19 – CATCHES WIN MATCHES
“Cricket is a most precarious profession; it is called a team game but, in fact, no one is as lonely as a batsman facing a bowler supported by ten fieldsmen and observed by two umpires to ensure that his error does not go unpunished.” John Arlott
Generally it is always good to see the return to the Villas of former players who have left to seek glories elsewhere; or in some cases have simply been so poor that even in the days of the most parlous of player availability, they still could not get in either team.
Sometimes it gives the game a special edge and sometimes it is just good to renew old acquaintances out there in the middle, hoping that you can put one over on an old mate. Of course the returning player is always determined to perform well so it adds extra spice to the game and an element of edginess. It should always end with a beer or two no matter what the outcome; the game is not about life or death after all.
These games are often packed with unpredictable twists and turns and for the returning player, no matter how good they may be, games against your old team-mates are probably as tough as they come, as Brent found out on his various returns to the Villas over the years.
Despite bowling like the wind at us he often discovered that we dug that bit deeper, which made for cracking contests between us and, well whoever Brent was playing for at the time.
When Paul “Meds” Medley returned years after honing his craft in the Great Milk Crate Test Matches with his new team, Laisterdyke, he did so as skipper of their first team. Meds left the Villas under a bit of a cloud although to this day nobody quite knows which cloud; these things happen at every cricket club up and down the country and often the mediation and compromise arts of ACAS would not be enough to resolve matters.
“The Dyke”, as they were known, had their origins in the Bradford League but had taken a step down into the Bradford Central League beginning what was a gradual, almost inevitable sad road to future extinction.
Although their ground had a tired appearance and the clubhouse seemed full of people oblivious to anything other than the afternoon “turn” – I believe the legendary Idle Elvis cut his teeth there, most probably on a bottle hurled from the audience – Dyke were a combative team full of abrasive characters and many with Bradford League experience. In short, they were a tough bunch of cricketers.
They had a couple of seasoned pros opening the bowling and a young quickie who was quite literally, mad as they come. They also had the muscle bound Gary Kingett, a very competitive all-rounder who could smash it miles and bowled at a decent pace; if only I had known that he was really a secret Duran Duran and Wham fan, something I discovered years later via Facebook, there may have been an extra bit of banter out there.
Gary still lives with the shame of smashing a long hop from me that he could have put to any part of Bradford, right down Duck’s throat at square leg; that’s what you get for singing Rio at the crease.
I honestly think Dyke also viewed us as a bit stuck up, although residing in Wrose we were hardly in the leafy suburbs, maybe just that we had salad for cricket teas rather than the Dyke Delicacy of pie, chips and peas.
The game that saw the return of Meds saw us at home and batting first. Duck had ground out a typically hard fought innings and was one clean hit from his half century having batted almost three hours for it. Now Duck hitting a six was a rare occurrence.
So we expected him to nudge another six careful singles to reach the milestone with minimal risk. To our amazement, inducing shock and horror from his watching father Billy “The Analyst” Stockdale, uncharacteristically he lashed out violently at the ball, sending it skyward towards the boundary.
It was clear that the ball was not going to clear even the shortest boundary at the Villas and guess who was under the catch… Meds! Now Meds always played his cricket with a bit of a strut right from the age of about ten and I quite admired that even if he never, in truth, got the runs to match the strut.
Bedecked in sun glasses – I know what you are thinking – out went a cry “Meds’ ball!” as he confidently steadied himself ready to put an end to Duck’s labours and send Billy to the tea tent to give his ashen faced son a good talking to before going through his scoring chart.
However, there are times when you see a fielder under a ball and just know that that the ball is going down and this was one of them. There was almost time to ring Ladbrokes and secure the odds on the spilled catch.
Meds never quite got under it in time, posing for too long adjusting his sunglasses and cap. Over-balancing, he hopelessly groped for the ball only for it to slip between outstretched hands hitting him square between the eyes and, laughably, bouncing off his head and over the boundary for Duck’s first six-hit of the season, albeit assisted, bringing up his fifty in the process.
Off went the sun glasses flying in the direction of the ball over the adjoining hedge as well, lodging firmly in there as ten other fielders collapsed in fits as Meds staggered around the boundary edge with a lump as big as the ball forming on his head.
The fact that he was twenty yards from our notorious Critics’ Corner – a senior citizens’ version of the Sidney Cricket Ground’s infamous Hill Section – did not help his cause and soon they were pelting him with bits of Granville Lawson’s pork pies with cries of “roobish lad!” and “no wonder we got shut of you!”.
I swear even Haighy was out of his seat jabbing his finger towards Meds and jeering “reject, reject”.
Due to open the batting for Dyke, Meds had to stay in the dressing rooms, allegedly due to double vision from the impact but, as he confessed much later, terrified of more pork peltings from Critics’ Corner.
Med’s great pal is Haighy’s son Phil “Micromesh” Haigh, known simply because he is probably the worst fielder ever to step on a cricket field and, to Haighy’s eternal relief, left the Villas and the critical gaze of Critics’ Corner many years back for local neighbours, Hepworth Idle CC.
The nickname arose because the ball seemed to be able to go through Micromesh each and every time he attempted to stop it and, as for catches, well if the ball went up in the air, opposition batters just kept running safe in the knowledge that once he had grassed another aborted attempt at a catch, Micromesh would end up flailing around trying to find where the ball had landed.
Whether it was a fear of the ball or that he is secretly blind who knows, but many a bowler has been heard to utter “not him” as a batter screamed a ball off in the direction of Micromesh, whilst both scorers put pencil to book to record the inevitable boundary in the score book.
With fielders like Micromesh a captain will eventually try to compensate via damage limitation and attempt to hide them somewhere the ball is not expected with any frequency or pace. However, cricket is cruel at times and Micromesh was in as much danger “grazing” far out of sight on the boundary edge as anywhere else on the field; in cricketing terms, the ball simply followed him wherever he hid.
Fielding in recent years has become a much more important part of the game not only at the very top level but also on weekends at clubs up and down the country; no longer something you have to endure before the cream teas, a quick whack with the bat and beer time.
Most of us practice hard as the last thing you want to do is let the team down; there are plenty of other opportunities in a game of cricket to do that. Sadly, some seem content to chance fate regardless by avoiding the weekly fielding sessions and taking their chances when Saturday comes.
Take Brian “Suzy” Sewell for instance, a stalwart from the olden days and a member of the Second Team when I first gained entry to the adult world in cricketing terms. Suzy lives in the memory for two notable escapades in the field.
Many years before Meds had come to grief in the same corner of the ground, Suzy had been back pedalling under a catch only to hit the same hedge and promptly do a back flip into the adjoining garden landing in almost the same place as the ball.
Several heads peered over, asked him to lob the ball back in disgust and left him there, preferring to field one man light whilst he plucked twigs and leaves from his woolly sweater.
Suzy also had this “trick” of trying to con the batter that he had lost the ball like some seaside magician – sort of, now you see it, now you don’t – with the aim being to tempt the batter into taking an extra run only for Suzy to then throw the ball in and run the batter out by yards.
There were several flaws to this plan most notably that not in thirty years of playing had Suzy actually run anybody out with it. That may have been because he could barely throw ten yards and was generally accepted – his batting as primary evidence here – to be as blind as a bat.
Nevertheless, the last time I ever saw him attempt this was farcical beyond belief. His attempt at deception was to pretend to fumble the ball, with no pretence actually needed in truth, and then surreptitiously slide the ball under his sweater making the batters think it had passed him.
In those days the cricket sweater was often a voluminous thing, generally made by doting grandmothers and washed almost to extinction. As the batters took the bait Suzy’s eyes lit up but as he searched for the ball he started to struggle like an amateur escapologist. I swear they ran another three before the team came across and ripped his sweater to bits trying to find the ball. He never played again.
