Wednesday 12 March 2014

ON RECRUITMENT AND OTHER HEADACHES (BB10)


The winter recruitment drive is the bane of those responsible for a cricket club’s short-term, on-field development, a headache that’s only getting worse for captains trying to paper over cracks or find missing pieces to jigsaws. These days it seems that every player has a ‘market value’ (although having recently been told that a Division One club were prepared to “cross my palms with silver” to come out of four-year retirement, I was disappointed not to have been told precisely how much. Usually, it takes thirty pieces. Fifteen quid, that is, not 75p). 

Personally, I wasn’t much cop at it, the old persuasion game. Heart just wasn’t in it. I always felt that if you needed to persuade someone too much of the obvious merits of Moddershall (great pitch, awesome view, cake to make your arteries weep), then they probably weren’t what you were after anyway. Plus, it became more and more apparent to me that what I thought was a dynamite sales pitch – a near-obsessive attention to detail that players I skippered seemed to quite like – was actually putting some potential recruits off. Eff that for a game of soldiers. I guess I was an acquired taste. You needed to suck it and see – a sales pitch that I’ve tried and failed with more times than I care to remember, incidentally. 

During Moddershall’s 14-year stint in the top flight between 1997 and 2010, there were probably three distinct, powerful teams that emerged, none of the recruitment for which was my doing. Not a single player.

The first ‘great’ side – Division B winners and Staffs Cup runners-up in 1996; Premier League Champions in 1997 and 1999; Talbot Cup winners in 1999; assorted Barney McCardles, Stone Charity Cups and JCB Knockout successes – was grown organically in the Barnfields soil and later tended lovingly and expertly by an outstanding club pro and inspirational leader in Jon Addison. If there was a player he fancied, he simply bought ‘em a couple of lagers, made ‘em feel good about themselves, then popped the question – pretty much your standard tactics for any given Saturday night up Hanley. 

Over the four-year peak (or high plateau, perhaps) of that team, we recruited one significant player each year, each of whom stopped for two silver-lined seasons. 

First in was Dave Wellings, a pugnacious, slightly stiff top-order batsman and lively, partnership-breaking seamer who, with us having already secured promotion, was made honorary skipper for the final game of the ’96 season: away at his old club, Kidsgrove. To our eternal consternation, Welly took pity on his old teammates by declaring at 370 for 6 (already by far a league record, though since broken) with still a possible nine overs left. He really, really ought to have been overruled. We may have got 450!

In 1997 came the Crewe Rolls-Royce Express, Glenn Heywood, dubbed “the ten-to-two from Crewe” on account of both his Charlie Chaplin-style gait and the time he usually rocked up (boots in a bag, nothing else) for what were 2pm starts back then. Glenn had seriously impressed us all with a very quick opening burst on a hard, green flyer at Rolls-Royce that resulted in Richard Harvey going to hospital, Andy Hawkins being put on his backside, Addo having his castle splattered, and several others wearing a few. In the bar afterward, Addo wasn’t backward in coming forward – he was certainly keener to come forward there than he had been when out in the middle – and, without even needing the five pints of Inhibition Reducer that most of us tend to neck before popping important questions to the objects of our desire, made a bee-line straight for Glenn as he shared a jar with teammates – tantamount to pulling a married woman right in front of her husband. Glenda was duly wooed, and he brought a lot to the party. Speed, mainly. Not that kind.

Roger Shaw followed in 1998. With Addo evidently having seen enough of my wicket-keeping skills efforts, and Phil Hawkins still doing whatever he was doing up at Ashcombe Park, our recruiter-in-chief buttonholed the Dodge over a pint of hand-pulled Carrier Bag in the Cheadle member’s lounge. Jaya-Shaw-iya got gloved up for two years, including the quadruple-winning 1999 campaign, before heading off to Blythe as pro, then making the return journey in 2005 and slowly morphing into a canny off-spinner (to be honest, the club was more interested in Julie’s cooking talents by this stage; Rog was just a proxy).

Finally, in 1999, came Caverswall wobble-dobber, biffer, and grand finalist in World’s Soundest Bloke competition, Chris Baranowski, who, while not a main player, was a great team man who made three or four vital contributions with bat and ball, including 30-odd against Ottis Gibson, and would never, ever shirk a job he’d been asked to do. Field short-leg for Drew Heard? Yeah, why not.

The second strong team, emerging in 2004 and 2005 after three fallow years, was a fully-formed unit that by and large had evolved at Moddershall and required few extra ingredients. Addo may have gone, yet his flair for recruitment wasn’t really necessary. In 2003, with West Indian paceman Adam Sanford bringing some venom, we finished in the top four and lost a Staffordshire Cup final. Our main ‘outsider’ (a position he would never really overcome in three years), James Cornford, pro in 2001 and amateur thereafter, was made captain for 2004 but skedaddled four weeks into the season with senior players on the cusp of mutiny. I took over as skipper and we stabilised in the league – losing only once in 18 matches having been defeated in three of the opening four, yet lacking a bit of magic overall – and managed to reach both major knockout finals, losing to Audley in the Talbot Cup final while beating Hem Heath to win the Staffs Cup. The following year we recruited Richard Holloway and a well-balanced side, one being given serious cutting edge by Imran Tahir, ran an incredibly strong Longton side – the 2005 version probably the strongest XI I played against – right to the wire. It was not to be.
  

Longton CC: where it tipped down on our dreams...


