advocating the over hyped comic strip Twenty Twenty approach but we have to look at formats, structures and, above all, as older participants be prepared to pass the game on.
Where better for any senior league to experiment that with second team cricket? I have several suggestions to try to do something different with a view to trying to retain the youngsters we all spend years developing but, inescapably, are not staying with the game in enough numbers once they leave the junior structures. My ideas are not rocket science but here goes:
And finally, stop this ridiculous obsession with shelling out money on players that contribute absolutely nothing to the clubs they turn out for. The game is in a dire state at the moment and it needs resources ploughing back into its core fabric than into the pockets of some hired gun whether they be of an overseas or domestic origin.
Lets all start to take some responsibility for the future of the game or suffer the consequences if we don’t.
“Talent” money never ever produces team spirit or a strong club and eventually when the egos that provide it get fed up and disappear the problems this creates can destroy a club.
When you finish at the bottom of any league, no matter how badly you may feel the roll of the dice went, no matter you did not think you were that bad, it is often said that the league table never lies. So it is fair to say that the humiliation of season 2004 when we finished bottom of Division C under Captain Stoker had taken a long time to wear off. In the intervening years we had probably not played to our full potential, almost entirely due to an inbuilt cautiousness and fear of ever having to go back again to beg for our readmission to the league on a cold winter night; the league know how to make you grovel.
Having taken over the captaincy in 2007, after a two-year patch up job by yours truly, Steve “Shutty” Shuttleworth had gradually built a team in his own style and made one or two seemingly bold decisions along the way. As an example he had jettisoned Rick Slater, our opening bowler, even though we were not overflowing in that department; perhaps there was time yet for a bowling come back? It was a courageous decision in the interests of getting the right team spirit and a collection of unified triers rather than suffering the odd, part-time, prima-donna. Slats had a busier wedding calendar than the Beckhams and suffered the worst hamstrings ever, generally when he was being carted around the field on an annual basis at Woodhouse.
So with Slats gone and with young lads like Sam Lawrence and Rehan Butt developing slowly, hampered by the namby-pamby ECB Bowling Directives, we started to gel together as a side. We still had to wheel Brent out for a season or two longer to get us through and, undoubtedly, even on one leg he was our best bowler when he played.
The bowling directives mean that young guys can only bowl a very limited number of overs but place no restrictions on forty-plus year olds who can bowl until their arteries burst. They have a place for the elite youngsters as a mode of protection but not for the lads with one or two games a week at best and are another example of the governing body’s complete lack of understanding of grass roots cricket.
I say it softly but there was a feeling of quiet confidence at the start of the 2009 season. Shutty had made some good signings with our usual inducements of warm water, great teas and changing well away from Barry. The young lads were developing and there might still be life in one or two of the old dogs yet. Shutty was both older and wiser so he did not repeat his glorious inauguration speech made at Woodhouse at the beginning of the 2007 season when he pronounced that there were “22 games and my target is to win 20 of them”. Ambitious to the extent that in the following two seasons we didn’t get remotely close to winning twenty in total.
And yet when I look back to the start of season 2009, which culminated with us becoming champions of the renamed Division 3 for the first time, for all the talent within the dressing room, there was at last an unmistakable belief that we could actually achieve this. That growing confidence, the momentum from convincing early wins plus the ability to bounce back from a couple of early season setbacks at New Rover & home to Olicanians, all combined to enable us to become worthy champions. So here is my personal tribute to those guys who made it happen.
LEE MARGERISON – probably the most competitive guy in the team who became a father midway through the season and celebrated with an undefeated hundred and plenty. Loves a chunter at the opposition whether he is batting or bowling and has even been known to throw a ball at an opposing batsman’s head to get a bit of attention. At least he broke the partnership that day even if Harry, our scorer, had to put “concussed” in the How Out section.
If his baby son is anywhere near as competitive he will probably be launching rattles from his pram like missiles from a bunker at the other kids by now. Lee’s bowling is useful too as he has a bit of a Golden Arm – which to non-cricketers means he gets wickets with utter tripe – but his stares when some of the tripe disappears out of the ground are priceless. Poor wife Sally must have to go through hell when he gets a bad decision on a Saturday.
