Zummerset la-la-la!

Life as a fan of any club, in any sport, is inevitably a rollercoaster ride. Winning matches is great, and doing so in entertaining fashion is a bonus, but the old cliché of ‘It’s all about winning trophies’ is hard to avoid. And that’s where supporting Somerset has been a particularly tough test. So why couldn’t I have simply plumped for a proven champion county like Surrey, Middlesex, Lancashire or Yorkshire? The answer is, of course, because Somerset picked me.

I can’t recall exactly when and where it happened but it must have been inspired by my delightful family holiday spent in and around Minehead in the summer of '71. As it happened, that was one of Somerset’s best cricket seasons for a while but it had long been considered one of the sport’s sleepy backwaters. There were no international stars, just a few ageing ex-England players in Brian Close and Tom Cartwright plus a motley collection of journeymen and young recruits from that longstanding cricket academy in Millfield School. It was probably the random combo of attractive scenery and sympathy that brought me and SCCC together.

Somerset’s Taunton HQ must be one of the county circuit’s most recognisable grounds. Like The Oval’s gasholders, the trio of sandstone church towers provided a familiar backdrop to the arena for TV cameras set high on the River End pavilion. From the opposite side, the Quantock Hills fill the space between what is now the Sir Ian Botham Stand and the sky. Whilst living and working nearby, I attended several matches there, in addition to a few sneaky peaks through the Garner Gates in lunch breaks, but my introduction to live cricket was Somerset’s trip to Essex at Chelmsford on a cool May afternoon in 1975. It was to be a winning start thanks largely to a then little-known West Indian called IVA Richards. More of him later…..

The following season we came agonisingly close to clinching a first ever trophy. While it wasn’t the featured live game, Dad and I were following the fortunes of Somerset at Glamorgan, watching BBC2’s cricket coverage of the final round of Sunday League fixtures. We lost a thrilling encounter by just one run and the title on away games won, and this teenager was in despair. In ’78 we were again runners-up, not only in the Sunday League but also the premier knockout competition, the Gillette Cup. This has been a recurring theme for the past four decades.

Luckily, the lengthy search for silverware ended the following year. Neither Essex nor Somerset had ever won anything. Then, in one glorious season, the two clubs shared all four titles on offer. For us it was the John Player (Sunday) and Gillette Cup. Under Brian Rose’s captaincy, with Ian Botham an established international all-rounder Viv Richards’ extraordinary batting and Joel ‘Big Bird’ Garner leading the attack, Somerset’s golden era had begun.

The forty-over league proved to be our speciality and yet we could finish only second in three of the subsequent four years. It was in June 1981, following my end-of year exams at Exeter University, that I enjoyed my only live experience of watching our three legends playing together.

It was at the Bath Festival clash with neighbours Gloucestershire but, instead of the current bristling rivalry, the atmosphere was light and friendly and before the game we could stand on the outfield while the players warmed up amongst us. Standing alongside Joel Garner I could appreciate just how tall he was (barely fitting into my lens, below), and he played his part in our 20-run triumph, taking 4-21 as Gloucestershire suffered a catastrophic collapse.

That memorable summer we clinched the Benson & Hedges Cup (55 overs a side), repeated the feat in ’82 and took Kent apart in the Nat West Trophy final (successor to the Gillette Cup) in ’83. After that, it all went horribly quiet. In 1985 the county tore itself in two, not over Brexit but on the thornier issue of whether to replace Richards with the younger and frankly more conscientious Kiwi, Martyn Crowe. Somerset hadn’t experienced such division since the Monmouth Rebellion three centuries earlier, and that hadn’t ended well! Despite my hero-worship of King Viv, I actually sided with the more forward-thinking members at SCCC. Richards departed, followed by his friends Garner and Botham and suddenly captain Peter Roebuck and Vic Marks were left with some mighty boots to fill.

The victory champagne dried up. For years, we couldn’t even finish second. It wasn’t until 2001 when Jamie Cox’s side ended the barren run with success over Leicestershire in the new 50-over C&G Trophy. It has since gone down in folklore because of Leicester seamer Scott Boswell’s nightmare second over, in which he bowled eight wides. Eight!