In truth we all drop catches no matter how hard we practise nor how often; it helps though, if when you are the culprit you do not drop an absolute dolly, one that Geoffrey Boycott is fond of describing as “that easy me mum would have caught that one!”
When you do – and I know this feeling well – you just want to borrow a shovel from the garage and dig a hole to bury yourself in. Equally, take the odd blinder and after a quick check to convince yourself that you have actually caught it any number of celebrations can commence; of course you don’t confess that you never saw the ball you just hung out a hand and hoped that all your fingers would still be there post impact.
Age is a killer for fielding prowess, as catches you normally would have swallowed as a kid can now hit you anywhere from the intended palm of the hand to your armpit and any dreams of still hurling the ball into the stumps from the boundary edge are about as realistic as that call from England.
So you just give it your best and go from weekend to weekend hoping that somehow you will stop the ball, no matter which part of your body it hits and that all bones will remain intact. And if a catch goes down, please dear God the batter does not rack up a brutal hundred ensuring you have the popularity of a skunk in the dressing room.
Cricket is fundamentally a game of respect: for the game itself, the opponent and the umpires. Treat any with contempt and you get what you deserve as indeed did one of cricket’s more complex of characters, Chris Spivey, one Saturday afternoon proving as they say, your reap what you sow.
Although he was not bowling, he had not been banished to the edge to sulk after his weekly impression of a five year old, something the other ten adults in the team grew used to ignoring; either that or he had simply gone wandering like most children when the adults take the ball away from them.
Somehow he had found himself in what is known as the inner ring, usually containing those fielders mobile and alert enough – two qualities not often associated here – to stop batters taking quick singles.
Soon there was a false shot and the ball spooned up in the air towards the village idiot and what appeared to be the simplest of catches. Unbelievably, with the ball still in the air he decided to become a television commentator and here’s what happened next with the ball still gently hovering.
“Oh that’s a bad shot by the batter – what a way to end the innings” he cried moving towards the ball oblivious to his teammates’ jaws dropping in unison.
“Come on down to Daddy, lets be having you” yelled the challenged one. Had the ball been capable of rationale thought, it must have come to the conclusion that the guy beneath needed sectioning or if three wishes were possible, then let one be the ability to turn into a grenade.
“Its mine and you’re toast batter…on your way lad… you’ve had your day!”
It was at this point that we all wanted to suspend time with a Sky+ moment and race off to the bookies to wager our houses, savings and families that this catch would be grassed.
“I’m ready for you now” he wailed skywards as he slapped hands together, adjusted wristbands only for the ball to drop gently in then bounce out as if to say “that’s made you look a twat hasn’t it?”
To a man ten fielders – it is the only time I have ever seen a bowler laugh at a dropped catch – two batters, two umpires, Critics’ Corner en masse and even the tea ladies fell about on the floor as the troubled one, not untypically, tried to blame a Gulf Coast wind current for blowing the ball off its path downwards.
Sport is life and, as in life, respect is priceless; you also, on many occasions, get what you deserve.
20 – BY ORDER OF THE COMMITTEE
“A committee is a group of the unwilling, chosen from the unfit, to do the unnecessary.”
Anonymous
“A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours.“ Milton Berle
Will Carling famously described the Rugby Football Union (RFU) Committee as “57 old farts” a quote that, temporarily, cost him his job in the mid 1990s as England captain. Whilst it was perhaps not the most sensitive comment to level at your employers, it struck a chord with many up and down the country.
There are thousands of clubs “managed” by committees that comprise as that other famous saying goes “a collection of well meaning idiots”. I am allowed to say this because I have served as one of those idiots for numerous years now and on many varying committees.
Typifying my own frustrations at this most useless of decision making vehicles was the night at the Villas when, at probably the most defining point in the club’s history – we were trying to agree on a plan to raise the funds to replace our crumbling clubhouse before it fell down around us – we wasted an hour debating a complaint as to why we had run out of margarine for the club teas the previous Saturday. Crucially we reached no definitive conclusion there, either.
I suspect the notion of a committee probably started centuries ago and was probably a wheeze for men to escape for a quiet midweek goblet of ale in the guise of community service. Fast forward to today and all possible positive intentions often sink in the mire of never ending late night meetings on freezing cold winter nights, listening to people clearly with nowhere else to go.
Sadly, you don’t get many committees overloaded with business people or at least, business sense; some do join and then quickly realise the stupidity of that decision made in a haze of goodwill. That’s because businesses need decisions to be made quickly, with certainty and not without a pointless rambling debate and a deferral until next month as another excuse for a pint.
My earliest exposure to the committee at the Villas was perhaps an early sign of masochism, volunteering as I did, as a very naïve fourteen-year-old, so the juniors could have some representation at the club. If you think it may have been the beginnings of a career fighting for human rights please read on.
Given that the club, post the demise of the Three Wise Men, could no longer rely on their munificence and was now firmly back in its perennial penniless state, the juniors were actually the most liquid part of the club’s “operations”, in fact the only liquid part.
It was ironic that it took the juniors to kick start the club into a larger fund-raising cycle some thirty years earlier and that’s not to decry the efforts of all those who had taken the club to that same point over the past sixty years.
It was also ironic that in our darker days some twenty years on, once again, it took the junior funds to bail out the club from a combination of ineptitude and, in certain cases, outright crookedness on the main committee. Those were indeed, very dark days and there were times when I wondered if we would survive them.
Way back in the 1970s, as a small group we had formed a Junior Committee originally as a wheeze to convince Haighy to grant us a key to the old hut for winter; we spent our summers on the field so it seemed cruel to kick us off for the winter. It might be okay for polar bears to have to find new grounds for the winter but not us; we just wanted a bit of shelter, even if the woodworm-ridden hut was the best available.
Cautious as ever Haighy “lent” us a key for our first meeting and we promptly got several cut and handed back the original; I think he knew but simply played along with us.
Now that we had a base for winter – what other local “gang” could match this splendour even if it was sub-zero at times – we set about creating the Junior Committee. As we needed a Secretary we decided to advertise in the hope of meeting gorgeous girls in pencil skirts with glasses perched on their noses?
Thus, we held interviews for the posts available and eventually our Junior Committee was formed. Now we had to decide what to do as the Elders would want a report from us at their preferred staging post, The Wrose Bull pub.
In the summer we had raised a decent sum of money flogging various things but now we hit upon the idea of broadening our offering, a sort of Villas Argos catalogue. So it was that we started selling Christmas cards, embossed pens and horrible acrylic club ties; in fact, I think we were partially responsible for kick starting the Chinese economy.
When we rolled up to the massed ranks of the main committee to present our initial report, it was quite daunting as there could be upwards of twenty sat there. Generally they were all smoking their heads off and you struggled to make out faces through the smog but when I told them of our growing fortune you could see the looks of bewilderment around the room.
Given my exposure to those meetings at such a young age, I remain convinced that my fate is sealed and I will croak it soon from emphysema but there was no doubt they were impressed.
With so many of them all wanting to chip in (even if they had no idea what the current debating point was or what they could add to it), the prevailing theme seemed to be to ensure the meeting lasted until closing time. There was little structure to most meetings and it was easy to see why little ever got done.
What also became apparent was that the last thing you should attempt to debate at a Cricket Club Committee is cricket. You can almost guarantee that the majority of people on a cricket committee will have never played, watched or shown the least bit of interest in the game.
In later life I have represented the club on other generally pointless external committees hoping against hope that these could be better. Once again the pattern is repeated: endless pontification and procrastination followed by the comfort of knowing that life had not changed one bit in the last three hours as you gratefully inhaled clean air again.
Indeed the single most progressive change in all my years attending these meetings was nothing to do with any of them but courtesy of the smoking ban.
It is as if all the lessons learned from individual club meetings are completely ignored by suddenly ballooning the process and encouraging even more useless opinions. I give you a few examples starting with the monthly meetings of the Bradford Sunday Alliance Football League.