DANNY GAUNT – made me wonder on a weekly basis if he was playing a different game as he made batting look ridiculously easy at times. Clearly slips occasionally into catatonic state as his usual mode of dismissal is “Bowled Ted Trundler – Sleeping” but also dropped some howlers that Shutty’s young daughters would have caught, whilst also sleeping. A very good addition to the team that gave us that edge we needed and demonstrated the attitude needed at nets week in week out. The team “fidgeter” as always tinkering with technique and if we had had a team laptop like Team England he would doubtless be scanning videos all afternoon…assuming he could get Barry away from the porn channels.
SAM WADE – I had coached Sam since he was a wide eyed, little lad who just loved to bat and, without doubt, he could go on to much better things if he really wanted to. Laid back to such an extent that sometimes you wonder if the lights really are on in there, we tend to forget that not many of us were perfect when we were his age. Really it’s up to him how good he becomes but it would be criminal to waste such a unique talent. Time will tell but I hope he does not get to his mid thirties thinking if only he had worked harder and really challenged himself to be as good as he could be.
BARRY HAWKSWORTH – the Compo of the team without doubt and the ultimate character. Since he left in 2010 having found the impossible – a woman that could tolerate him – the dressing room has never been the same. Simple approach to life: eat it, drink it and mount it. No more an out and out slogger he developed an obsession with having “not out” after his score; much to the amazement of the opposition as well his as team mates. So many stories but not many better than commencing the worst break dancing demonstration in the world at Illingworth after sending the ball into orbit.
SHUTTY – the Player of the Season 2009 and a reflection of his total commitment to the team. Transformed from chain smoking chubby into honed, toned near-anorexic in recent years and tries like mad to avoid his brother-in-law, Molly, thereby ensuring he does not go back to previous bulk. Grew into the role as skipper as we all do given time and one of the nicest lads you could meet. Deserved the success for all he had put into the team ans still a massive, if not by weight, part of the dressing room.
REHAN BUTT – the quiet lad of the team but cometh the hour cometh Rehan. Took us over the line in the season-defining away game at Olicanians, the big money boys of the division, and in doing so ensured the championship was ours. He bats, bowls and fields with equal enthusiasm. Lost to the club as he pursued work opportunities in London and Dubai but always a welcome back at the Villas.
SAM LAWRENCE – another gentle giant, our opening bowler and potentially as good as there could be in the league going forward. Sam can bat as well and when he is set he can launch it many a mile. Strangely only bowls nasty bouncers at his ageing coach which, considering I chauffeur him all over the place, is probably a delayed reaction to my Ipod choices.
ADAM SUTCLIFFE – the last of our quartet of “youngsters” and every bit as quiet as the other three. Bowled what you would call a heavy ball although opportunities were restricted in 2009, largely due to the poor quality of some of the opposition. Left in 2012 to go back to original club but again, always welcome back.
CHRIS SPIVEY – where do I begin; here is a whole book here? Well, in fairness, let me start by suggesting that Chris can be a complex character, the one most of all in the dressing room that needs a hug and a cuddle and making sure he gets home safe at the end of the night. He joined us for his first spell in my second stint as skipper.
A fine bowler on his day and eighty plus wickets are conclusive proof of that you may contrast him with Mick Adams from twenty years previous as Mick was equally obsessive with his figures. Has been known to have the odd tantrum, shall we say, mainly on field and generally ending in his car. Tends to react to the ball not swinging a bit like Barry if we’ve run out of lager.
STEVE “RYLO” RYDER – Another slow bowler in the Villas mould: small, fat, useless with the bat and never turned a ball in his life. Our voice of reason in the dressing room, the Wise Old Sage of the team. Hung up his boots recently but still supports the club and never shy to dip into his pocket to help junior cricket. Sport is brilliant for breaking down barriers as before he joined us I had an entirely different opinion from when he left. Again, a hole in the dressing room and we have missed his non-spinning varieties.
HARRY RYECROFT – whilst there were some twenty or so players that appeared over the season and most of us accept that Joe Lawrence’s five appearances really won us the league mostly by virtue of having a posh “sledger” at gully even if he could not catch – our Twelfth Man for many a year has been Harry, our scorer and Team motivational speaker on many an occasion.