It wasn't as if we had no decent players. Quite the reverse. Talented locals like Vic Marks, Colin Dredge, Richard Harden and Marcus Trescothick were supplemented by imports such as Andy Caddick, Mushtaq Ahmed, Steve Waugh, Graeme Smith and Jimmy Cook. The latter spent only three years at Somerset, yet racked up 28 centuries and almost 7,000 first-class runs. And still we struggled.

Then in 2007, following the arrival of Justin Langer, a new golden age beckoned. We returned to Division One, tightened up on discipline and discovered that the exciting new Twenty20 format played towards our strengths. Somerset were great to watch, competing in every competition. And yet, for some reason, the fates conspired against us. Apart from the solitary T20 success in 2005, we crumbled under the weight of destiny and expectation. Between 2009 and 2012, we were beaten finalists five times in the Blast and 40-over CB40 trophy, and runners-up twice in the Championship. Surely we would win something? No.

For years, the Taunton pitch was notoriously batting-friendly, ideal for high scores but useless for taking the twenty wickets needed to win matches. But it did make for some incredible run chases. In 2009, I was invited to join some old BBC friends to watch day one of Somerset’s home fixture against Yorkshire. Jacques Rudolph piled on the runs and the draw seemed inevitable right until the final day. As I followed proceedings online, Arul Suppiah and Peter Trego crashed centuries in the last two sessions to pull off a remarkable victory. Heartwarming stuff. After that, no chase was impossible and opposing captains would henceforth be extremely wary of offering declarations.

Marcus Trescothick’s age and fitness have restricted his appearances but he resolutely refuses to retire until the elusive Championship pennant flutters proudly above Taunton. I fear he’ll have to be batting in a wheelchair. For all the talents of the much-loved Trego, James Hildreth, Lewis Gregory, Tom Abell, Jack Leach and the Overton twins, another county always seems to do just that little bit better. In 2018 it was Surrey, while an excellent T20 season ended in the semis. 

                                  

Could 2019 see us get over the line at last? Old hands like me fear the worst but if the planets of batting and bowling align, anything’s possible. Please let it happen, even if it’s just to see the smile on Marcus Trescothick’s face.

Overseas Inspirations

At the start of each year, county cricket club websites are full of excited reports raving about their new overseas signing for the forthcoming T20 Blast or maybe three Championship games in May. Rolling my eyes at such promotional puff I recall the days when many of the world's biggest stars would appear for the same county, year after year, April to September, first-class fixtures and one-dayers.

Long before I was born, overseas players would extend their earning period by signing as a professional in the Yorkshire or Lancashire leagues. This continued well into the Eighties – imagine taking guard at say, Haslingden, watching Rishton’s Michael Holding steaming in towards you! – but I feel fortunate that my initiation into the joys of cricket coincided with a golden era of international cricketers on the county circuit.

It was probably no coincidence at all. In the early Seventies, watching live coverage of one-dayers, especially the Sunday League, I was thrilled by the performances of the overseas recruits. Most of them were West Indians or Pakistanis, who seemed to play a different way from the home-grown contingent. It’s cricket, Jim, but not as we know it. The Caribbean crew in particular seemed to boast the fastest bowlers, most athletic fielders and finest strokemakers. Watching the likes of Clive Lloyd (Lancashire), Roy Fredericks (Glamorgan), Alvin Kallicharran (Warwickshire) and Vanburn Holder (Worcestershire) also meant I didn’t have to wait four years for the next West Indies tour to enjoy their unique approach to the sport. I vividly recall the black and white images of Nottinghamshire’s Garfield Sobers at Swansea heaving poor Malcolm Nash for six sixes in an over in 1968.

It wasn’t just about telly. At my first taste of live cricket in May 1975, it was the batting of Somerset’s Viv Richards and fielding of Essex’s Keith Boyce which made the greatest impression on me. Later that summer, I became engrossed in the inaugural Prudential World Cup, noting that many of the biggest names were already on the county scene. If they weren’t at that stage, I wouldn’t have long to wait.