In my spell as White Bear rep these were held at the East Bowling Unity Club (EBU), grim enough for EB to be mistaken for East Berlin; at least in the concert room it was often pure theatre.
The Treasurer at the time was a larger than life character called Eric who would always preface his Treasurer’s Report with a joke in an attempt to hide the fact that, in common with most Treasurers, he was clueless about accounts.
Each month you willed him on to make this month’s attempt funny only for him to get to the punch line and be greeted once again by the great and the downright ugly of Sunday football turning to each other, slurping another gulp of Carling and asking “what the fuck was that all about?”
Eric would then get his own back by reading out every line of figures from the accounts to numb the attendees into submission; laugh they bloody well would next month. The good thing about the EBU though, was that it was massive and had several exit routes so the trick was to collect your monthly papers at the front desk, hang around two minutes and then slip out of the snooker room exit unless you fancied watching Eric die again on stage.
It was a common theme for sports club reps with the majority seemingly hooked on the filthy weed and the Bradford Junior Cricket League meetings were no different. The Chairman smoked more than the Flying Scotsman and early meetings were notable for being unable to see from the front to the back of the room.
Once again the chance to get anything progressive through is often lost, simply because too many voices are offered meaning, when it got to the vote, most will go for the easy option and the chance to get home.
Cricket meetings are by far the worst because there are so many rules to tinker around the edges with. You know as the end of each summer approaches, there will be somebody frustrated by their general lack of purpose in life and they will have been beavering away with all manner of proposed rule changes that may range from the change of a comma in a sentence, to how many teas each team must consume per game next season.
The Airedale & Wharfedale Senior League has by far the most archaic and useless process to administer proposed rule changes every conceived by man.
Towards the end of each summer when most volunteers are generally exhausted from the effort of keeping individual clubs afloat, preserving the peace and having been the target of every conceivable whinge thought possible, you are landed with the annual proposals for rule changes which fill a dossier.
The league has a protracted and pointless process that demands that all clubs meet in October to debate the merits of each proposal – having presumably debated them back at base – and then meet again in November to vote. How many more excuses do these guys need for a beer?
It is torture and most clubs will send the guy who either lives nearest to the meeting venue or has plainly got nothing better to do ensuring that few have really considered the proposed changes. In this age of electronic communication surely it makes more sense to simply request a “Yes” or “No” response for each proposal, count them up and then Bingo!
Joking aside, cricket clubs are struggling with ever dwindling numbers of volunteers left to cope with often more complex regulatory demands, especially where children are concerned.
Those who elect simply to turn up on the Saturday afternoon, play a game and then scarper are safe in the knowledge that, as player numbers dwindle and commitment to play weakens; they will always get a game somewhere as few clubs can afford to turn away players.
However, what they fail to comprehend is that, one day, there will be no volunteers and, maybe that old adage of always appreciating something most when it’s gone will come home to roost for many?
21- PLAYING FOR LAUGHS
“The man who has no imagination has no wings.” Muhammad Ali
Over the years I have never been a great fan of playing so called friendly fixtures, ostensibly as practice, as they often lack the edge that a genuine game provides and quite often these games can turn into anarchy given that they are generally meaningless. However, sport should always be fun, so when you do have the opportunity to relax a touch and play it a little more for laughs, then it’s good to take the chance.
At the Villas, as the Under Eighteen team that many of us had enjoyed came to an end, we wanted to stay together and continue to play Wednesday night cricket so we joined the Bradford Evening League as an open age team.
The intended ethos of the team was to offer the chance of a midweek game, to allow lads out of form an extra chance and to provide a team where First and Second Teamers plus one or two others could join together in a relaxed format.
Despite the relaxed approach we were still competitive and we enjoyed a fair amount of success as we progressed up the league: but when we eventually joined the Division One big boys we were up against some seriously good Bradford League players.
Still we always tried to maintain the spirit of the team and, crucial to that, was the addition of the wild card picks, generally somebody who had never played cricket in his life but would do anything to get out a few midweek beers.
One of these regular picks was that my great mate, Gasman, who, not content with escaping Our Lass in the football season, became our specialist number 11 batter, non-bowler and fielder to be hidden from the ball at all costs.
After a hard day down a hole fixing gas pipes then a few beers as reward for enduring a game he knew bugger all about seemed to be a good trade. However, as I mentioned earlier, when writing about the perils of trying to hide a fielder during a game, there was one game that proved that you can run, but eventually you cannot hide.
We were playing at the old mental asylum, High Royds in Menston, now being converted to trendy flats for modern day lunatics willing to pay a King’s ransom for a shoebox. And whilst the old asylum had been emptied of inmates several years earlier simply by opening the doors one evening and somebody shouting “fire!” in what New Labour called Care in the Community, there were still rumours of escapees hiding in the trees surrounding the ground.
As we took this seriously we elected Gasman to field on the boundary edge whenever we played there; he was quite handy and if anybody was to get banned for punching a spectator far better to lose the token non-cricketer for the rest of the season. We could always teach him to score to maintain the Wednesday night escape route and the much craved for beers if necessary.
It was a balmy summer evening and this was a lot better than digging holes until, as it always does, the ball eventually found Gasman, dreaming away in the outfield. Fielding as he was at the longest distance from the batter known as long off – a tactical decision made on the assumption that the ball would always fly over him thereby not requiring any attempt at a catch – this time the opposition batter got too far under the ball.
Up it went skywards, seemingly like a rocket disappearing from view as it pierced the clouds. And then it reappeared, to great amusement from all bar Gasman and the bowler, who both knew there was more chance of Shergar coming out from the bushes being ridden by Lord Lucan than the catch being taken.
Gasman had obviously listened to the basic cricket coaching we had offered him on entry to the team – a sort of Health & Safety Guide to Survival – and started to focus on the sky, picking out the ball and steadying himself for its return to Earth.
He actually looked like he was going to try to take the catch, maybe thinking if he did it was free beer all night. And then, right at the last moment, as the ball careered back to ground level he took two steps forward, watched it drop over his shoulder, plug in the soft ground and casually walked back, picked it up and threw it in to an incredulous bowler and teammates.
Revenge on the part of the bowler was not far away as he somehow forced the skipper, Bodger Lee, to open the batting with Gasman in full knowledge that the opposition “pro” was nearby Menston’s overseas player for the summer, a colossus of a Kiwi called Sterling who bowled like the wind.
Somehow when Gasman was told he was opening the innings he did not smell a rat; we hoped that when down a hole all day he was a bit better at sniffing gas. And so the conversation went like this:
BODGER – “You’ve hardly had a bat all season Gas so for being such a good sport here’s a chance to go enjoy yourself”
TRANSLATION – “This bloke will probably knock your head off but see if you can be a good sport and waste some of his allotted four overs so he can’t knock ours off.”
GASMAN – “Cheers lads I really appreciate this!”
TRANSLATION – “There must be a catch here!”
So we kitted Gasman up in that much body armour he could barely walk to the wicket and even then he suspected nothing, which made me wonder just what he would do for a few midweek beers. Then he began the long waddle to the middle that we fully expected him to have to repeat in the opposite direction on a stretcher before being delivered to Bradford Royal Infirmary.
What happened next was pure theatre as Sterling, on the edge of the Kiwi national team, marked his long run out whilst Gasman, in reality never on the edge of our midweek team, at last sensed his impending fate and tried to figure out if it would be cool to simply run for the bushes and head home.
With Sterling at the top of his run, hard, shiny, bone-crushing new ball in hand it was like waiting for the executioner’s guillotine to drop and many years later Gasman confessed to me that “he was that far away I thought he was coming in a taxi… when he started running so did a slime down my trouser leg!”