Having honed his speech making skills fighting at Rourke’s Drift and surviving the Zulus only to get the reward of looking after Barry for a decade a century or so later, Harry has been with us through thick and thin … mostly thin. A legend in the dressing room Harry is famous for his never changing motivational speech whenever we are up against it again. South Africa employ Jeremy Snape as their Sports Psychologist, we have Harry who will simply implore us to “Just go fook ‘em.”. Who needs Jeremy Snape on a central contract when you can have this quality on the doorstep?
Simply put, Saturdays are just not the same without Harry who is now in semi retirement getting pissed in Critics’ Corner every fortnight. Slowly, slowly turning into a critic; it can only be the cheap whisky.
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In truth, we ended the 1990s not that much further ahead than when this story really began some twenty years ago…which is not the date of the picture here although some believe that Haighy and Browny were both members of the 1925 team.
With the fag perched in his mouth there are rumours that the umpire to the right could have been a young Charlie Dalton; who will ever know?
The old changing rooms built after the second world war had been replaced towards the end of the 1980s and the practice facilities were about to be revamped with our one and only successful bid at Sport England money who provided around 40% of the project cost; the rest being raised by our own efforts.
We were about to enter a new era with fresh challenges, the main one being our admission to the Airedale-Wharfedale League; frankly, we were nowhere near ready.
On the field we were competent at best, off it we were a shambles. The bar had, over the best part of twenty years, brought more than it’s fair share of problems not unique to our club in any sense and similar to those up and down the country.
Because it did, and still does, rely on volunteers, goodwill and honesty, it was open to abuse from those shameless enough to indulge; sadly for a long while we had more than our fair share of light-fingered members.
As a result, after nearly twenty years with a busy bar, the club had no money and a clubhouse that refugees would have declined a stopover in; as to where all the money had gone, perhaps we were all culpable.
Those of us that had seen the start of the eighties begin with such optimism arguably had taken our eye off the ball and allowed a hard core of shameless, dishonest so-called members to almost run us into insolvency by their greed, ignorance and stupidity.
We reached the nadir one winter when at a meeting of the committee and following another recent break-in via the now colander like walls of our tatty pre-fab, having found little of value to steal, the local druggies had smashed all the light fittings for kicks and stolen the payphone from the wall.
As the members treated the payphone like the bar there was no money in that either but we needed to replace this and the treasurer approached me for the £120 replacement cost from the Junior account. We were literally that broke.
Several years earlier we had started what became known as our “offshore account” – aka the Cayman Islands account – designed to ring fence the junior fund raising from the general anarchy that prevailed at the time in the bar. Knowing that we had this money the treasurer approached me for a “loan”.
We had no choice but to help, after all this was the cricket club’s money, but if this was how bad things were then how much longer could we go on? Amongst the very few of us there was a recognition that things should and could be a lot better.
So, at our lowest point we decided that we were going to replace the clubhouse. Borne out of madness, wild optimism, sheer desperation or pure blind hope – take your pick – the clubhouse project was conceived.
Much has been made over the last decade or so about the power and good of lottery funding administered, as far as grass roots sport is concerned, by Sport England. Surely it was there to help clubs like ours that were not seeking simply a handout, more so a proportionate level of assistance?
Let me tell you, unequivocally and from bitter experience, Sport England and lottery funding is the biggest sham and wasted opportunity that I have ever seen. Administered largely by idiots attempting to work with them was impossible. Blinded by political correctness and only interested in headline grabbing projects they wasted our time shamelessly.
We actually put together two detailed bids encouraged all the way by their salaried, track-suited, clipboard-wielding half-wits, only to be refused twice but for entirely different reasons. Now I accept that the monkeys are far removed from the organ grinder but it was a farce and a huge waste of our time and effort; we were not alone as well speaking to many other clubs.
Having started a project with quoted prices of between £120-150k we had been hoping for a sum equal to around half the cost, way below the normal level of support “offered” which was around 65-70% of a project’s cost. However, it soon became very clear that we were on our own.
The basic problem with this type of funding is that the parameters are driven down by central government which allocates the funding to bloated bodies like Sport England. Initially the gravy train then starts to initially fritter away a portion of this on staff, administration and more new tracksuits, before then allocating it to another, equally bloated body.
In our case this was the ECB which does exactly the same thing, but with the added condition that for a club to receive a grant it must turn itself into some form of socially and politically correct Utopia.
