Last summer I had the pleasure of a long and winding
chat with Jimmy Adams, the former West Indies captain and now head coach at Kent. Either
side of lunch on Day 2 of his team’s Championship game at Derby,
we walked back along his career path, pausing for a long look at the Windies
rivalry with Australia
through the nineties – two hours and twenty minutes; two features for
ESPNcricinfo.
Ever predictable, at one stage I asked him which he considered his best ever knock.
Unpredictably, he replied – in that wonderful Caribbean drawl always threatening to break into a fully-fledged Jamaican patois – by asking me what my best ever innings was.
I could see his point. It isn’t easy when you’re put on the spot. So, I gave him three: two for shot-making (always the aesthete’s fix), one for context. Actually, come to think of it, all three had an element of context – perhaps, rather than their context being the reason they’re outstanding, or stand out, that context is precisely the reason I even remember them.
Anyway, these are the three I mentioned – coincidentally, scores of 73, 72 and 71 (at least, that’s what I remember), probably symptomatic of my atrocious fitness and skittish concentration.
However, since I’m not one to condense a yarn to, say, 500 words when it can be spun out to 2000, it’s perhaps best if I break it up into three (massively self-indulgent, self-congratulatory, positively masturbatory) parts. It subsequently became apparent to me that both the bronze and silver medallists ended with me in highly compromised, unconscious states…
Click the links for the full yarnathon:
3rd place: 73 vs Himley, Staffs Cup Final 2003
Ever predictable, at one stage I asked him which he considered his best ever knock.
Unpredictably, he replied – in that wonderful Caribbean drawl always threatening to break into a fully-fledged Jamaican patois – by asking me what my best ever innings was.
I could see his point. It isn’t easy when you’re put on the spot. So, I gave him three: two for shot-making (always the aesthete’s fix), one for context. Actually, come to think of it, all three had an element of context – perhaps, rather than their context being the reason they’re outstanding, or stand out, that context is precisely the reason I even remember them.
Anyway, these are the three I mentioned – coincidentally, scores of 73, 72 and 71 (at least, that’s what I remember), probably symptomatic of my atrocious fitness and skittish concentration.
However, since I’m not one to condense a yarn to, say, 500 words when it can be spun out to 2000, it’s perhaps best if I break it up into three (massively self-indulgent, self-congratulatory, positively masturbatory) parts. It subsequently became apparent to me that both the bronze and silver medallists ended with me in highly compromised, unconscious states…
Click the links for the full yarnathon:
3rd place: 73 vs Himley, Staffs Cup Final 2003
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