They weren’t the modern day ‘blink-and-you-miss-it’ contracts either. Lloyd, Richards, Kalli, Greenidge, Walsh, Marshall and Zaheer Abbas each represented their respective counties for a decade or more. With none of today’s distractions of year-round T20 tourneys and short ODI series, they racked up career tallies of first-class runs and wickets which dwarf those of current Test superstars. Boosted by their prolific seasons at Gloucestershire, Hampshire and Northants, Courtney Walsh, Malcolm Marshall and Bishan Bedi each retired with well over 1,500 first-class scalps to their names. At the time of writing, Dale Steyn has a mere 612, and even the perennially fit Jimmy Anderson remains ninety short of the thousand landmark.

Throughout my life I haven’t attended a huge volume of county matches but I’ve been lucky to have witnessed some superb international players in action, even if they weren’t necessarily at their best. In addition to the incomparable Viv and Joel Garner for Somerset, Essex used to feature batsmen of the quality of Andy Flower, South African Ken McEwan and Aussies Allan Border, Mark Waugh and Stuart Law.

Other personal highlights have been the giant Sarfraz Nawaz bowling for Northants and Younis Ahmed’s resounding crack of an off drive for Surrey in ’76  (it resonates in my mind still), the jaw-dropping pace of Warwickshire’s Allan Donald (bowling second change) at Ilford in ’95 and Mike Procter almost singlehandedly saving Gloucestershire against Somerset at Bath in ’81. I’m glad he failed in the end!

My favourite Procter moment, however, was when he destroyed Dad’s beloved Hampshire in a 1977 B&H Cup semi-final, this time with his pace bowling. It must have been the first time I’d seen a hat-trick. Had South Africa not been isolated by their country’s political apartheid abomination, Procter would surely have gone down as one of the greatest ever all-rounders. His compatriot Barry Richards was similarly disadvantaged but he and Gordon Greenidge (below) formed for several years the county game’s most formidable opening partnership.

In subsequent decades, other Southern Africans opted to seek international cricket with England by serving their seven-year county apprenticeship to achieve residential status. Allan Lamb, Graeme Hick and Kevin Pietersen spring to mind. It’s not all about traditional Test playing nations, either. I recall in the ‘80s/’90s the extremely economical Danish seamer Ole Mortensen for Derbyshire and Somerset’s profligate Dutchman, Adrian van Troost promoting the European Union.

Imran Khan graced the county circuit for many years, too, first with Sussex then Worcestershire, by which time Pakistan’s Wasim Akram (Lancs) and Waqar Younis (Surrey and Glamorgan) were also on these shores. Banned rebel West Indian Frankly Stephenson twice achieved the 1000 runs/100 wickets double for Notts in 1988 and 1989. In the Nineties, it was against Durham at Edgbaston that Brian Lara stunned the world with his record-breaking 501 not out, and two decades later with Surrey that both Ricky Ponting and Kumar Sangakkara opted to end their first-class careers, the latter in stunning style in 2017.

In more recent times, county fortunes have often been galvanised by the arrival of foreign internationals. Mushtaq Ahmed’s leg-spin transformed Somerset and especially Sussex for whom he helped win two Championship titles. Shane Warne’s overall aura and astute captaincy gave Hampshire impetus in the Noughties, and the veteran Ottis Gibson bowled Durham to success. Several Aussies, unable to break into a formidable Baggy Green batting line-up, also proved influential over here, notably Stuart Law, Michael di Venuto and Chris Rogers, while Michael Klinger’s batting and leadership took Gloucestershire to T20 glory.  

All this brings me back to the current fetish for ultra-brief stints by the likes of Muralitharan, McCullum and Gilchrist, plus jobbing Twenty20 specialists such as Dirk Nannes, Aaron Finch, Kieron Pollard and the Sultan of Sixes himself, Chris Gayle. These stars undoubtedly help shift season tickets and advance Blast sales. Unfortunately, when in 2015 Somerset snapped up the Jamaican, the biggest star of them all, it proved to be a bittersweet experience. In the January, it was revealed he’d made good on a three-year promise to join the county for a maximum of six T20 fixtures. Six games! Yippee! He was certainly a huge draw and demonstrated the right attitude towards promotional appearances in schools, etc.

On the pitch, too, Chris Gayle fulfilled the hype with devastating innings at Taunton, even if his 151 not out against Kent wasn’t enough to win the match. If only I’d crippled the visitors’ team bus the day before at Membury Services maybe the result would have been different! Sadly he decided that three matches were enough and duly buggered off. Remember that “maximum of” prefix to the six? He did return to play what must have been an exhausting five matches the following June but with considerably less impact.