The first ball whizzed past Gasman so quick that by the time he had picked up his bat to waft an imaginary shot, the wicketkeeper was tossing the ball back towards Sterling. I’m not sure how many balls Gasman survived, but I have never seen a man so happy to be out as he almost ran from the field to rapturous applause from the edge. He never put those pads on again.
As we started to progress through the divisions we came up against more and more teams that contained several “ringers” and some top players as evidenced by Sterling. We continued in sheer defiance with our policy of an eclectic selection of cricketing all-sorts.
Bizarrely we had Sessay Jim who somehow thought it worth the effort of a two hour round trip to have a midweek slog having met Bodger at a caravan park they both frequented. Sessay was actually a good batter and, belying his timid, bespectacled appearance, he was a feisty guy who could whack it a long way which was what the Evening League was all about.
Tactics rarely came into it as demonstrated by the unchallenged tenure of Bodger for many years. As anybody who has tried it will know, organising a midweek cricket team is best done by somebody with nothing else to do and Bodger, having dedicated himself to a life on the golf course post a very early retirement, was the undisputed man for the job.
Tactically he could be limited to say the least with his strong belief in the Parachute Field when fielding. In short, the basis of the Parachute Field (that to my knowledge has never formed part of the ECB Coaching Manual), is to effectively place a fielder where the ball last landed based on the probability that at least some time in the next few years, it will actually land there again, suggesting the captain is a tactical genius.
By now you will gather that in those days the essence of the midweek team was less tactical and much more social although when you came up against a team with a star man the last thing you wanted was to be chasing leather all night.
If you got a chance to dismiss the key man early, thereby averting potential humiliation and several expensive repairs to neighbouring properties, then you grabbed it; unless that is the opportunity went to the wrong man.
One game we were up against a very prolific Asian batter who had been demolishing Wednesday night teams all over Bradford. This night was no different as he smashed us for an explosive hundred but only after Big Phil Smith had dropped him on nought!
Big Phil had been the Great White Hope, at least of his father’s, as the next fast bowler at the club but, as the name implies, he just got bigger, developed the equivalent of the “yips” and could barely run in and land the ball by the time he emigrated to Florida.
As a fielder he was in the same category of Gasman and Micromesh; admittedly, on this occasion, the batter hit the ball hard and true but at a good height for a regulation catch.
Big Phil reacted like a startled rabbit, never moved until the ball crashed into his kneecap like a bullet, causing him to collapse like a demolished tower block with the ball pinging off his knee and forcing a high pitched wail from the crumbling tower. Nobody could chase it for laughing and it eventually crept over the rope for four.
It was not all about damage limitation and there were some high points; the peak of our success came in 1986 as, replicating the First Team who won the double, we also won the Bradford Evening League Division One title, albeit in truth assisted by some rain-truncated games with the title decider against the big boys from Pudsey St Lawrence being rained off completely.
It was an unexpected point gained from our perspective as PSL were miles better than us with an array of big guns at their disposal. Generally it was damage limitation against these guys but they did have one thing in common with us in their choice of captain, a character nicknamed Amos, who was clearly a second teamer bordering on the third team.
No matter because he clearly had the time to arrange the game on behalf of his superiors and, once in their company he was like the school bully surrounded by his big, tough mates. You could never escape the feeling that some of the PSL lot viewed us somewhat dismissively.
Suffice to say there was not a lot of love lost between the two sides although we had little to match them on the cricket field. One game we actually had them in real trouble; with PSL batting first we had to come off for a short rain break but the mighty PSL were actually less than twenty with half the team out.
It was during the break that I destroyed any pretentions to becoming either a pundit or forecaster as I announced confidently “we’ve got them now, only the rabbits (a term for the less able batters) to come!”
Unfortunately, when we did get back on the field the “rabbits” smashed us to all parts with most of my bowling hopping over the boundary edge; we got stuffed…again.
In the year of our ultimate success in the midweek slog league – 1986 – the new clubhouse was now up and situated across the field so the old toilets around the back of the changing rooms had limited appeal (unless you were a fly or rare breed of locust) and were in the process of being demolished.
If occasionally you got caught short then most people used the groundsman’s watering can than risk malaria. By now the old hut had no running water and this was clearly not what the PSL boys were used to with Amos at his usual condescending, patronizing and irritating best.
So much so that when Amos popped his head into our dressing room and asked if we had any water that he could wet his wicket-keeping inner gloves with…well, of course we had. As I write this, I wonder if there is a Statute of Limitations for offences against a fellow cricketer?
Perhaps after twenty five years I should seek forgiveness and confess my sins to Amos who I see most years as our juniors visit the hallowed turf of Tofts Road, Pudsey which for the record remains one of my favourite Bradford League grounds…even if it is in Leeds.
Dear Amos…it was me…and I am humbly sorry!
22 – THE BIG SOCIETY
“Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches” by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and then he would have meant the same thing.” John Steinbeck, Cannery Row.
I’ve been playing sport now for some 40 years and during that time life has changed beyond all recognition. I cannot say I ever really took my career with Barclays as seriously as others, money or status as forms of incentive held little appeal. Somehow, all I ever wanted to do was find a way to the weekend and the next game with midweek nights punctuated by training or practice sessions.
It never mattered that I was really not that good, in fact often that’s been a great driver, to try to be better than you thought you could be. There are clearly more important things in life and all I really am trying to say is that sport has given me a purpose.
I preface this chapter with the above quote illustrating, I believe, the very essence of life itself, which for all our apparent differences of physicality and personality, scratch deeper and we are much alike. I have never considered myself a political person, having little faith in any of the mainstream parties, viewing politicians with the mistrust and distaste that most of you will doubtless share.
I see them as self-serving, self-promoting, greedy, slimy and at worst often corrupt, totally out of touch with the people they are elected to serve. In modern societies like Britain, there are supposed to be controls to limit the obscene excesses seen in Third World countries but, in recent years greed and excess have run unchecked and, largely unpunished in both politics and business.
Growing up, I thought I was a bit of a “Leftie” with a social conscience, believing in some form of fairness, equality and a division of wealth; in truth, I remain clueless as to what this really means and now admit how unrealistic it is.
As you get older you realise that there will always be stinking rich people and the desperately poor as well, trying to find a way to co-exist; I guess most of us aim to be somewhere in the middle, a sort of comfort zone keeping our heads down and hoping it will all turn out okay. Or at least get to the weekend.
If the Labour Party is supposed to be the party of the working classes then you can see how impossible the notion of social equality is with the number of millionaires on the opposition benches; the fact that the gap between rich and poor widened more than ever in the New Labour years is further testimony.
Thirteen years of “New” Labour in power left the country broke again just like Old Labour used to and the Coalition left to muddle through as best they could given the circumstances. No matter that the personal wealth of Tony Blair has exploded post his tenure in office but then did you really believe that “things can only get better”?
Cameron’s Coalition also seems to have no idea how to connect with real people as they lurch from gaffe to gaffe. And if there is one thing that the whole Leveson pantomime will not curtail it is how cap in hand the political parties are to their invisible paymasters, the press barons. What has this got to do with sport? Bear with me please.
Initially I did like Cameron’s early ideas around the notion of The Big Society even if this was nothing new and has existed for generations, although probably not at Eton. The British have always shown a desire to help others, sometimes to an extent that makes you wonder if we are too generous, take India as an example.
At the time of writing, we are still providing billions in aid having already given them most of our textile industry and sold off other major “British” businesses to them. On the blindside what we never see are the contracts signed behind closed doors, in particular to keep orders and jobs secure in some of our key industries such as defence. We giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other.
The British people have always been generous, rising to support international disasters and often punching above our weight for this small island. Look inward though and committing time to help others has become so much harder these days; so much so that it threatens the fabric of our daily lives.
Much of what we have today was founded on a Big Society notion, well before Big Dave ever got wind of it as a vote puller. The term “fairness” is banded around regularly by politicians as they seek to appease a hacked off electorate but how can they really understand? Ironic, is it not, that so many divisions in society were widened by thirteen years of Blair.
