Almost a decade ago, as I prepared to leave the gilded world of Barclays Bank after twenty-five enjoyable years, what to do next was far from clear. But it did give me a chance to write a few modest books, for personal satisfaction if anything else.
Given we are all going to be in this for some time, I decided to serialise the third book, published in 2013 to celebrate my fiftieth birthday. I’ve reproduced each chapter with only modest tweaks.
The three books raised over £6,000 for junior cricket; I hope you enjoy.
1 – I’M FRANZ BECKENBAUER
“Too many people grow up. That’s the real trouble with the world. They don’t remember what it is like to be 12 years old.”
Walt Disney
I grew up obsessed by sport; God knows why because I have never been better than mediocre at my utmost best, generally between poor and occasionally not bad. But that is the beauty of sport; it does not matter as long as you give your best and have the character and desire to try to do better.
There are so many spin-offs in life through the highs and lows of sport that set you up to deal with all manner of challenges. The friendships formed, sometimes in alliance, sometimes in opposition, occasionally as victors and many times as vanquished are the best you can ever have.
I still love sport now, although the allure of the very top echelons has vanished, tarnished by the deluge of television money and the conversion of many sports to sanitised entertainment shows for the titillation of ill-informed subscribers
And you don’t need to have immaculate facilities to enjoy sport; growing up as kids all we needed was open space and whatever “kit” we could beg, steal or borrow.
Fred Dawson
I remember vividly my very first cricket bat passed over the garden fence by our neighbour, Fred, a lovely old guy with a love of sport especially cricket, and at the time a member of the local Bradford League big boys Undercliffe CC.
Fred knew that I had just joined nearby Bolton Villas CC which, compared with Undercliffe was a bit like comparing Bradford City to Manchester United, but he was keen to help where he could.
One day, into his garage he went and came out beaming with his old Gray Nicolls bat, the brand of my dreams. It was so dark from years of embedded linseed oil that it looked like a wooden Joan Collins.
As it towered over me given it was a Size 6 – I was only ten – my dad offered to cut it down, lopping a few inches off the bottom with his rusty saw (did Geoffrey Boycott start like this?)…I could just about pick it up.
It had no gaudy stickers like today’s creations, it was just a bat but a bloody Gray Nicolls! This was the brand with that distinctive red stripe down the back used by the best players in the world.
I think it was the first thing I ever took to bed, cuddled and woke up still cuddling. I spent hours sanding and re-oiling, topping up its tan, tormenting my mum with a constant thud-thud-thud of a ball in a stolen pair of her tights “knocking” it in.
This was extreme overkill as you generally knock a bat in only when new, but it was new to me.
The Death Of The Sports Shop
When winter came I duly ruined one of my pillowcases by wrapping up my best friend for the winter complete with another smearing of oil and gently placing it into hibernation because Fred told me that’s what you did. He also told me not to store it near a radiator which was okay as we didn’t have any.
As I grew up I did not have the money to go out and buy one of the new bats displayed at local sports shops like Carters and Knuttons in Bradford, where you could buy sports equipment from people who knew what they were selling you.
Today the independents have been almost obliterated from our high streets by the likes of Sports Direct who sell crap piled up high. Sports retail has become big business but these sheds are generally staffed by witless kids with bugger all knowledge too.
Avoid them like the plague if you are serious about sport, find a good independent, if you can.
When Gray Nicolls brought out the iconic Scoop bat with its distinctive hollowed out back, my reaction was simply to get my dad’s wood chisel and planer out, risking losing a few fingers, to replicate the new innovation.
When I finally graduated to a new bat I kept Fred’s old Gray Nicolls like a dead body for post-mortem experiments, slavishly copying new innovations from time to time until there was barely any wood left.
One such experiment copied the late Bob Willis bat of the time. Willis was a fast bowler for Warwickshire and England so how he ever got to endorse a bat is beyond belief.
His bat makers Duncan Fearnley brought out a new concept with holes drilled through the middle of the bat to allegedly increase its aero-dynamics, thereby increasing the critical bat speed at the point of impact.
