PROS AND CONS

At the back end of last summer I was asked by All Out Cricket editor Phil Walker to write something about the hallowed club pro: the greats and not-so-greats, the upside and downside, a few yarns. I'm not entirely sure whether he realized that I'd written something very similar for them a couple of years earlier (while he was editor) but I was happy to oblige. 

However, time soon caught up with me and I found the deadline approaching with no work having been done. One Friday in September, the day of the deadline I headed to London for the Lord's one-day final, having explained to Phil, using a mixture of truth and white lie, why I hadn't yet filed.
 
I arrived at my mate's house (he was in Devon) and stayed up till 4am working furiously on this and another piece for AOC. Then I turned in for what was a smidge over 4 hours' kip, then dragged myself across town to Lord's.

Upon arrival, I checked the seating plan for where to park myself and my totally knackered Dell laptop and USB keyboard (keeping it real at the Home of Cricket). Who should I be sitting next to? Yep, Phil Walker. Ace. Only, he hadn't arrived. Acer. So I cracked on with writing about Sobers and Learie Constantine, SF Barnes and Shane Warne. But then he did arrive. Arse. 

I apologised for my slackness with the Pros prose. He said: "No problem. Monday's good."

I apologised for my slackness with the piece about Staffordshire's 1000th game. He said: "No problem. We're pushing that back a month to a different issue." I thought: "Well, you could have fucking told me that yesterday, before I stayed up till 4am working on it." But I said: "Oh, cool." Mainly, because I was in the wrong.

So then we watched the match, a humdinger, and I had a much-needed beer with a couple of journalists before schlepping first to Archway, to pick up the bag I'd travelled down with (as I'd be going to stay with friends in Woking for a couple of days), and then on to Dalston, where I was meeting said friends for drinks before heading on to Hackney Wick to an Altern 8 rave, at which I would start the process of writing about their dancer, Martyn, with whom I'd played junior cricket. I was still awake at 8am, by which stage I was a little bit tired. 

Still, the piece about the pro's turned out alright. And the strapline calls me a "stalwart clubbie"... 

Prose and Cons 

RELIVING GLOUCESTERSHIRE'S ONE-DAY GLORY YEARS

Mid-September, and a trip to London to watch unfancied Gloucestershire take on fat cats Surrey in the Royal London Cup final, once upon a time the showpiece game of the English domestic first-class season but now something of a poor relation to the glitz of Twenty20 Finals Day.

A smallish crowd – the larger part of which were down from the West Country, it seemed, rather than south of the Thames – were treated to a slow-burning classic of a game, with Sangakkara at one stage looking like he was waltzing Surrey to victory, until his dismissal triggered a tense hour-and-a-half on a crusty pitch. Gloucestershire fought superbly, and eventually squeezed out a victory, one that was highly reminiscent of their glory years under John Bracewell and Mark Alleyne at the turn of the century, when they completely dominated limited-overs cricket.

It was this one-day dynasty that formed the subject of my ESPNcricinfo blog for September, and I managed to run into quite a few of that team around the ground: Mike Smith, Jack Russell and Alleyne in the press box, Ian Harvey and Jon Lewis in the Tavern pub, clearly enjoying themselves.

Reliving Gloucestershire's One-Day Glory days 

 

TALKING OF... XI THOUGHTS ON GALLE

AUTHOR’S NOTE: When I say ‘XI thoughts on Galle’, I don’t mean on the city per se, although I’m sure it’s lovely. I’m merely using Galle as a synecdoche: a large thing that stands in for a smaller thing that is the actual referent of the word or phrase, as for instance when newsreaders say “Washington” or “Moscow” when they mean the US or Russian government. OK? OK. Here are my thoughts. They are a VERDICT. Nail them to the inside of your eyelids, scum.