If you could convince the idiots in charge of the asylum that you were capable of developing and running several teams consisting of a perfect mix of bisexual, ethnically representative, disabled and socially excluded from society (on account of them being psychopaths), then you were quids in.
As most of us were struggling to get the fat lads away from the Nintendo’s in the government directed non-competitive environment then we decided to go it alone and leave the box ticking to somebody else with a more acceptable postcode.
Although we had no major grant support available we did, on reflection, have Lady Luck on our side in many forms throughout the project. By this time we had shed ourselves of most of the light-fingered brigade, having at first attempted to shame them and latterly simply by watching them like hawks.
Some of them simply vanished for pastures new and the odd one dropped off the perch, doubtless weighed down by their illicit pieces of eight.
It still goes on without a doubt but our little cricket club will never change human nature. The club’s finances were now controlled by Juli Pargeter, daughter-in-law of the bar manager, Alan, seemingly in his position of birthright since we opened and fittingly known as Arkwright.
He got his nickname many years ago from the Ronnie Barker television show Open All Hours. Now Arkwright has always enjoyed a pint no matter what rubbish we have served over the years from Greenall’s Local, Websters, Worthingtons and now John Smiths.
If it’s brown, fizzy and in a glass then Arkwright, having lovingly tended it seventeen hours a day, seven days a week at the club, is never happier than with tankard in hand. Imagine his sheer joy all those years ago when we announced we were opening a bar, fifty yards from his garden gate.
Although he cops a fair bit of stick, Arkwright has been a key figure at the club for the best part of thirty years and it’s hard to imagine how we would have got on without him.
True he has eccentricities, and his lovingly called “state of the nation” address, where he holds court at the committee meeting before he goes away on holiday and details all the duties required of his stand-ins, remains one of the highlights of the committee season.
Juli was a revelation for the troubled position of Treasurer. Just when we needed one most she actually volunteered and, even better, she was a real accountant and actually turned up to meetings able to tell us what we had or did not have; for a while the latter was more relevant.
Throughout the whole project she worked tirelessly and without her support and extraordinary diligence we would not have completed the project within our ridiculously naïve budget of circa fifty thousand.
However, the man that really made the new clubhouse a possibility was Derrick Armitage, a club member and builder by trade who turned college lecturer after a horrific on site accident.
In some perverse way this was to turn out fortuitous for us, if not Derrick, as he not only provided the technical know how but also gave us an idea of how we could achieve what we did for around a third of the quoted cost and had the contacts we needed to get the job done.
True it did mean employing a tag wearing, hashish smoking brickie and a couple of “chippies” that kept us all entertained but he had so many contacts and so much knowledge it actually would not have been possible to do this without him.
Plus he remained patient and restrained when the idiot minority post-completion made ridiculous suggestions that this had been an “earner” for him. How on Earth they thought we could pay anybody, from a budget as limited as ours, summed up the narrow-minded approach of a tiny, ungrateful minority.
Derrick was simply invaluable and the club owes him a great debt. Sadly, Derrick passed away after a long illness in 2013 and the clubhouse remains a testimony to him. Rest in peace D.
There are other people very deserving of a mention here even though they never sought a public thanks. Our architect was Robert Rhodes of Janus Architects in Idle who gave his time and limitless enthusiasm completely free and you just cannot thank someone enough for this type of selfless generosity.
He even had the patience to tolerate Browny who turned up one morning, having had no involvement with the project at all, to demand a site meeting to knock down the toilet walls because they were not big enough. So we stood there freezing cold, listening to Browny still trying to rearrange things – I think he still hankered after those underground squash courts – and Robert just smiled.
Steve Feeley was our long suffering plumber again pushed to the limit by the endless visitors and suggestions made as he worked his nuts off for “Kosovan” wages as he put it; neither of us suspected that we had so many world experts on the art of plumbing.
The site had so many visitors each weekend we must have rivalled the local theme parks. In they rolled, strolled around and wandered off after generally leaving yet more idiotic suggestions as to what we should and should not do.
Had we charged them an entrance fee maybe we could have afforded to put some of their suggestions into practice.