It's all a far cry from those dizzying days of Asif Iqbal, Farokh Engineer, Glenn Turner and Sylvester Clarke, who’d delight county crowds week in week out. And when they weren’t representing a county, such cricketing celebs would also grace our grounds as part of their respective country’s tour schedules, which deserves a blog entry of its own.

County Cricket - A Love Affair

Whilst much of my cricketing love is reserved for Somerset, a great deal of my affection remains concentrated upon the bigger picture, the structure which has supported Somerset and the other first-class counties since Victorian times. Whether as a supply line for the national teams or the stage for entertainment and competition in its own right, county cricket doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.

I remember once being at the first day of a Lord’s Test involving England and – I think – the West Indies. The tiers around me seemed filled by half of London’s market research community and indeed I was only there at the expense of the BBC, a very rare corporate ‘jolly’. I chatted to a colleague whom I considered a cricket fan. Remarking on the recent form of maybe Andrew Strauss or Darren Gough for Middlesex and Yorkshire I was struck by his reply: he had no knowledge of England players’ counties and, worse still, was completely uninterested. Would a football aficionado at Wembley be similarly ignorant about which clubs Harry Kane or Marcus Rashford represented in the Premier League?

This response got my hackles up but, even in the mid-Noughties, the writing had long been on the wall. The ECB’s central contract system severely weakened the link between England’s stars and the clubs that developed them into the biggest nations in cricket. Everything was geared to improving the chances of the national teams in the Ashes, World Cup or a tin-pot Twenty20 tournament, the counties receiving a few quid as a grudging compensatory ‘thank you’.

It’s the same with national media. Whereas in my younger days the centrepiece one-day final in September would generate genuine headlines, in these Ashes-dominated times any newspaper article would be relegated to the inside back pages beneath the angling and netball and – with the exception of Sky Sports - on TV there’d be nothing. I find that so sad.

For me, the County Championship remains the epitome of proper cricket. It’s not called ‘first-class’ for nothing. I’m not convinced about the value of a two-tier league system, though. If it was designed, like football’s PL, to make the rich richer and poor poorer, it’s not working. For example, in 2011, Lancashire clinched the title before spending the next four seasons in yo-yo mode. Despite the presence of Malan, Morgan, Finn, Robson et al even the rich men of Middlesex now languish in Division Two, just two years after finishing top of the tree.

Since the early Seventies, no county has displayed the all-important pennant for more than two consecutive seasons, although between 1979 and 1987 Essex and Middlesex almost made it a duopoly. Newcomers Durham were initially whipping boys in the Nineties but in the Noughties won two crowns on the trot. That made my frustration at Somerset’s lack of success even more acute. At least we are not alone; neither Northants and Gloucestershire have so far ended their drought.

Perhaps the two most compelling Championship chases occurred in 1981 and 2016. In a memorable summer of sport (and decent weather), while England were winning a memorable Ashes series, Sussex and Nottinghamshire were involved in a right old ding-dong. In the end, with Clive Rice and Richard Hadlee in top form, Notts narrowly nicked it. Just a few years ago, three sides went into the final day with a chance of success. Somerset had fulfilled their promise inside three days and hoped Middlesex and Yorkshire drew, a likely result. Then came a Toby Roland-Jones hat-trick and my hopes were dashed yet again.

The red-ball, white-flannelled game may be largely off even the Sky Sports  screens but at least it endures in Fantasy Cricket. Two decades ago Dad and I started participating in the Telegraph’s summer-long sister competition to its football one, and I have continued, albeit with an occasional hiatus, ever since. It keeps me grounded in the minutiae of the Championship. Where once it was necessary to assess the point-scoring potential of the Neil Lenhams, Adrian Dales or Alan Igglesdens, I now pore over the numbers for the Benny Howells, Tom Baileys and Billy Godlemans. Their faces may not be familiar but I have a fair feeling for whether they are good value for their Fantasy ‘price’!

I’ve written already about the role the John Player League played in the evolution of my relationship with cricket. With Dad I’d watch BBC2’s coverage on most Sunday afternoons and play in the garden afterwards. Furthermore it was the opening JPL fixture of the 1975 season which introduced me to the live experience at Chelmsford and the extraordinary batting of a 23 year-old Viv Richards.