That team broke up, partly due to Immy leaving, partly as a result of my two-year stint in Nottingham, but we were both back in 2008 as members of the final strong team: a one-season affair only. Putting this team together involved something of an orgy of recruitment. Several good players were not around from the previous campaign – Iain and Darren Carr; Joe Woodward; Richard Holloway – and a team that had flirted with relegation for two seasons looked like they were paddle-less and heading up a certain Creek (the one alphabetically before Shot Creek). Conscripts were needed; headhunters to do the finding. And it wasn’t going to be me – I was one of the recruited players!

Andy Hawkins and A team skipper Mike Dyer got busy and eventually found Ally Whiston and Amer Siddique. I have to be honest, I had never heard of Ally – and, on first impressions, I wasn’t entirely convinced he was much cop (mainly ‘cos his chat was a bit Denstone) – but he proved a very, very solid gloveman, with the invaluable ability of being able to pick Imran’s variations (something that proved well beyond me), and dug in to play an absolutely vital innings in a nerve-jangling title-deciding final match. 

Amer, meanwhile, swept into the indoor nets at Sandon Road like a Sultan into his harem, promptly shrinking-violeted that he was “probably the best looking Asian in Great Britain”, and was then sweded by the Moose – at the first net! Welcome to Moddershall, pal!! Regards, The Moose – leading some to wonder whether we’d see him for a second net, let alone the actual season. 

As it turned out, we’d have to wait for a crucial match in the title run-in for him to go AWOL, Stone away, Amer fobbing me off with some ornate yarn about having had a fallout with Mr Siddique and needing to beat a retreat to Leeds when in fact he’d gone on a jolly to London to watch Arsenal in a meaningless pre-season ‘tournament’, as revealed by him being tagged in a Facebook photo. D’oh! Still, he’d had a really good first half to the season, was a decent, gutsy player and boisterous presence around the place – therefore someone I didn’t want to make an example of if I didn’t have to. So, I Malcolm-Tuckered a fix: I told him to “get the effin’ photo off Facebook, yeah?”, drafted an apology for him to email to the rest of the team, and that was pretty much it. Bygones was bygones. No story here. Move along.

Two years later we were hot on the trail of his more gifted yet also more aloof brother, Hamza, a schoolboy record-breaker at Repton trying to crack it at Derbyshire. In fact, we’d been on the case for two years. He’d stayed at Cheadle. Eventually, we got some sort of green light from his father, who Andy Hawkins and I thus arranged to meet over what we assumed would be a lavish spread at Thornbury Hall. Mmmm, curry. (I mentioned earlier that I had nothing to do with recruitment – that wasn’t technically a lie; I’d just forgotten about this whole episode…) Trouble was, that same afternoon I’d visited my mother in the North Staffs Hospital and managed to contract the 24-hour sickness-and-diarrhoea-bestowing Norovirus, a fact that became very evident about half-an-hour before Hawk picked me up – via the medium of massive stabbing pains in my intestines. 

Arriving at the opulent converted Georgian mansion, then, food was the furthest thing from my mind. As was cricket. In fact, the only thing on my mind was not having the increasingly watery contents of my bowels end up hose-piping their way out into, maybe through, my trousers. 

I visited the loo eight, ten, twelve times – at least twice as many as the number of mousey nibbles of the delicious-looking starters that I attempted – all of which may or may not have proved detrimental for the sales situation, what little of it I was contributing to with my head rolling around on my neck like a beachball on a ship’s deck. Still, Hawk’s a well-practised flogger of stuff and seemed to be doing a grand job in ushering the deal over the finishing line. In fact, probably the only thing that could have scuppered things at this stage would have been for one of us to projectile vomit over Mr Siddique’s Peshwari naan – which obviously couldn’t be entirely ruled out.

Anyway, despite these microbiological mishaps, the deal was closed. Hamza came, and while he himself got the runs – on the field, of course – he nevertheless remained a self-contained presence, batting in his bubble with undeniable application yet hovering serenely above our heart-on-sleeves, sleeves-rolled-up emotional investment in it all. He was more or less indifferent (perhaps there are parallels here with KP). Still, had our own team culture been stronger at the time – it wasn’t, for a variety of reasons – then I suppose we might have drawn more from him. Maybe.

As I say, it’s getting harder and harder to recruit. I still need persuading that people need persuading. The club always had an almost spiritual hold over me, see, something that becomes more and more apparent when you play at some of the uglier grounds and on the poorer pitches. And while nowadays I’m died-in-the-wool, I wasn’t even ‘originally’ a Moddershall player – I joined from Little Stoke, largely as a protest – not that that matters at all (another parallel with KP). As Ian Brown of the Stone Roses once said in an unusually philosophical moment, “It’s not where you come from that matters, it’s where you’re at”. 

On that note, it’s been great to see the recent flourishing of young talent at Moddershall (back-to-back trebles for the U-17s; first team and A team choc-full with skillful teenagers making meaningful senior contributions), talent that, while perhaps planted elsewhere in some cases, is now being nurtured at Barnfields; and talent that, in return, is fertilising our soils for future teams, future glories, a time when recruitment is headache-free because people are queuing up to hop aboard the juggernaut… 

Carpe Diem. 