Not that previous Tory Governments were any better, proving equally inept at preserving a core fabric of society, burdened by the pervading image of a party of toffs. The common theme over recent decades surely has been that, whether Governments seek to bash trades unions or bankers, depending on the pantomime villain most in vogue, the ultimate losers in the fallout are always the little guys.
Trade Unions get bashed, the little man loses his job; bankers get bashed and your local library shuts. Even that safety net for those who have fallen on genuine hard times, the Welfare State, has been abused to such an extent that it now resembles a bloated whale floating out of control. Honest… this does relate to sport… stay with me.
I do not claim to have a cure-all for the current ills of society and am not worldly-wise enough to comment on many issues, but there do seem one or two things so obviously wrong with my little world and yours as well.
So I choose this space to have a final rant at life’s injustices before they seize my house, strap me to the plastic bottomed wheelchair and cart me off to the venture capital-owned care home to be looked after by some minimum waged, Bulgarian with tattooed biceps.
So where to begin? What matters most to me are the basics of life; let’s take the traditional Englishman’s pint of beer, a simple pleasure so horribly abused in recent decades to the extent you need a bank loan for a night out. This is a classic case of politicians meddling where there was simply no need to do so.
In 1987, the Conservative Lord Young’s Beer Orders Act removed control of the pub trade from the large brewers, which were viewed as “uncompetitive” by a Monopolies & Mergers Report. Ironically, overnight one monopoly position was replaced with another in the form of Pubcos (public house operating companies) created to manage the estates that the brewers were forced to shed.
Pubcos were largely debt funded by the major institutions, and seen as a property-backed, gilt-edged investment; the debt would be serviced by the profits and rents from the new estates and everybody would be rich. Not so!
Pubcos “tie” both the rents and the supply of products, in effect, they control what a tenant can buy and sell, and at what price but the model was hugely dependent on property values as they both secured the debt and determined the cost of that debt. If commercial property values fell the pressure went down the chain and Pubcos built up massive debts and had to find a way to service these.
The largest Pubcos are Punch Taverns and Enterprise Inns, both hugely leveraged businesses with combined net debt levels of £5.6bn in 2011. These are enormous figures and both businesses have struggled in recent years as they have tried to reduce their respective debt mountains; this can only be achieved by squeezing more revenue from the estates, in other words raising the price of a pint, and/or asset disposals.
Pubcos control around 65% of an estimated 52,000 pubs in the country and as many communities will evidence, pub closures have been a common feature in recent years with the current rate estimated at about 20 a week in 2013.
Successive governments have also treated the pub industry like a cash cow; it contributes some £19bn in duty and VAT per annum – around 2% of GDP. Duty and VAT are now estimated at £1.05 per pint , which is 12 times the level in Germany. Britain’s drinkers are now paying 40 per cent of the entire EU duty bill, yet only drinking 13 per cent of the beer.
Some might think it’s a good thing we can buy a case of beer for less than a tenner from the supermarket, but we now have a major health issue caused by alcohol and fuelled by a government in cahoots with the drinks industry and its financial backers.
Despite the sums raked in by the Exchequer, estimates of the cost to wider society through associated health issues suggest that the tax take is all but neutral. Corporate greed – including the ill-conceived all day opening – has pushed the price of a simple pint of beer over three quid, caused thousands of pub closures and still turned our city centres in ghettos most weekends.
As pubs close we socialise less and retreat with our discount pack back home behind closed doors.
And what about petrol prices in recent years? It is scandalous that Governments think there is no end to what the ordinary motorist and the haulage industry will put up with. Once again it is too easy a target, generating easy pickings for the Treasury, instead of trying to identify and collect the billions squandered each year in uncollected and evaded personal and corporate tax.
Whilst we are nowhere near Greece, the fact is that we have a tax system that does not work and focuses on the “low hanging fruit” which means that it lacks any element of fairness and picks on you and me.
While I am on a roll lets have a think about immigration then. Before I begin what about that oft used word “racist”? Personally, I believe it is used simply as an excuse to halt any rational debate about the subject of immigration by tarring anybody with a counter view to those that would gladly open our borders to all and sundry.
Nationally we are a small island with around sixty million people which means we are roughly four times as densely populated as France and Germany.
As both those economies are also “prosperous”, advanced nations then why is Britain such a destination of choice? Firstly our benefits system is far more generous and much easier to abuse than our European neighbours. Secondly, and linked to the above is the fact that because our system tolerates the work shy so generously we have to import labour to do the jobs our idle indigenous population see beneath them, in a country where we issue degrees for nail painting.
It’s not the fault of the Italians, the Jews, the Asians or the recent influx of Eastern Europeans if good old Great Britain will welcome them with open arms, a raft of benefits and housing, poor as it often is, but far better than from where they have come from.
What would you do in their position? Had we cured the problem of the long term idle and got them in work doing the jobs we need to “out source” then there would have been little need for mass immigration. Now we have an under-current of tensions simmering because “they got our jobs”, even though we don’t really want to do them.
When people are struggling day to day they should think long and hard before directing their ire at the local Polish worker and wonder about that army of some two and a half million people deemed unfit to work on Incapacity Benefit. We are at capacity on this small island but when the economic recovery does start to gain momentum, if we still have to import labour to fill vacancies then there surely will be something wholly wrong with the system.
And finally that great issue of education, education, education. I recently read that nearly half of all sixteen-year olds leave school without even achieving five good GCSEs and this in the age when they tell us year after year that records have been smashed again with Little Johnnies and Jemimas rushing home clutching twenty A* passes, smiling and whooping for the attendant news cameras and everybody convinced our education standards are beyond reproach.
Blair’s education vision was to shove some fifty percent of school leavers into university which was a pretty good wheeze to dampen down the unemployment figures for another three or four years. Basically, under Blair any kid who could write his or her name could be assured of a university degree course, even if it was in nail polishing.
I always thought that university was for the brightest kids, so how come around half of ours qualify when in France and Germany it is roughly half this proportion?
It is simply wrong to force kids to stay on at school past the age of sixteen when, for many, academia simply does not work for them; set them free to learn something that might benefit the individual and wider society. As much as I found exams fairly routine, present a wiring circuit or a U-tube to me and I am flummoxed; people simply have different skill sets.
I believe all the above have an impact, eventually, on everyday life and sport as there are causes and effects here. Councils forced to cut budgets are hiking up the costs of sports facilities up and down the country with fields still being sold off no matter what the Government claim.
When we last ran the White Bear football team, the cost of our pitch then was approaching unsustainable levels so I dread to guess the cost more than a decade later for that bag of grass seed. Privately run clubs like the Villas face ever escalating costs for the provision of utilities, insurances and general running costs.
Those, like us, seemingly fortunate to have a form of bar income see that squeezed annually as people choose to stay in rather than endure the ridiculous Beer Escalator Tax that ministers piously tell us is good for society…but please don’t upset our supermarket friends.
We also struggle to get consistent commitment from the younger end now who, to keep up with their peers in this hi-tech age, have to have the latest gadget and so many feel the need to work weekends to pay for them and sport becomes a poor second.
And, as hard as we try to keep actual playing costs down to the bare minimum, by the time I have driven to an away fixture, paid my match fee and coughed up the weekly fine for being “old and useless” I am quite a few quid down. I am lucky as I can afford it but the constantly increasing costs of simple pleasures we used to take for granted are a big problem for many.
Of course life has changed and these issues are miniscule if you are wondering where your next meal is coming from or hiding from raining bombs in one of the war-torn areas of the world. Yet try to imagine some ten years on – I promise it will be that soon – and look around at what we have now as much of it will be gone.
The Big Society may be a cheap words from another cheap politician but it is disappearing. Older readers will doubtless nod in sympathy but I hope the younger ones grasp what is happening and, at the very least, fight hard to keep what we still have left. Otherwise what Olympic legacy will we really have preserved?