1. Sri Lanka used to be called Ceylon, after the tea producers. Before that, however, it was known (to Europeans, at least) as Serendip, whence comes the word ‘serendipity’: the art of chancing across beautiful things (the cornerstone of creativity and innovation according to Steven Johnson’s excellent Where Good Ideas Come From). Well, all I can say is, let’s hope that the England top order chance across the art of not throwing your wicket away through poor concentration in a manner that would shame the fucking X-Box gen– … Erm, sorry about that. I saw some lovely, fluffy clouds outside… I didn’t really, you goon; I was doing satire. Yeah, anyway, England need to stumble across the art of stumbling across a way of making enough runs for their bowlers to work with. Now-ish will do.

2. Talking of Sri Lanka and names, there’s a very important debate that needs to be had, and that debate is this: the pronunciation of which cricketer’s name best captures the sonic essence of Richie Benaud’s inimitable, though much imitated voice, and thereby the basis of his laconic commentary style as a whole? Eh? Some say it’s “Muttiah Muralidaran,” with a hard ‘d’ (as opposed to “Muralitharan” with stress on the middle syllable [for everyone in the world except Tony Greig] or the penultimate [for Tony Greig]). Some even claim it’s “Kapila Wijegunawardene,” which sounds to me like an invitation to eat. Personally, I think the name that best captures Benaud’s soft and rhythmical vowel-fondling ululations has to be “Mahendra Nagamootoo”. What you saying?

The debate could be extended to other sports, too. It took a long while for the BBC to recognize that received pronunciation did not encompass the majority of its audience, and that deploying a regional accent on its airwaves was not a hanging offence. And thus came the luscious-voiced likes of Brendan Foster, whose Rehrzer Mert-ah (Rosa Mota) is surely the name that best exemplifies his Geordie tones.  

And then there’s rugby, and the great Bill McClaren. So hydraulic was his enunciation, so many moving parts concerted, such a range of twangs and grumbles, a whole glottal gymnastics, that one could easily imagine him blowing or even vibrating the cutlery clean off your dinner table during the evocation of a particularly memorable passage of play – maybe a garryowen starting off a magnificent sweeping counter-attacking try, ball passed through the hands of all 15 players before being touched joyously down between the posts. A mention in dispatches should go to Eddie Butler for his beautiful enunciation of the French players’ names – Dussautoir, Rougerie, Poitrenaud; even those with Basque, Vietnamese or West African heritage, like Harinorduquy, Trinh-Duc, or Nyanga – hitting all the diphthongs and nasalised vowels like a master pianist. 

But McLaren’s Lagavullin-steeped Highland burr evokes perfectly the cold and windswept context in which rugby union really ought to be played, and the quintessential name to exemplify his voice – his brrr – would have to be that of ex-England flanker Peter Winterbottom. Go on, say it: Peet-turrh Wahn-turrh-boar-tumm. Now say it again, but louder. And again, faster. Go on! Go ooooon. And once more. Say it like Bill McClaren would say it... And now you’re laughing, aren’t you? Tittering inanely. Fun, isn’t it? Thanks, that’ll be £5 you owe me.

3. Talking of names, the United Nations Council for the Protection of Finite Resources has decreed that, as of 2015, Sri Lanka will have to cut down on the number of polysyllabic players in their side because of the amount of ink it’s forcing Western newspapers to get through. Thus, the likes of Paranavitana, Kaluwitharana, Kalavitagoda, Bandaratilleke, Wijegunawardene, Samarasekera, Kuruppuarachchi, and Jayaprakashdaran will all have to be sacrificed for the sake of the likes of Vaas, Silva, Dias, John (yes, look it up), Silva, Zoysa, Silva, Randiv and Silva.

Randiv: a secret lemonade drinker?

4. Talking of Randiv, old Suraj nipped in with a cheeky 4-fer in the second innings, adding three tailend wickets and KP to the couple he took in the first innings. Well bowled, I guess. But did anyone else spot the quirkiness of his run-up: it’s like someone trying to sneak up behind you by tiptoeing across a very creaky old wooden floor, the noisy parts of which he knows very well (is he a secret lemonade drinker?). Precise, jerky, awkward, angular.

5. Talking of angular, does anyone else think that Lankan paceman Suranga Lakmal bears a certain resemblance to the actress Sandra Bernhardt, who played the stalking accomplice of De Niro’s unhinged Rupert Pupkin in Scorcese’s underrated classic The King of Comedy? He does, kinda – but you need to know how to look… 

Suranga Lakmal's twin sister?