Previous columns for Moddershall CC's newsletter, 'Barnfields Buzz':

BB01: The Grass Isn’t Always Greener… | On club loyalty
BB02: The King and I | Early forays in the press box and meeting IVA Richards 
BB03: Chris Lewis: Still out in the Cold | The coldest cricket match I ever played 
BB04: Sam Kelsall: Role Model | How a 15-year-old's standards inspired a team to the title
BB05: Astle la vista, Baby | Surrealism and hypocrisy with a NZ star
BB06: The Geometry of Captaincy (A Hunch) | Waxing philosophical about setting the field 
BB07: A Brief History of Moddershall in the Staffs Cup | A look back at our four finals 
BB08: The Name of the Rose | On facing a big Jamaican on a minefield at Burslem
BB09: But I did not Shoot the Deputy | On the sub-pro minefield

Tuesday 11 March 2014

BONES OF CONTENTION #1: THE BANNED KILLAMARSH REPORT


The following report was produced in the aftermath of Killamarsh versus Wollaton on May 26, 2007. Shortly after appearing on the Wollaton website, the club received contact from the Nottingham Premier League Chairman requesting it be taken down. Apparently, it had offended our friends from South Yorkshire. Anyway, it has now been officially declassified. Phew. But can you guess what they found so upsetting...?


* * *


PUBLIC HEALTH WARNING:
Despite the best intentions of the author to keep things brief, it proved difficult in the face of the day’s events. He apologises about this and recommends that reluctant readers, the impatient, and the ‘time poor’ amongst you stick to the white bits and skip the sections in green...   

[In which case, the above would read as follows...]

PUBLIC HEALTH WARNING:
Despite the best intentions of the author to keep things brief, it proved difficult in the face of the day’s events. He apologises about this and recommends that reluctant readers, the impatient, and the ‘time poor’ amongst you stick to the white bits and skip the sections in green... 

(although, if you really were ‘time poor’, you’d probably have skipped the Public Health Warning anyway, perhaps been attracted by the lovely golden yellow below, in which case you’re also probably not reading this either, you scatterbrained twat…)



WOLLATON 159/9 (50 overs) 
Elstone 35, P McMahon 35

KILLAMARSH 160/7 (48 overs) 
P McMahon 4/42, Heath 3/40


Were memory not such a fickle thing, I’d probably tell you that Saturday’s trip to Killamarsh was The Worst Day of My Cricketing Life. But, as has been said elsewhere, memory is a fickle thing, so such a claim would be either fib or exaggeration, both of which are best avoided. For instance, I was going to say ‘Worst Day Of My Cricket Career’ but then I realized that this was loose terminology, licentious, principally because I have never played first-class cricket and even implying that I had played first-class cricket (by casually using ‘career’) when I hadn’t played first-class cricket would be as deceitful as explicitly stating that I had played first-class cricket when I hadn’t played first-class cricket. I think it’s important to recognize this, clear it up from the outset. Anyway, if not The Worst Day Of My Cricketing Life, it was certainly up there. A definite contender. 

If you’re reading this blue section, I suppose it’s because you want to know why it was such a bad day. Right you are. Well, despite U-11-sized boundaries on three sides and pokey dressing rooms, it was far from being the worst ground I’ve ever played on. Not in the top 20, in fact. Neither was it the worst weather I’ve ever played in, although it was bitterly cold at times and drizzling for long periods. Nor were they the worst teas I’ve ever eaten; however, they were so bland that had we been presented instead with nothing but a huge bowl of iceberg lettuce to munch through, it wouldn’t have suffered much by comparison. I can’t even claim that it was the worst pitch I’ve played on (there were a few snake pits about in the demanding Nottingham University Interdepartmental League), but just about the only thing that can be said in its favour is that it wasn’t particularly dangerous. The umpiring? Well, it certainly wasn’t the worst I’ve ever encountered, despite it appearing that one of them had completely forgotten the leg-side wide ruling during our innings, only to be tactfully reminded of it at tea by his junior partner (Jose Mourinho would probably claim the official had been ‘spoken to’ during the interval, but I think that would be far-fetched), before proceeding to overcompensate in the second innings, to the extent that it no longer mattered whether or not the ball had hit the pads in his adjudication of the wide ball. Finally, this defeat wasn’t the most galling or painful of my car- (oops, nearly said ‘career’ there) …of my cricketing life, probably because there wasn’t as much at stake as on other occasions; that said, it didn’t feel great, as defeats rarely do. Anyway, the combination of all the above can be said to have contributed to a low-ranker of a day. A bleak’un. 

I should have sensed that it was going to be a bad day more or less as soon as I woke up, around the time that the teabag burst in my morning cuppa. Even more so when, having gone ahead and drank the foul brew anyway, the leaves remaining at the bottom of the mug had spelt out: ‘Don’t go to Killamarsh this afternoon!’ Was this a cryptic message of some sort? Not being the superstitious type, I ignored what the tealeaves may or may not have been trying to say. However, on the journey up, any conviction about this being a day like any other ought to have been removed when the normally eloquent Vince described Notts’ innings-and-whatever defeat of Essex as a – …well, let’s just say it rhymes with “nut cooking” and means sodomy. I thought at the time: has Vince been possessed? Perhaps it was the McMahon clan, drugged by the central heating or something – after all, I later saw Gerry thumbing through a copy of Zoo magazine. Something was rotten in the state of Denmark. Anyway, by the time the first ball of the match had been bowled, I realized absolutely beyond all doubt that it was going to be a pretty ordinary day, as days go, all things considered. Far from my cricketing zenith. 