Then there was the excitement of a knockout competition in the form of the 55-over Benson & Hedges (usually a July climax) and 60-over Gillette Cups (later the Nat West Trophy). In my mind, the Gillette final (before packed houses) and the following day’s Sunday League denouement (for instance, 1989) comprised the most electrifying weekend in the entire sporting calendar. Unlike the Championship, these benefited from network TV coverage and, for the decisive overs in the early evenings, healthy audiences way above anything Sky can generate nowadays in spite of the vast array of cameras and commentators employed.

The knockouts also offered the leading Minor Counties like Cornwall or Buckinghamshire and other outfits such as Scotland and even the Netherlands the opportunity to spring a surprise against the professionals. These days, the only new names in the domestic cricket pages of the Guardian or ESPN Cricinfo website are associated with whatever sponsor-friendly suffix counties adopt for the new T20 Blast campaign. With Warwickshire ditching the county name in preference for the Birmingham Bears, I fear the move to a city franchise system is looming ever closer.

That would be a calamity, but that’s what is earmarked for the forthcoming ‘Hundred’. I’ve not been immune to the charms of the Blast, even attending in person the 2012 Finals Day in Cardiff, but surely it’s important to harness the exuberance of short formats to county cricket rather than divorce the two permanently.

Whether a match lasts four hours or four days, county games deliver just as much drama, tension and enjoyment as anything served up by a Test or IPL clash; it’s just that the crowds are thinner, and TV cameras don’t like empty seats. County cricket has given me so much pleasure that it merits a much longer life, alongside the bigger bang of the five-day events. In any case, I don’t think England can manage without it.

The 1951 Wisden - An Almanac for all Years

I’m proud to say that I grew up in a book-loving household. I recall loving Mum reading to me children’s classics like the Beatrix Potter series and AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh. However, while I could physically read at a very young age, it was a while before I took an interest in tackling stories myself.

Until I succumbed to the lure of Enid Blyton’s Five Go to Kirrin Island or Malcolm Saville’s Wings Over Witchend I would often be found with my head buried in an atlas or junior encyclopaedia. However, perhaps the most influential book of all was, oddly enough, Dad’s 

battered cloth-covered 1951 edition of the Wisden almanac, the cricket-lover’s bible.

Well, I’ve never attempted to conceal my ‘anorak’ credentials, but this obsession with a statistical book published ten years before my birth predated even my first forays into trainspotting. I don’t think there was any significance attached to the 1950 cricket season; perhaps it had been given as a twenty-first birthday gift. Nevertheless, once Dad first dusted off the book and showed it to me, I was hooked.

Firstly, I was amazed how a volume with such small dimensions could contain more than a thousand pages. Wow! Admittedly I paid little attention to the sizeable chunk devoted to cricket’s holy laws, but those black-and-white photos of smartly-blazered gents with huge white collars, together with scorecards for every match played in the 1950 English summer, winter tours and global domestic competitions, seemed more enthralling than anything Dickens or RL Stevenson ever wrote.

It wasn’t the prose, the short summary introducing each game, but the facts and figures which proved so absorbing. It’s hard to put my finger on the reason. It’s not as if cricket was hitherto an enigma. I would have been well aware of contemporary stars such as Garfield Sobers, John Snow and Colin Milburn. Nevertheless I devoured all the facts and figures therein. Without consulting the internet I couldn’t tell you much about, say, the 1970 season but I can happily reel off unaided long-remembered stats from two decades previously: John Dewes’ nine centuries, Roy Tattersall’s 193 wickets, Everton Weekes’ 304 not out against Cambridge University and the fact that Lancashire and Surrey finished as joint county champions.

Perhaps in retrospect, this yellow-covered publication represented not merely a random snapshot of a single year’s sport but the entire history of the game. Those fragile, wafer-thin pages contained a myriad of first-class cricket records (no one-dayers then, of course), many of which remain, and always will be, unbroken. The Wisden introduced me to names such as AP Freeman (304 wickets in a single summer), Jack Hobbs (197 career centuries) and of course the incomparable Don Bradman, whose retirement with a Test average of 99.94 would still have been fresh at the time of publication.