Where the design fell down was that there was so little wood left on point of impact, bat speed often resulted in bat explosion with the owner left holding only a handle. To test it on a proven number 11 was perhaps a touch optimistic.
Commercially cricket was light years behind where it is today. My first brand new bat was the famous Senior Counties brand but eventually, despite their excellence, they simply vanished under the pressure from the wave of new, mass-produced – and crap – bats.
The Beautiful Game?
If cricket kept me obsessed in the summer then football did the same in winter; the two seasons seemed to respect each other in the way one ended and the other started almost seamlessly. Today, football is a year round assault on the senses.
Growing up, football seemed to be much more of a sport and far less of a circus than today’s over-rated peak time drama shows with a foreign legion of B-list actors.
True enough England still flattered to deceive, believing with a deluded arrogance that we deserved much more than a place amongst the also-rans as each major tournament ended in more despair.
As kids it was largely all about a ball, a few mates and a couple of coats down as goal posts. We played most of our football on a spare bit of grass at the cricket club and occasionally, if we were brave, on the actual outfield itself awaiting the arrival of Tom the groundsman, ready to grab our coats and exit through the closest garden.
In truth most of us were useless but I doubt whether the likes of Messi and Ronaldo would have been able to dribble on our lunar landscape of a playing surface.
And so, rather than idolise the more crafted and skilled players of the age, we all became defenders, keen on mastering the assault from behind and the invisible tug of the shirt to haul back somebody much quicker, which in my case was most.
The ball we played with would vary from one of those horrible plastic things that burnt a mark on your thighs for weeks if it hit you – which was okay if you fancied “Mitre” being tattooed for free.
Very occasionally we had a shiny new “leather” ball – smuggled back from China in bales of wool by a mate’s Dad. They looked great until it rained, very quickly dropping to bits.
Then one year we actually got real goals courtesy of my best mate Duck’s dad: dear old Billy Stockdale. This was fine until we realised that when Duck had to go in so too did the goal posts.
Often it was wet, muddy and cold but nobody cared because we were outside having fun. Although you could not classify us as street kids, we were so poor that, at times when our equipment failed us, we had to get inventive as Duck described to me many years later.
“One thing I do remember was the time our plastic football burst. We were that keen to carry on playing, I had this bright idea of setting a small fire in the cricket milk crate {more later – Ed} to try and mould the plastic over the hole. If you remember the only thing we achieved was to totally melt the milk crate into a plastic puddle and for Jonathon Elliott to grass me up to Billy resulting in clip round my ear in front of all my mates. This also delayed milk crate cricket for some weeks until we could nick another one.”
Even though we had a total meltdown of our equipment, a grass in the camp and evidence of parental brutality, little could quench our passion for sport and the great outdoors.
And so it was that I convinced my mum to buy me a pair of new boots in my last desperate attempt to convert to a striker; it was shit or bust, aged eleven.
One cold and rainy Saturday afternoon, well after the cricket season had ended, I knocked on Duck’s door complete with brand new Adidas Beckenbauer boots endorsed by the eponymous, legendary West German captain. These were the first real leather boots I had ever owned and I had unceremoniously dumped my old Woolworths “Winit” boots back in my mum’s bin.
The Woolies boots had three stripes in an attempt at mimicking the famous Adidas trademark and could be disguised with a heavy application of black dubbing but were such a bad fit and so non-breathable, they made my feet smell like a sewer.
It was now time now to see if these new boots would change my destiny – oblivious to the fact that old Franz was a high-class defender not a lethal goal machine.
Unbelievably, Duck had also got a new pair of the same boots as well so off we went to the field; old Franz was having a good week with the mums of Bradford.
Three hours later, two crestfallen lads trudged off home covered in mud, trying hard to find some blame to attach to our new boots. We knew, deep down, we were hopeless cases, unable to hit a proverbial barn door from two yards.
But we loved it!
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