I had been asked to open the batting. As you probably know, a NPL match, if it goes the distance, is 600 balls in length. Suppose, then, that you are a reluctant fielder, non-bowling, who is asked to open the batting, and suppose that, first ball of the match – or, to put it another way, six or seven seconds after the umpire has called “play” – you receive a briskish ball that pitches on an ‘in-between’ length and hits middle (or was it off?) stump, just about six to eight inches high, then it’s fair to say you’re staring down the barrel at a stinker of a day. It did not augur well. I think it was the first time I’d been dismissed first ball of the game, but memory is a fickle thing. The only thing that can salvage such a day is team victory. And you already know we lost… 

Now, if you’re not thinking ‘I get the picture with the whole bad day thing, move on’, then you’re probably thinking: ‘that’s the second time in six games that Ed has been responsible for your wicket’. And you’d be bang on, of course. Still, the guilt he might have been feeling for not, as senior opener, having taken strike (especially as he later confessed to having “a feeling that you were going to get out”) would soon be extinguished by a more powerful emotion – anger – just two overs later, when he found himself victim of an act of blatant skulduggery, later described by the official that gave the decision as “the most disgraceful incident he had seen in nine years’ of umpiring”. 

This is what happened: their Sri Lankan overseas bowled a short ball that stopped on the wicket, forcing Duncan’s attempted cut to become a block-pull that rolled out to wide mid-on. Ed thought there was a single and shimmied down the track, waiting for a response, but Dunc was unsure of where the ball was, so sent Ed back. The DoC touched his bat back into the crease at the non-striker’s end, then almost immediately went down to examine any damage done to the pitch (without having ascertained that the ball was dead, true, but unquestionably not trying to take a run), only for Killamarsh’s captain – yes, captain – to throw down the stumps, with Ed pretty much oblivious. The umpire raised his finger and the home team went doolally. Ed paused to query the decision (the umpire later admitted, somewhat vaguely, that had it not have been the captain he might have been able to do something) but, strictly speaking, he had to be given out, at which point one of their largely unrepentant team sent him off with a sarcastic “bye bye”. It was at about this point that we started to simmer. (For anyone who’s seen The Big Lebowski, I felt like Walter Sobchak at the bowling alley, when his opponent, Smokey, overstepped the line but still told Dude to mark an 8 rather than a zero. In a league game!! Am I the only one around here who gives a sh*t about the rules?! Smokey, you mark that frame an 8 and you’re entering a world of pain…) 

The rest of our innings was a stop-start affair. Keels looked in good touch until committing to an Antipodean on-the-up square drive to a ball that jagged back sharply (the first from that bowler that did so), to be bowled for 22. Duncan (28) and Vince (35) then battled hard to consolidate – taking the score to a reasonably healthy 93/3 in the thirtieth over – but both fell when primed to kick on, not that you were ever ‘in’ on this pitch. When we came off for rain, and an early tea, after 41 overs, the total was around 115/6. Upon resumption, the two youngest members of the team put together the innings’ brightest partnership. 

Ah, wook at wickle Scotty playing for that England, 'n' that
Coming out to bat on a very poor pitch, with no first XI runs behind him for his new club, against some wily, negative ‘spin’ bowling, Scott Elstone showed what a classy player he is, constructing a calm, orthodox 35 that contained several attractive shots on both sides of the wicket, the pick of which was probably an Azharuddin-esque back foot clip between square leg and mid-wicket for four. In fact, so complete was the display of batsmanship that his captain’s effusive praise was soon running out of body parts to commend: “good hands”, “lovely wrists”, “excellent feet Scotty Elstone”, “fantastic elbows, mate”, “top drawer earlobe-work Scotty”. Scott was well supported by Tim Young – or Young Tim; or even, if you prefer, Young Tim Young [Tim, should your career path lead you to star in Hong Kong kung-fu films, this would be the screen name I’d suggest] – who looked assured and stylish on debut, completely at home on a first XI field, making a neat and valuable 13. A few late wickets in the slog prevented us from picking up the second batting point, as we finished on 159/9 from our allotted overs. For the Killer Martians, Dave Adams exploited the conditions well and picked up six wickets with what JC would later describe as “left-arm darts”. We thought this score could be competitive if we could exert a strong squeeze and push the run-rate steadily up, allowing pressure to lead to mistakes – on this wicket, in the absence of heavy artillery in the seam bowling department, it had to be our strategy. I felt that a couple of early strikes would be necessary, perhaps decisive, against a team that had relied on two or three batters for their runs. After a team-talk containing the phrase “modus operandi”, we took to the field hoping for early inroads. 

As it happened, the Killamarsh openers added 58 invaluable runs. Burdett (37), the aggressor-in-chief, took advantage of most of the loose balls on offer and kept them in the driving seat, whilst Burgess, looking correct and solid, laboured to 16, Vince all over him like the proverbial rash. Luckily for us, Burdett, seemingly well set, gave his wicket away, backing away (the ball after sweeping a four) to try and hit the offie over extra cover, only spooning a catch to mid off. This over-ambitious shot was our avenue back into the game. Shortly afterwards, with a steady drizzle having returned, Burgess’ vigil came to an end when your correspondent, more than a little frustrated by how the game was going, asked our ‘keeper, pretty loudly and perhaps a little boorishly, if he knew where the batsman’s next run was coming from. Next ball, he drove Vince uppishly to extra cover (I’d like to think the two events were related, but I couldn’t prove it in court), exactly where he had cunningly stationed goalkeeper of renown, Duncan Heath, who held an excellent catch. Perhaps “next week”, suggested Colin, confusing the meaning of the words “where” and “when”. If we could wangle another couple of wickets in the four overs before drinks then, as betting-obsessed snooker commentator Willie Thorne would say, we’d probably go slight favourites here 