My youthful brain was filled with a whole new vocabulary of names and initials: DVP Wright, RN Harvey, RT Simpson, Essex spinners Peter and Ray Smith (Dad’s namesake!), Wardle, Washbrook, Fagg, Fishlock, John and James Langridge, Laker, Lindwall, Knott, Nourse, etc, etc. It was almost as if I knew all these mysterious figures from long ago, permanently attached to their 1950 tally of runs or wickets.

Except, of course, that I didn’t know them at all. It was only by talking to Dad that these old cricketers were brought to life. For example, Hampshire’s Charlie Knott had been educated at Dad’s alma mater, Taunton’s School, Doug Wright had bowled fast leg-breaks (huh? Even now, I’ve never seen anyone do that on a regular basis), the West Indian ‘Three Ws’ were so thrilling and Essex’s Trevor Bailey had been stultifyingly boring. Even Mum, too, had anecdotes of collecting autographs of Essex players when accompanying her younger, cricket-loving brothers to Valentine’s Park.

Dad could also furnish me with context to apparent oddities such as why NWD Yardley captained England when he seemed to score few runs and take just one wicket (he was amateur in an era when professionals were frowned upon) and John Goddard skippered the West Indies touring side, purely because he was white. These weren’t just dusty tales of cricket, they were social history.

For many years I would revisit this venerable edition of Wisden whether to research something or simply for pleasure. I was fascinated to discover that one or two players I had watched perform in the mid-Seventies (notably Somerset’s captain Brian Close and Middlesex spinner Fred Titmus) also had bit parts in the book.

Yet it didn’t propel me into the rarified world of Wisden collectors. The only other edition I bought (I think it was in a sale!) was that of 1985 featuring the unforgettable exploits of Viv Richards et al the previous summer. More recently, a friend bought me a limited-edition focussing on the famous 2005 Ashes season, a splendid souvenir of that series. However I could not lose myself in the wealth of contemporary stats in the way I’d done with those concerning 1950. Perhaps it was because I had scribbled down some scores and notable performances in my own diary, or that TV and the Guardian sports pages had rendered Wisden redundant.

Yet, despite many of its pages becoming loose, possibly even mislaid, it’s Dad’s old possession which I most cherish. It’s not just because, since his death in 2015, that it reminds me of him. It’s also a souvenir of a time in my pre-teens when I was developing an interest in a sport which would entertain, intrigue and engross me for five decades and counting. It’s not my sole source of inspiration – there’s no substitute for playing – but the dusty, musty 1951 Wisden was undoubtedly a factor.

My Love of Cricket - It always starts with a game

If football is sport at its most basic, then cricket can’t be far behind. Forget the MCC’s book labyrinthine book of rules; it’s essentially someone throwing a ball and someone else trying to hit it with a wooden plank, isn’t it?

I don’t know when I first played a version of the game. Dad and/or at least one of the cricket-loving Grimble family would surely have been involved, either in a Brentwood or Goodmayes garden, park or on a beach somewhere in southern England. No matter.

 

I just loved having a bat in my hand, and summers would never be the same without games of cricket. Again, as with football, this was to be no portent of a stellar professional career. I was never coached at school and so what meagre innate talent I possessed was never exploited. Instead, cricket merely embodied a lifelong love affair which, despite all the subsequent major format surgery, remains undimmed.

One of my fondest childhood memories is of Sunday evenings in the Seventies. Inspired by watching the climax of whatever John Player League fixture BBC2 had chosen to feature, I would persuade Dad after tea to join me with bat and ball on the back lawn. The ball was a once-pimply little pink sphere with minimal bounce, ideal for playing in such a confined space.

It proved quite a challenge to get it to spit up to bail height, and even more so to restrain ourselves from any deliberate lofted stroke, the outcome of which would at best be a sheepish walk to the neighbour’s front door to request the ball’s return. At worst we’d never see it again. To our credit, we never experienced a permanent loss. Whilst the extremely short boundaries smothered any attacking batsmanship, I must say that I honed my defensive technique. With ball in hand I sometimes experimented with impersonations of leading bowlers at that time such as John Snow, Sarfraz Nawaz and Jeff Thomson, and learned to deliver a high-bouncing googly even with a three-step run-up and uneven 1:3 scale ‘strip’.