23 – DAYS OF OUR LIVES
“You can’t help getting older but you don’t have to get old” George Burns
The first time you set foot in an adult dressing room and I use the term “adult” loosely, it can be a very intimidating experience. Where do you sit, who will speak to you, should you speak back and how can you change without displaying to all how puny you are?
These days parents have to sign a disclaimer allowing Little Johnny to change and maybe shower with adults although most of the smelly young skunks are generally in the bar two minutes after the game has ended. In my day, the first thing I heard in the Beldon dressing room was Pansy Potter cooing “nice bottom” and consequently scaring me witless – as intended – although not as much as Jimmy Saville would have.
There was to be no cheeky lip from this youngster just a wary eye on the greying Captain Birds Eye lookalike, winking at me continually as he still does most Sundays in the Bear.
There is quite a difference between a football and a cricket dressing room, most likely due to the potential duration of the game ahead; in the football dressing room it is all machismo and breast beating with ninety minutes of bedlam ahead.
As cricket can evolve over a whole day, there’s time for a more cerebral approach, at least from those capable of understanding what this entails, which tends to exclude one or two of the lads I played with. Whatever the approach to the game, you are never more together as a unit than whilst in that dressing room; the inmates are safe within the confines of the asylum.
My early recollections of playing for the Villas Second Team are full of characters largely archaic in appearance to a then impressionable teenager, unhelpfully nicknamed The Blond Bomber by Haighy after I slogged a fifty one day, down the road at local rivals Thackley CC.
The Sex Pistols and red food colouring soon put paid to the blond hair and my Grandma Ada hardly spoke to me for months afterwards, dismayed at why any grandson of hers would want red hair.
A great early character was Steve “Car Park” Jackson, son of Villas legend Ernest, although never quite to walk in the same cricketing boots and lost too soon and to us all, tragically.
Car Park was ten years older than me – he would have been sixty this year – around the time I broke into the side as a thirteen year old and, although he seemed ancient to me, he was the link between the embryos – us – and the dinosaurs like Suzy Sewell who made up most of the team. It seemed that Villas youth policy had yet to kick in and so the team was littered with guys clearly with one foot in the grave.
As young lads we could banter with Car Park and his nickname came from repeated threats to mete out retribution if we went too far by way of “any more lip and I’ll take you out in that car park!”
Imagine the ECB Child Welfare Policy chapter dealing with “Beatings by a Senior Player in the Car Park”?
My turn in the car park nearly came one afternoon when Car Park prodded my backside and said “by you’ve got a spotty arse!”
This may seem extreme treatment for a teenager but it was the seventies and nobody broke down and cried wolf in those days; besides, I offered the reply of “at least nobody can see my ugly arse whereas they can see your face all day!”
“Right young ‘un you’ve ‘ad it…time for the car park!” said Car Park with a wink and a glint in his eye and started to pick me up and carry my seven stone out of the dressing rooms with the team in fits!
Car Park was great to be around, a robust figure – he was a builder by trade – and gave the appearance of being indestructible on the outside although something very bad was gnawing away at him inside and none of us ever saw it.
I spent the last day he was with us, chauffeuring him and another old pal, later to become a team-mate, Johnny “Ando” Anderson, around local games one glorious Sunday afternoon. Ando had escaped his wife Kath, guarding the front door with her rolling pin aware that something was afoot, by shinning down the drainpipe.
Trademark pipe in his mouth – the only thirty-odd year old I ever saw smoking a pipe – and we were off for the day. Last time I saw Car Park was dropping him off in Idle village for a few more beers and less than twenty four hours later I heard he was gone having taken his own life; it ripped a hole in the dressing room for ages.
Life goes on inevitably as it has to and often the only cure is laughter and there was always plenty of that available. These days you see some of the young lads like Sam Wade turn up for matches dressed like a homeless kid but apparently it is all in the name of fashion; likewise Molly’s string vest and undies have been in and out of fashion more often than Bruce Forsyth but he just keeps on wearing them oblivious to Carnaby Street.
In the early days men’s hygiene was still awaiting the launch of the plethora of male grooming products available today. For most of us a shared bar of Imperial Leather would have to do.
Hygiene wise, if you got it badly wrong, then it was likely that you would soon have a new lifelong nickname as a consequence, which is what happened to veteran Gerald Taylor who made the mistake of hanging up a disgusting pair of Y-fronts only to be known forever more as “Klinkers Taylor” due to one wag remarking these had “more skid marks than Le Mans”.
The best times though have been the endless pranks over the years as grown men do a good job of imitating twelve year olds, free from any reproachful look from any mother, teacher or wife.
If you have heard one or two blood curdling screams coming across the field from the dressing rooms over the years I offer you some potential causes.
1 – Although the shower was a touch lukewarm when it started, it is suddenly instantly lovely and warm but somehow only on your leg. And then you notice Jarvo stood a foot away, big grin as he continues to pee all over you. Cue screaming fit.
2 – You always knew it was coming as it is the last day of the season and Arkwright, who ran the bar, is complaining that somebody has nicked all the ice. And then the room goes quiet, people move away from you in the shower and – because it’s all you can do by now – you brace yourself for the full icy bucket of water and the heart clattering round faster than ever before. More blood curdling screams and obscenities.
3 – This time a deathly hush would give it away so the dressing room chatter ramps up with the targeted figure, oblivious to the threat of psychotic teammate – Duck – who is on all fours prowling across the floor like a cat with a bird in sight. And then a lunge for the hips and his teeth lock on to the target’s backside with unerring accuracy. Screams that beat anything Hammer Horror films ever produced.
And before you read this as a parent who hopes that one day your son will become a senior player, let me reassure you that not all pranks involve potential heart attacks or random acts of violence. Some are simple and much more measured allowing for the clinical approach; take the advent of Super Glue which in the Eighties was a huge addition to Saturday afternoons.
Veteran bowler, Mike Adams, was the first victim as he used to spray spare change over the window ledge displaying a casual affluence. One day somebody decided it would be funny to glue this down and watch him at the end of the game attempt to collect the change; may I confess my guilt through these pages Mike?
The initial reaction is always confusion then bewilderment followed by the obvious realisation that you have been stitched up; which was the same effect when the same tube of glue was used to glue a zipper on a teammate’s trousers in the “off” position, which meant he spent a Saturday night with a raft of safety pins holding his dignity intact – sorry Ginger!
But perhaps the funniest was at Ingrow where the dressing room ceiling was UPVc panelling and Duck had rolled up one day with some fancy new shoes a la Miami Vice; the worst thing you could ever do was announce a new possession as it always attracted attention.
At Ingrow, to get to the showers you had to walk out of the changing rooms and up some stairs outside – they breed them tough on the edge of Keighley. This gave us time to put all Duck’s gear together with his towel in the middle of the field, which meant a frantic naked dash with young kids collapsing in heaps of laughter as he recovered his gear and modesty, simultaneously cursing us all to high heaven.
When he got back to check his clothes, the treasured shoes had gone and as he interrogated each and every one of us and issued threats to “bite every arse in here” he failed to notice that both shoes were glued to the ceiling, with the laces almost kissing his head as he prowled the room.
He looked everywhere but above him until we had to give in for fear of bursting our guts laughing. On the basis that if you are going to play a prank then better to wait till the last game of the season, I felt my arse was safe and that he would be forgiving about the two bananas I had stuffed in his batting pads that would ripen well over winter.
As he is no longer playing my confession is made, once again, with little fear of retribution. So too Ando, who took a long time to recover his poise after Webbo & I drilled his bag to the bench one afternoon; at first he must have thought it was full of concrete and then threatened us both with a similar fate.