This optimism, however, was not long lasting. It enjoyed rude health for about 5 or 10 minutes, or whatever time it took before the umpire was turning down an absolutely stone dead LBW (the batsman’s bat was around shoulder height when the ball struck his pads en route to the middle stump). By his reasoning, the umpire agreed with us about the destination of the ball; unfortunately, he also thought the batsman was playing a shot. Playing a shot!!! This ‘shot’ must therefore rank as the most massively ill-conceived attempt at second-guessing that an off-spinner was, without showing any prior inclination, about to bowl you a fast, steeply rising ball just outside off stump that you, from off the front foot, would cunningly try to steer over the slips for four. Madness! Anyway, the now-shrinking optimism took another severe dent soon after, when Adams smeared 14 runs from the last over before drinks, swinging the momentum again decisively in their favour: 70 required from 25 overs with 8 in the shed.  

By the way, when Adams came to the crease, first drop, a rather mischievous JC suggested that Scotty Elstone should keep flighting it up, rather than “bowling darts”, to which the batsman replied “6-fer”. Instant bite. Unfortunately, Scotty then bowled a low full-toss that Geoffrey Boycott’s granny would almost certainly have hit for four, prompting the batsman to say, rather tersely, and with a triumphalism not really appropriate for the degree of difficulty of the shot, “fetch!” Aye aye… While the ball was being retrieved, Adams said to JC:

     “Played a bit of first-class have you?” to which the affable Kiwi replied in the negative. “Yeah, well, I have”, he continued, not really waiting for JC’s answer. 
     “Oh yeah, who for?” 
     “Gloucestershire, Derbyshire, Auckland…” 

Apparently, he then proceeded to name players he’d played with. JC was hugely impressed. Had he have had a pen on him, I’m sure he’d have asked for an autograph right there and then, in the middle of the game. We thought it’d be interesting to check out Adams’ first-class stats, see where the peacock got his strut, so to speak. Imagine, then, the shock it was to discover that cricinfo.com had no record of a David Adams that had played first-class cricket in England. Zip. The WCC research team then turned its attention to the more extensive database at cricketarchive.com, which did reveal a David Adams who had played Second XI championship matches for Derbyshire, Gloucestershire and Somerset, but not one who’d played first-class. A search of the domestic NZ averages showed up no David Adams in the Auckland ranks, either. A case for Columbo, or perhaps even Banacek? 

All of this leads us to one of three conclusions: either (a) he has played in first-class games not archived on the aforementioned websites; (b) he doesn’t understand the definition of ‘first-class’; or (c) he has gone and popped one out there. A porkie. Largely inconsequential, perhaps, but a porkie all the same. In fact, you could almost say that he might be laying claim to a career, and you know my feelings on that. I have asked a friend of mine, a psychologist, about what might have motivated Adams to do such a thing, suggesting that it may have been narcissism or vanity, perhaps even some kind of borderline personality disorder (sources told me he was driving his brother’s sponsored car, with one wag – not WAG - quipping that he was dropping it off at Yorkshire CCC after CJ Adams’ u-turn). My friend politely yet firmly dismissed this conjecture and told me, with typical modesty (and in slightly formal language, it has to be said), that “since psychoanalysis is a speculative art, it is impossible to know the precise reasons that led David Adams, elder brother of well-paid and successful county cricketer Chris Adams, to claim that he’d played a lot of first-class cricket when he hadn’t, especially in an information age, where factual statements are so easily corroborated or disproved with a few clicks of a mouse.” That’s right, I thought, not like the good old days where you could, with a reasonable amount of front, bullsh*t your way through. “And why Auckland?” My friend again: “I suppose you can understand the choice from a geographical point of view, what with it being as far ‘over there’ as it’s possible to go, but in an information age, in which we don’t have to liaise with the NZ Cricket Board Office of Statistics in order to verify these things, surely it’d have been wiser to have chosen Zimbabwe, where the rigorous archiving of cricketing scorecards is probably not high amongst many people’s priorities.” Infallible logic. 

Anyway, back with the game. After drinks, the scoring rate was slowed, slowly, by the combination of Duncan (who bowled excellently, and without luck, for figures of 15-5-40-3) and Apollo Creed, Master of Disaster (10-2-28-0). Just 34 runs were conceded in 15 probing overs, during which Duncan picked up Adams’ wicket and that of the overseas, smartly snaffled by Steve. All the while, their number 4, having been granted the LBW reprieve, battled hard against some tight bowling and, to his credit, held things together until being gated by Vince for 31 crucial runs. So, with four overs to go they needed 20 to win, us 4 wickets, at which point, with my optimism having largely returned (it’s the hope that kills you!), their number 7, Ludlam, sliced a four over cover, creamed another over extra, and took 12 runs in all from the over, all but sealing the game. As the death-knell sounded, Ed’s frustration boiled over: having appealed for a leg-side catch by Steve, only for the umpire to signal wide, he groaned, without really thinking it through: “it hit his pad, man”. 