Such was my motivation and pre-school energy levels that we’d often play on long into the gloom, the sun having dipped below the bungalows at deep midwicket. If Dad was tired or unwilling, he rarely showed it. Mum, on the other hand, was somewhat less keen on our evening endeavours. Our cricket was a threat to her floral borders, the glass panes of the lounge door and the neat green of the lawn. Even placing a mat within the ‘crease’ couldn’t prevent a tell-tale worn patch appearing by June.

It wasn’t just about our own back garden. I also harbour fond memories of an evening game in the Seventies at Nanna and Grandad Grimble’s home in Great Clacton. Played on a sliver of a front corner garden which bordered quiet residential streets guarded by unassuming retirement bungalows, what passed for the boundary was a very low brick wall. Grooved by countless defensive sessions on our own lawn I was reluctant to go for my shots. Uncles David and Keith were far less restrained! We had a whale of a time which is more than could be said for a few of the grouchier neighbours who resented an assortment of Smiths and Grimbles invading their property to retrieve the ball. Although he consequently fielded a few vocal complaints. Grandad nonetheless recognised that no physical damage was done and so what was all the fuss about?!

Summer Saturdays visiting Mum’s parents often included a walk to the ‘rec’ or short drive to Clacton’s generously proportioned seafront. One afternoon with David and family, our objective of a bucket ’n’ spade session must have been thwarted by a high tide. We decamped to the greensward which separated the busy Esplanade road from the cliff gardens and set up our trusty trio of stumps. Adopting our colourful striped oversized ball, its low bounce and reduced aerodynamic properties making it ideal for such small ‘pitches’, we produced a very entertaining game.

Even the womenfolk, always more reluctant performers, were successfully railroaded integrated into the line-up. This wasn’t only done to reduce our own running around; it was genuinely a case of ‘the more the merrier’. It wasn’t particularly competitive but it wasn’t supposed to be. On that occasion our own enthusiasm and joie de vivre proved infectious. As we drew stumps and collected our discarded jumpers and jackets from the grass, a number of elderly deckchair spectators burst into a spontaneous round of applause. Probably the first and only time I’ve played to a crowd, appreciative or not!

School offered few opportunities to play with a real cricket ball. Summer games lessons were too short to encourage anything approaching a competitive contest; rounders was far more inclusive for all abilities and could fit into a forty-minute session on the field. However, when it comes to sport, teenage boys can be creative. For a few years, the group I tended to hang out with at playtimes would fashion a form of cricket with tennis ball and – innovators, take note – no bat! Three sturdy school cases served as the wicket and runs were scored by kicking. Provided we didn’t inadvertently boot the ball towards the moody gang of smokers huddled menacingly near the fence, we could make sunny lunch breaks pass in no time.

Obviously those with any real talent got to play for the school team and the same was true at university. Of course I wasn’t one of them. I did manage to play a few ‘competitive friendlies’ with work colleagues at Regents Park and Clapham Common. Apart from one stylish lofted on-drive boundary, my shortcomings were glaringly obvious.

Who knows what I could have achieved with a modicum of coaching? Based on my domestic sessions, my batting could have made me another Chris – though infamously dour Tavare, not swashbuckling Gayle. As a bowler, my dibbly-dobbly slow-medium pace efforts may have been suited to Twenty20 had it been invented back then. After all, if I don’t know what I’m going to bowl, how the hell could the batsman?

Family cricketing genes didn’t quite extend to me. Keith, in particular had been a useful player. Representing British Columbia CC, he even played at Brisbane’s famous ‘Gabba’. As ‘keeper, he made two stumpings but was the victim of a dodgy run-out decision, just 93 short of a momentous ton. Ah, such fine margins…. Still, anyone who has a competitive international tournament – albeit for the over-40s - on his CV deserves my respect!

For all those family-related exhibitions, I was mostly content with enjoying cricket as spectator. At first it was purely televisual but once inducted in the exciting world of live cricket, my relationship with the sport intensified. For all .football’s ubiquity and England’s once unassailable summer game exiling itself within the sheltered confines of subscription TV, I’d still pick cricket as my number one sport. To find out why, watch this space...