Doubtless the funniest of all though was the Rat Trap, briefly recalled in my first book “A Critics’ Corner” but well worth replaying at greater length. This was the day Dave “Singy” Singleton proved beyond doubt that he was one guy you never played any prank on ever.
A giant of man, father of seemingly dozens of kids, wearer of the odd glittering diamante earring and with a bit of a Romany look about him. He also had a permanent tan which was amazing as he got up at two most mornings to run the family fruit and veg business down at Bradford Market and slept most of the rest of the day presumably under a sun bed.
An underrated cricketer, largely because he was so unpredictable with both bat and ball, he did a very good job for me in my second spell as skipper at the Villas. His bat was colossal and held together by a series of screws and nails hidden by rolls of tape which I am not sure was entirely within the spirit of the MCC Laws of Cricket.
Being a bit of a character Singy always attracted attention but I am not sure why our opening bowler, Mark “Straw” Hey chose him as a target or what Straw actually did; whatever it was he could never have anticipated the kind of revenge meted out.
When Singy turned up the following week we found him sat in the corner cuddling a huge white rat which, bad enough as it was, turned out to be dead. He stroked and stroked it offering it around the dressing room awaiting, as usual, the late arrival of Straw. Then he asked me for a bit of a favour which, given he was six foot four with a giant dead white rat in his hands, I struggled to oppose.
“Skip will you do me a favour and bat first today” he asked which was not unreasonable as it was cracking the flags outside and, as opening batter, I could get away from this madness quick.
“Sure mate, sound tactics!” I conceded.
“No, not really I just want time to get my friend here” as he stopped to pat his “friend” on the head “into Straw’s cricket gear somewhere. If we’re going well will you put him up the order like he’s always asking?”
I nodded wondering what I was doing captaining a side that needed a man like Singy in it.
As it was we got off to a flyer and I think I wafted it all over the place as a nervous reaction to the giant white rat which, by the time I got back to the dressing room, was sprawled out on the window ledge with a lighted fag in its mouth, still being stroked by Singy as if trying to coax it back to life.
Straw was the other side of the field oblivious to his fate and so Singy asked if I would bring him back across to get changed to bat. Generally when Straw went in to bat we were desperate, so it was with a look of surprise and delight that he accepted his “promotion”.
What he did not know was that Singy had slipped the giant furry thing into his cricket trousers so when Straw rushed in excitedly to change from shorts to whites and prove his batting prowess, as he pulled his trousers on there was a blood-curdling scream.
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 despite a massive first innings total.
Undoubtedly, when I eventually have to concede to Father Time, I will miss the cricket dressing room above all else summed up by the words a few years ago from a teammate as the last game drew to an end and autumn approached. “Jesus next Saturday who am I going to laugh at? She’ll be dragging me off shopping with my feet aching more than spending an afternoon chasing leather and there won’t be a sniff of a beer. Can’t we just meet here again next Saturday and forget there’s no game?”
I think it was Shutty but am sure he will claim otherwise if questioned by wife, Jane.
Of course I hope there will be Critics’ Corner to sit in but everybody up there who has played will tell you that there is no substitute for being in that dressing room, good times or bad times.
The mindless pranks we have all played over the years have left us in tears of laughter and I accept that some of this may be viewed as puerile, immature and ( in terms of the potential of inducing a heart attack from ice cold buckets of water) maybe even reckless. But before you judge too harshly let me counter that everybody needs to let off steam from time to time.
Surely far better to do so in this harmless regression to primary school age than head off down town for an alcohol induced night of idiocy; life is tough, laughter is free and good. It’s not always the pranks though, as 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, these have kept us all going for years.
Again, it is that unique mix of individuals across the professions and age groups all locked in one room… marvellous.
24 – AND NOW THE END IS NEAR
“After all the cheers have died down and the stadium is empty, after the headlines have been written, and after you are back in the quiet of your room and the championship ring has been placed on the dresser and after all the pomp and fanfare have faded, the enduring thing that is left is the dedication to doing with our lives the very best we can to make the world a better place in which to live.” Vince Lombardi
In a few years, inevitably I will reach the age where it is time to call it a day; none of us has the power to avoid that day and it will be one I simply cannot comprehend at the time of writing. As a coach, without trying to appear like a prophet of doom, I constantly urge the younger ones to squeeze the pips out of their youth and vitality.
It really is all downhill for a long, long time. I would love to complete a sliding stop in the field these days without feeling like every bone in my body had just been shaken to bits, knowing that getting out of bed the following morning by sliding on to the floor is hardly attractive.
Equally, where some may consider me brave for occasionally “wearing one” (a term describing when the ball hits you somewhere, hopefully padded, on the body) really I know that if I had been able to see the thing I would have got out of the way!
Years ago I watched a David Attenborough documentary about lions, where the old lion that had been head of the pride for ever and a day, eventually got booted out and ended up sitting on the top of the hill having to watch the new kid on the block shag his missus before he eventually just keeled over and dropped dead. His time had simply arrived like it does for us all.
That must be what it’s like sat in Critics’ Corner with all the old farts, hence why I’ve pledged to play on as long as I possibly can simply to avoid ending up there with Browny, Haighy and the rest reminiscing about all their yesteryears. Knowing those two old buggers, they will still be sat there when they reach a hundred, demolishing that whisky bottle, casting their critical eye and reminding me that I was not half their equal.
Packing in football at the age of 45 was surprisingly easy as I felt like I’d been sat on that hill for years anyway having spent my last few seasons with a team with an average age of about twenty and an equivalent IQ. When you have no idea what your team-mates are talking about, largely because they speak in a variation of sign language, grunts and text, it’s time to go seek a different Sunday morning pleasure.
Besides, a long standing back injury made the decision easy; it was essentially give up one or the other sport given that I’d been lucky enough to play both almost non-stop for some thirty years. Pilates with the pensioners loomed in an effort to keeping pulling on the whites.
You may have detected throughout the more serious parts of this book that I am not confident about the future of grass roots sport in the country and, especially, the game of cricket. I penned the following for my blog www.idlelord.com (shameless plug) – since updated for this book – and it’s intended to be a thought provoking, honest and hopefully not a depressing piece; make of it what you will.
As the rain abates, we have a new cricket season to look forward to. This year, aged fifty, one wonders how many more seasons are in the legs and how long the eyes and reflexes will last although some have suggested they went some time ago.
In broader terms though, each and every year, I muse on the long term future of club cricket in this of all counties, a hotbed of tradition and cricketing folklore. Apparently there are some 800 clubs in Yorkshire making it the biggest cricket playing county in the country. Scratch beneath the surface though and the game is in a slow spiral of sad and inevitable decline, a combination of several factors.
I do not make the point lightly; the game and the unique spirit of cricket has been my passion since around the age of ten and, unusually, I remain a one club man. I have never played for anything other than the love of the game; equally nobody has been daft enough to try to woo my moderate skills with a few quid tucked into my back pocket, massaging my ego in the process.
That I have ended up pushing a bit of my own money the other way I do not mind one bit as the club is only alive today due to the generosity of many like The Three Wise Men of olden days. Clubs up and down the country are struggling with falling numbers, dwindling incomes and ever rising costs; the times are a changing with ominous consequences.
Of course, if you suggested this to the English Cricket Board (ECB), the games governing body, they would doubtless counter the above with reams of statistics suggesting the game is actually in rude health and awash with youngsters. This is disingenuous at the very least; at worst it proves the old adage “lies, damned lies and statistics”.
The ECB have to demonstrate healthy participation numbers due to the way central funding is distributed for most sports these days via national governing bodies, in order to retain a seat at the table when central funding is doled out.
As participation figures seem the diktat as far as the Sport England chequebook is concerned, how can a sport like cricket, non-existent in state schools, sold out to Sky Sports and with clubs struggling for survival, really make the case?