Apparently the home players were aggrieved that a few of the Wollaton team neglected to shake their hands whilst leaving the field. As one who didn’t, I felt at the time, and still do, that it would be an utterly meaningless gesture that somehow ‘pardoned’ their earlier actions, to them at least. Our post-match dressing room atmosphere was one of disappointment rather than despondency. We all realize our strengths and limitations as a unit. Keels gave us a quick, cold-blooded reminder of what we need to do better to win games. Time to knuckle down and try even harder to do it. 

Savill: last laugh

I’m happy to report that by 11 o’clock Ed seemed to have wholly forgotten his earlier misfortunes. Adhering to the old adage – “Win Or Lose, Always Booze” (or for Caythorpe: “Lose Or Win, Down The Gym” …only joking chaps!!) – and going into Blue WKD-mode, the Club Captain was seen throwing some fierce shapes on the dancefloor, letting the ladies at the 40th birthday bash know what he was all about, using a combo of ‘jelly legs’ sway-dance and smouldering glare, digit raised to pursed lips like Thierry Henry celebrating a goal that has surprised even himself. Nnnnnnnnniiiiiiiiiice. See, Ed knows it’s only a game of cricket… 

MD 

PS – paraphrasing Sesame Street, this report has been brought to you by the Latha, Shruti and Estrangelo Edessa fonts. [This is no longer true, due to the constraints of the Google Blogger platform; nonetheless, it was important to keep it in, right?] “But it’s all the same!” I hear you cry. No, it’s true. You see, after JC’s daring, even radical use of the Garamond font the other week, I had a quick squizz for something choice, carry the torch. But it soon became clear that some of these fonts were identical, despite their different names. I was reminded of Ricky Gervais’ irritation over the number of different bat species being categorized each year. Gervais suspected that these bat experts, financially rewarded each time they identify a new species, were making them up. So, alongside your pipistrelle and vampire bats, you get the long-eared bat, the slightly shorter long-eared bat, the medium-size-eared bat, etc., etc. Well, it’s time to point out that some programmers at Microsoft are doing the same. It’s a scam, I tells ya. A scam. 




Monday 10 March 2014

BLISTERING BEST



Since this 'ere blog was designed to be devoted solely to my club-playing exploits, and thus even more self-indulgent than other scribblings, I may as well post here a recent piece (recycled, admittedly) that ESPNcricinfo published about the day Tino came to Barnfields. 

I was quite chuffed they went for it, especially as it got Moddershall a mention on the world's biggest cricket website. 

Here it is, anyway: Blistering Best.


Thursday 6 March 2014

BUT I DID NOT SHOOT THE DEPUTY: ON SUB-PROS AND OTHER HEADACHES (BB09)


A while back, I told the tale of Moddershall CC turning up to Burslem’s new ground and facing West Indian paceman Franklyn Rose on a square being held together by ultra-strong orange plastic mesh that was still visible down cracks between the turf. It was intended to be the first of a few pieces looking at the good, the bad and the ugly of end-of-season sub-pro engagements. Ah, so many forgettable names, so many forgettable faces – most of which, as you’d expect, I’ve forgotten. 

In recent years, as my love of cricket fell quicker than Felix Baumgartner (there are signs, however, that it might be flickering back to life), Moddershall engaged many, many sub-pros. I did a lot of the tedious legwork – researching the possibilities in different leagues and at different counties, ringing round agents (akin, perhaps, to sitting in an aquarium full of sharks all day), all the while I really ought to have been concentrating on writing up my PhD thesis – all of which left me on the verge of cracking up, a quivering wreck who would spend afternoons in Shelton Park talking to the geese (“Oi, Goosey, couple of flaps squarer; and tighter, saving one…”). 

Asad and Irfan
The parade of sub-pros started at the end of 2008. In a story I’ve told a few times now, most recently for Wisden India, Immy was half-inched by Hampshire, yet in the end managed to play all but two of the final nine games for us, for which we thus hired the services of Asad Ali (who became a permanent sub-pro in 2010, when Mohammad Irfan turned out not to be flying quite as far under the radar as Id thought) and, for a game that was abandoned, the Zimbabwean seamer Gary Brent

It was the following year, 2009, when things got interesting. After three weeks hiring distinctly average clubbies with exotic names and ropey CVs from the Home Counties Premier League, I was delighted with the belated arrival of our designated pro: cuddly wee Sri Lankan twirler, Rangana Herath – recently, the fourth-ranked Test bowler in the world, yet unable entirely to convince the Moddershall hardcore of his merits with the 14 wickets he bagged in seven league outings before popping back to Sri Lanka to win Man of the Match in a nailbiter against Pakistan. Evidently, Mohammad Yousuf and Misbah-ul-Haq are less obdurate adversaries than Dean Bedson and Taz Hussain. 

By the time Ranga was spirited away, at exactly the half-way point of the season, we were struggling in the league but had made it through to the T20 semi-finals and Talbot Cup quarters. The rest of our season would be a parade of subs of varying credentials and character. You really were in the lap of the gods with this, particularly since the events of 2003 when Shahid Afridi had played both for and against Little Stoke in consecutive matches, which prompted the league to stop pros from turning out for more than one club per season. Of course, with several clubs in a similar boat, this meant an ever diminishing pool of potential targets and, with demand outstripping supply, led to a seller’s market. 