Fortunately, other members did get stuck in and one other small bit of good fortune was twofold. The project was always constrained by the narrow entrance drive to the club and relations were sometimes strained with a certain neighbour who, at one point- and I digress here- tried to land us with a claim for a new wall, allegedly the result of a skip wagon “crashing” into it.
Amazingly he claimed we had disturbed a 20-foot stretch which would have involved taking out his gate. When we were trying so hard to improve our lot this cynical, greedy and dumb attempt at opportunism really stuck in the throat.
Now it was clear to anyone that the conifers he had alongside the wall were the main reason it was falling down – pity he didn’t get the non-growing variety that Browny bought all those years ago – then he wouldn’t have had to send his dopey wife to complain to us.
Anyway, back to the story, one piece of good fortune was the day of the delivery of the roof trusses. As kind as ever, Billy Stockdale, who has always stuck his hand in his pocket to help out with any fund raising, allowed us to march them through his garden.
Good fortune number two was that it was the school holidays so Sam and Joe Lawrence plus mates were around. And actually there was a third bit of luck as Rick actually managed to get Joe out of bed, something that took some considerable effort in those days.
As always Donald helped us throughout the whole project with generous donations in private and simple hard work and patience working with machinery on the ground that we all knew we wanted to replace but simply could not afford to.
Chiz too brokered a deal with a local window supplier and also with a great couple of brothers, Mick and Albert Dunn, who had that all important JCB bringing a great deal of expertise to the project and at pricing rates you would deem to be from the “community” tariff.
In addition, several customers of mine at the time simply provided goods free of charge or at a sizeable discount. They all rightfully take their place on the plaque by the bar and the club’s debt is enormous.
Finally, from the minute Mick’s JCB crashed into the old pre-fab there was one guy that I could always count on no matter how tough it got. He was last to leave that numbing first day as we pulled apart the old place and never flinched whatever the task.
One Saturday afternoon spent with our hands up the freezing waste pipe to the main toilets was perhaps the afternoon that tested us both trying to locate the join to save yet a few more quid but Our Kid was simply magnificent.
How on Earth though, did we manage to raise fifty grand from a standing start in broadly four years especially having effectively run a registered charity since opening and giving new meaning to the term Free House?
Well, we tried all the usual things: sponsored this, that and everything else. Twice Molly and I walked – supported by our pal and friend to the club, Nigel Winckles, from Gargrave to Apperley Bridge, a 26-mile haul. I wore a strappy blue dress and Molly (as mentioned earlier) a Matron’s uniform and hobnail boots and it was no wonder the swans attacked him two years running.
Nigel declined the dress and on the second walk he was fortunate to have the Marsdens accompany him to offset his cross-dressing mates. We were grateful for the company as it is fair to say the majority of the members simply preferred to look the other way – and I’m not talking about the sight of Molly in a matron’s outfit.
The big push behind the fund raising was the support I was able to muster from the Barclays Community Team and two fabulous girls, Jeannette and Kendra, who helped me maximise every project we had backed by the bank’s community programme.
I know the banks are public enemy number one at the moment but without the support we got from Barclays in that five-year period we would never have got close to replacing the clubhouse.
And so on Saturday, 10th February, 2007, we opened our doors on the day the first snows of winter landed with a cruel and heavy vengeance. Doors were still being fitted and the memorabilia (painstakingly researched and provided free of charge by Brent) was still being hung on the walls.
Earlier in the day – 7a.m, to be precise – we had started a losing battle to clear the snow and lay gravel but never mind, we were open for business.
So, when one of the locals came up to me and grunted that “it wasn’t finished” I would have had good reason to stove his head in with a shovel had I had the strength to lift it.
We got there, with a lot of luck, a lot of friends and in spite of all the apathy and lack of interest from those best placed and most able to help us. And it was ours.
It took us until November to actually formally open the place largely because the work continued and the onset of the new season took precedence. Our guest at the opening night was non other than Harry Gration from BBC Look North who agreed to do this for a nominal fee on the basis of a cheeky email I sent via Christa, alluding to all sorts of cruelty inflicted on us kids years ago by her big brother Brian.
Harry was a true gent driving from switching the Christmas lights on at Meadowhall up to the Villas and managing to fit us in en route to South Africa with the great Sir Geoffrey Boycott.
He was funny, extremely courteous, put up with Haighy and Browny, and rounded off a very good night for all those that attended.
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