One way of massaging the figures is through the laudable, if woefully restricted, Chance to Shine scheme, which is basically an attempt to get cricket back into state schools. As much as the ECB trumpets this in their annual glossy reports, they have only reached approximately 10% of primary schools since 2005 and the 30% target for 2015 looks ambitious and yet this tells only part of the story.
Of course they can claim” increased participation” – that bit is easy from such a low base – but it is how you define “participation”. What is the game really getting through what are, at best, taster sessions at a local school? Ticking off another mythical number of new kids as “participants” is not ensuring the game’s long term future if next week it’s tiddly-winks for PE.
The game has been kept alive by the clubs, disappearing as it did with many other sports within schools dating way back to the 1980. Although my old school’s cricket facilities were hardly first class at least we had something to start a game with. And given that the public school sector accounts for only approximately 7% of children, what future for a “mass participation” team sport like cricket if the vast majority of kids have no access to it?
When Chance to Shine was launched, participating clubs, acting as a link between the ECB and several schools – all voluntarily – also had to have achieved Clubmark. As I mentioned (several chapters ago) this is a paper chase few clubs can aspire to, so many clubs are simply excluded from the process.
The ECB would have us believe all is well, after all the England team was, until the summer of 2012, number one in the test match rankings, so my point needs explanation. Whilst many clubs continue to work hard to attract youngsters the reality is that as volunteers we have a limited time to coach and the summer is short, weather dependent and ever shorter as football seems perpetual.
Exacerbating this is the reality that the majority of kids these days, seem devoid of the basic skills previous generations took almost as a birth-right: to catch, to throw, to run and simple hand-eye coordination. Before we coach an off-drive we often have to work on far more basic issues. Schools are turning out kids whose only functioning parts are fingers and thumbs.
Cricket suffers more than most because not only do you also need specialist equipment – okay we were quite happy with an old bat, ball and a milk crate – it is a tough game to learn requiring technical skills, hard hours of repetitive practice and games take time to play out; in an age of instant gratification cricket struggles for attention.
Also, for the majority of kids, the only access they will have to learn the game will be at a local club, in other words they do not develop these skills at school or on the street anymore; this means cricket simply becomes too hard for many and the drop out rate is huge.
It is the biggest single issue not even the ECB statistics can spin out of and yet it is hardly acknowledged. How many stats are there for drop out rates at 18/19? I guarantee that if we start with fifteen kids at ten years of age, if we get three into senior cricket that is a major success.
For all the youngsters clubs attract how many can we say are still playing the game into their twenties and can be viewed as future custodians of their clubs and the game? I have no precise figures but intuitively I will contend that this will be a very low percentage, indeed look around the leagues and you will see teams getting older each and every year.
Second teams are often a mix of the forty-somethings and teenagers and, inevitably, some youngsters are pressed into First teams before they are ready enough or good enough, which damages their confidence, development and appetite for the game.
I canvassed several youngsters I coached as teenagers (now in their early twenties) who no longer play; the common threads were that senior games were too long and that opportunities to participate were limited when they made the step up.
They enjoyed the game but were not prepared to commit a whole day to a match especially when, until recent times, they may not have had much of a role other than as a fielder. Like it or not society is changing although only the professional game has reacted to this with the leagues remaining largely as we were generations ago, mired in the mud.
Some leagues – ours included – at long last have introduced rules limiting the number of overs a bowler can bowl out of the total allotted, meaning Geriatric Gerry can no longer bowl half the allotment and sod the kids.
Mind you, he can still bowl uninterrupted whereas, thanks to the ECB Fast Bowling Directives, Fast Young Freddie cannot. These ridiculously inappropriate and damaging regulations ensure that the teenager scaring you witless with the new ball will soon be off, once his allotted few overs are up, almost barely breaking sweat.
This has long been viewed at club level as a stupid ruling designed to protect the elite, ignore the rest and make kids wonder why bother. Designed to protect the elite from over bowling they ruin the average club junior’s progression and we all lose as a result. Attempts at constructive dialogue with the ECB are met with a patronising and condescending “we know best” reply. I would suggest their knowledge of the club scene is in need of a serious refresher.
Many youngsters also view the transition from junior cricket – a twenty over, two hour game – to the senior format across a whole day as, sadly, too long and so we lose them after all those years spent coaching and developing.
Leagues resist change to shorter formats with spurious arguments like lost bar income but with drink driving and the demands of the family how relevant is this? Players and spectators do not retreat to the bar for the rest of the evening now as they have many more choices. Only the old farts from the committee want the bar open all night.
The grass roots game needs to react and quickly so here are a few ideas, accepting the solution is far from simple. I would standardise Second Team cricket to a shorter format (forty overs) so that a game would be over by late teatime. This would bridge the transition into the longer format of the game.
The more ambitious kids would have the even longer format via First Teams to aim for and those content with a more social game would not be lost plus the old lags playing for the “Stiffs” would probably also appreciate ten less overs chasing leather. Post match, the more imaginative clubs could make far more income with family friendly early evenings via barbeques or similar functions.
I would also harmonise junior cricket with Under 16s (not 15s as presently) as the upper age group and play this on a longer format (twenty five overs) on Sunday mornings to bridge the gap from junior to senior formats at the same time scrapping Sunday fixtures for seniors; annually leagues try to cram too much cricket into a short summer.
Increasingly, Under 17 cricket is also valueless as the pressure around exam time means many parents simply do not allow children to play this largely mid-week evening format and so I would scrap it.
There are simply too many leagues though to expect a cohesive response. In Bradford alone there are clubs competing in at least seven different senior leagues with no pyramid system and little evidence the leagues communicate with each other. For decades leagues have acted like little empires but, in time, all empires crumble. The wider good of the game is far more important.
Although I have intimated that the leagues are often behind the times, one aspect of modern life continues to prevail – the colour of money. Some clubs will continue shelling out cash at the expense of facilities, to cling to or attract players and “status” but you have to ask for what though? After all it is not as if you get Sky TV money for remaining in Division One of the Airedale & Wharfedale League!
Underhand payments made in the car-park – “talent” money – drains the game of funding that should be going into resources not back pockets of mercenaries. The elite will survive, no doubt, but even these clubs will not escape the long term effects felt first by those less fortunate as the game shrinks; in less than a decade the game will be unrecognisable without radical changes and even these may not be enough.
The writing is on the wall for sport at all levels in the fattest nation in Europe and cricket is not alone; it just has unique issues. Leagues have been painfully slow to let go of yesteryear and most old farts are still living in those times, in denial; consequently we have lost youngsters with years of coaching and time invested in them.
The game has a limited timeframe to get on the front foot and address the very issues that threaten its survival. Decades of denying kids sporting opportunity through schools and a wider society with changing attitudes has dried up the numbers of youngsters that sport was founded on. Yes, I am glad I saw the better days.
Many years ago our overseas “pro”, a hugely likeable Aussie lad Kyle Brook, made the observation that there were simply too many cricket clubs in the area serving only to dilute quality and it was impossible to disagree with Kyle.
Of course clubs fold from time to time but, more worryingly, has been the significant reduction in clubs running junior sections in my short time as a coach. This is a trend that continues and is ominous; Kyle was on the money here even almost ten years ago.
I have loved playing sport – not every minute, as I said there are ups and downs – but I could not put a price on what it has given me. Equally, I hope you have enjoyed this book – trust me you have done some good for helping to preserve a tiny bit of local sport through your contribution that will not be going into the pocket of any hired gun.
If you will allow me one final rant, if you have kids, feel free to take a sledgehammer to the Xbox, Nintendo or whatever other brain draining, fat boosting gadget they may be surgically attached to. Trust me; they will thank you in the long run.
Time to strap on the pads again… here comes young Fast Freddie!
Natalie A Farr says
The part about Dad is lovely Steve. Thank you. Nat
Steve says
Really glad you like its Nats…one of the saddest days of my life when Dot Haigh rang me…still smile thinking about him “threatening” us
Steve