Our 11-game run for the line in 2009 began with victory over Wood Lane – at the time an emerging power in the league – for which we had dipped into that diminishing pool and engaged Imran Arif, then of Worcestershire and since of Burslem, Whitmore and others. Aforesaid market conditions – of which Mr Arif had a sound grasp, as he would later prove in fairly despicable fashion – meant that we undoubtedly paid over the odds for him from the get-go, but it was a Friday night when we cut the deal and so our situation dictated it. Arif went wicketless from 11 overs, but made his first contribution when batting. That contribution happened to be berating a 20-year old batsman who had just arrived at the crease and blocked out a testing maiden from the wily Steve Norcup: “Are you playing for yourself or the club?” he was asked by the sub-pro. The young man told him he’d played for Moddershall from the age of nine, then pointed out that he, on the other hand, was “a money-grabbing [cee] with no care for the game or who he was playing with, only who’d pay the biggest bucks”. The two batsmen had no further interactions. In a stand of 59. 

Imran Arif
Still, the sub-pro carved and heaved his way to an inelegant yet matchwinning – and, more importantly for him, win bonus-winning – innings of 55 not out, so we were all, at this stage, pretty chuffed. All except the young batsman, that is, who informed me three weeks later – after we’d engaged Sri Lankan Jeeva Kulatunga, then pro at Burnley CC, for a losing draw at Stone and a defeat to Fazl-e-Akbar’s Porthill – that he wasn’t prepared to play with “that p***k, Imran Arif”. 

(Or should that be “Mohammad Arif”, the pseudonym he explicitly asked that we enter on the play-cricket website, giving the reason that Worcestershire wouldn’t be best pleased him playing when he had a niggle. I was happy to oblige, since I had little concern with Worcestershire. As it turned out, the reason he wanted to be entered under an alias was that he’d pulled a sicky with Kidderminster Victoria, the Birmingham League club to which, in standard practice, he had been assigned. I later found out from KVCC skipper, John Wright, that his fee there was around 40% of what we paid him, excluding the win bonus, which he reckoned enough of an incentive to lie to his teammates and his county and head north to play for us. Of course, making a match-winning 50 when playing under a pseudonym presents something of an anguished dilemma for the rampant egoist…) 

I say “all except the young batsman” were chuffed by the Wood Lane game. Actually, a couple of his colleagues were of the same mind leading into our visit to Longton (for which Kalutunga was unavailable), so some persuasion and cajoling were called for and a reluctant acceptance of our beggars-not-choosers predicament among the disgruntled members of the team. For the record, I didn’t dislike Arif at this stage; he was a working-class Bradford boy, very excitable on the field, and I felt we needed a little bit of presence out there, provided it was channelled. Anyway, Arif threw himself into the warm-up, shouting at people for fumbling the ball and generally behaving like a cranky diva with a Red Bull addiction. He took 2 for 52 on a sticky dog on which he ought to have taken 6-40, chipped off weakly for 8 when batting, before then having his entourage wander blithely in and out of our dressing room like it was a summer house at a garden party. They were ejected as politely as I could muster, and my toleration of his presence in the group, borne of the cricketing cutting edge he was supposed to bring as compensation, was now at the limit. 

Two weeks later we played Leek in a bottom of the table clash. We were one place outside the relegation zone and only Leycett were keeping them off the bottom. Imran Arif was available for this game – that is, he had either pulled another sicky at Kidderminster or had been released by them – yet despite our perilous situation we chose to go in without him. For a relegation crunch match. No pro. Draw your own conclusions. It wasn’t exactly ideal, then, that our main seamer went down injured after 3.2 overs, but still we blocked out for a losing draw. 

Leek CC
Gary Brent deputised the following week, a losing draw against Hem Heath in which he played with a first-rate attitude and bowled with zero luck to pick up 19-7-24-1. He wasn’t a world-beater, but was a solid citizen and exactly what you need from a pro in terms of setting an example. And since we are drawing contrasts here, it shouldn’t be forgotten that when the penultimate game the previous season (at Wood Lane) was abandoned without a ball being bowled, Gary only took £50 petrol money and declined the other £200 that was rightfully his. I believe the hashtag is #justsayin… 

The following week, the fourth last game, we travelled to Little Stoke, who were at the time vying for the title with Longton. Another rummage in the sub-pro lucky dip barrel unearthed Naseer Khan, a 36-going-on-46-year-old off-spinner with 61 first-class wickets at 43 and a handy eight half-centuries. He was, I discovered immediately, a warm, genial figure. A big personality. Nevertheless, I was a little concerned when he came out for the warm-up wearing full whites, silver Nike trainers – silver Nike trainers that he proceeded to play the actual game in – and a Georgetown University baseball cap. A Georgetown University baseball cap that he proceeded to play the actual game in. The only thing missing were Chinos. 

Lord only knows what Richard Harvey and Gareth Morris, Little Stoke’s pro and captain, must have been thinking as they stood on the square deliberating over which strip to pitch the wickets in: the fresh one or the Bunsen. Surely they cannot have contemplated the portly Asian fellow with greying curly mullet – a guy who looked like he enjoyed a samosa, a guy one of our team thought looked like Dev from Coronatian Street – and thought: “Reckon he's a seamer”. Nevertheless, they opted for the Bunsen. While Nas bowled with good control and threat, it was Matt Stupples who picked up a maiden 5-wicket haul before Chris Beech played sublimely in contributing an unbeaten 104 of the 165 we knocked off. 

Naseer Khan
Naturally, ‘Dev’ was retained for the following match, at home to Burslem. However, after batting well for an unbeaten 73, he was unable with the ball to press home a good position on a tacky surface. Burslem recovered from 103 for 5 and 174 for 8 to knock off 186, Michael Brown adding a crucial 46 to the excellent 80 he had taken off Ranga in the earlier fixture. (We were familiar foes, us and Burslem, playing them five times that season, employing a different pro each time. We managed to beat them in a round-robin-deciding T20 game, yours truly steering the team into Finals Day with 37 not out, sweeping Khalid Malik for four to win the game after former Pakistan U-19 star Anwar Ali had biffed 50. In the Talbot Cup, however, with leg-spinner Imranullah as our Pakistani sub-pro, we lost at the second attempt, the first having been abandoned ten overs in due to a dangerous rain-affected pitch, a decision sub-pro Samit Patel disagreed with volubly.) 

Anyway, our penultimate game was another relegation decider, this time against Leycett, and again at home on a sticky dog. Thanks to a Dan Redfern hundred, Leycett, who really needed to win to close the gap with us, scored 220-odd for 3 declared. Nas was again disappointing on a pitch that ought to have helped him (if he’d bowled the correct pace) and we ended up blocking out for a draw. 

This left me with a quandary going into the last game. Statistically, Nas had done so-so in his three outings, averaging over 50 with the bat yet failing to bag the wickets he should have done (8 for 183). He was a likeable fellow, with the breezily charismatic air of an ageing Bollywood heartthrob, and, silver trainers notwithstanding, was a positive influence on the team. But we were playing at Knypersley, where it was generally slow and low, a wicket on which Immy had had scant success. I felt we needed a seam-bowling horse for the course. So, having broken the bad news to Nas, we again plunged into that ever-diminishing pool. 

A friend put me in touch with Joe Sayers, then at Yorkshire, and for a while it seemed as though Ajmal Shahzad would play. However, despite our offer rising to around £700 at one stage, Ajmal decided to spend his free weekend shopping in London. We thus turned back to Mr Arif, who was again paid a lower base fee than for his first game for us, but we agreed to double his wage if we won an incentive designed to give him that wee bit of extra motivation that his obvious, aching love for the club couldn’t quite provide. 

Ajmal Shehzad
The day started terribly. Our position was that we needed to gather more points than both teams below us, a draw being enough if they each failed to win. Predictably, I lost the toss on a green top. Nay, a rug. However, before the crestfallen feeling had chance to play across my face, Kim Barnett told me matter-of-factly that they’d have a bat. “Er, come again?” Not long afterward, his off pole would be in a different postcode and Arif – ironically, borrowing kit from the young batsman he’d insulted a couple of games earlier! – would be on his way to figures of 9 for 37 from 13.2 pacey overs. Now, someone taking 9-fer to keep you in the Premier Division really ought to be the cause of unadulterated delight, but it was, frankly, a bittersweet experience. Having to feign post-game mateyness wasn’t exactly a season’s highlight, either. 

The pattern of dubious behaviour he’d demonstrated up to that point would be confirmed the following season, his last at Worcestershire. Indeed, one week he told me at 7.30 on Friday evening that he would need “an extra £75” on top the verbal agreement we had made that Tuesday, otherwise he wouldn’t be making the journey up. (Perhaps this openly venal desire was crystallised when he literally ran out of our pavilion to watch Anwar Ali count out his money on the outfield, shortly after a rain-affected game against Elworth that was drawn. At considerable expense…)Anyway, once again, with no other pro around – Asad Ali was yet to arrive; Anwar Ali was playing for Nelson, his club in Lancashire – we were over a barrel and Arif knew it. So, having bought myself a few minutes to get my heart-rate down from ‘psychopathically angry’ to just ‘irked’ by telling him I’d need to talk it over with the club (which was true), some monetary compromise was eventually struck and he turned up. 

You can imagine my pep-talks to the team were starting to lose a little pizzazz by this stage, what with thinking our pro was an unscrupulous, deluded, vain bandit – so vain, in fact, that according to a housemate at the time, he commandeered a full-length mirror from a shared room in his Worcester digs and kept it hidden under his bed for personal usage, flatly denying he had it when asked!This 11th hour ‘up-selling’ was even more galling for me given that I’d told a white lie to the umpires to get him off what would have been a certain ban for his part in an altercation with Samiullah Khan a few weeks’ earlier, the latter walking after Arif while brandishing a bat after he’d been sconed by a sharp bouncer that was followed by a preposterous roar and insult in Urdu. I think we explained it away as crossed wires. 

I’m not sure there’s a moral to this story – there’s certainly few morals in this story – although it might be that it’s a good thing to have a pro who’s around for the full season. That, or we should have stuck with Nas after all. Oh, how I miss the good times on the sub-pro carousel. 

Previous columns for Moddershall CC's newsletter, 'Barnfields Buzz':

BB01: The Grass Isn’t Always Greener… | On club loyalty
BB02: The King and I | Early forays in the press box and meeting IVA Richards 
BB03: Chris Lewis: Still out in the Cold | The coldest cricket match I ever played 
BB04: Sam Kelsall: Role Model | How a 15-year-old's standards inspired a team to the title
BB05: Astle la vista, Baby | Surrealism and hypocrisy with a NZ star
BB06: The Geometry of Captaincy (A Hunch) | Waxing philosophical about setting the field 
BB07: A Brief History of Moddershall in the Staffs Cup | A look back at our four finals 
BB08: The Name of the Rose | On facing a big Jamaican on a minefield at Burslem