6. Talking of being unhinged, the Sri Lankan Cricket Board’s opportunistic ticket-pricing policy – effectively setting up a dual economy: one price for locals, one (exorbitant) for Brits – even extended on the fourth day to fleecing people who tried to watch the game on the cheap from the ramparts of the old Dutch fort, ostensibly because some local nabob had hired out the place for a party. You wouldn’t think they’d have the gall. It seems to me to be short-termist in the extreme to dole out punitive charges to the one nation that consistently brings a large contingent of supporters overseas. One can only hope that the profits are being used to persuade Lasith Malinga to return to Test cricket, as I have a feeling he might prove more than a bit useful on some of the flatter pitches out there.

7. Anyway, talking of having some gall, Galle is undoubtedly a beautiful setting, but is it the most impressive cricket ground in the shadow of an old fortified stronghold? Players at Bamburgh CC might beg to differ… 

8. Talking of the old Dutch fort, it is perhaps not all that widely known that the men of the Netherlands established a trading colony on the island – following 97 years after the Portuguese, of course (think of all those Fernandos) – a staging post en route to Java, no doubt, for the quasi-governmental proto-megacorporation, the Dutch East India Company. Anyway, the Dutch legacy lives on today in the tradition of the Burghers, patrilineal descendents of the Dutch (principally though not exclusively), who have a first-class cricket side named in their honour and whose latest international representative was Michael Vandort.

Anyway, I mention all this because it struck me that Holland are missing a bit of a trick as far as strengthening their national cricket team is concerned. What with their colonial past in South Africa, too – not to mention Tasmania, once known as Van Dieman’s Land, after the U2 track (is Dirk Nannes from down there?) – there are not only a whole host of not-quite-good-enough-for-the-national-team Saffers they could pick up (all due apologies to Ryan ten Doeschate), thus competing with us (all due apologies to KP and Trott), but probably a few Lankans who could trace back their ancestry to the motherland. While they’re at it, they could smuggle some Guyanese over the border into Suriname (possibly making them eligible, although this involving too many layers of immigration red tape for me to work out right now); or Trinidadians onto the Dutch Antilles. What’s the point of colonialism if you have to give up the cheap flow of important resources? 

Strauss: professional trudger, down but not RAUS

9. Anyway, talking of Teutonic interest in cricket, German tabloid Bild is in no doubt where the blame for England’s current subcontinental woes lies, yesterday running its leader beneath the (faintly anti-Semitic) headline STRAUSS RAUS. However, to people – German-speaking or otherwise – who think that a sole hundred in 48 innings is proof positive that he should be dropped, I say this is a slightly misleading stat. It is not, strictly speaking, ‘all about hundreds’ as it is about match-winning contributions and, to a lesser extent, averages. You can make lots and lots of 80s and you’ll be doing a good job. “Hundreds win Tests,” you reply. Again, not necessarily. I would bet that there have been more hundreds scored in draws than wins – certainly, up to about 1995 (I’d wager). And then there’s the unquantifiable value of captaincy, of leadership, to a team. Is Strauss slipping back into the Misbah and Sammy realms of being picked for his captaincy? Maybe. But he’s earned some breathing space.  So back the fuck up. 

10. Anyway, talking of headlines, it’s a shame Charlie Shreck wasn’t selected for this game – instead of James Anderson, say, or Monty – not because that would have given Notts four of the attack (yes, yes, I know he’s signed for Kent) but because it would have allowed someone to use the headline CHARLES DE GALLE. As it is, new West Indies opener Johnson Charles better sort his shit out so that his career is prolonged to the point where the headline can eventually be used. Money on that not happening, from the evidence so far. 

De Galle: leadership (albeit
high-handed and autocratic)

11. Anyway, talking of a Notts-based bowling attack, I have a prediction: should Samit Patel’s England career extend beyond the current tour, to environments other than those in which the need for a fifth (or fourth-and-a-half) bowling option is best served with a spinner slow bowler – for instance, with England now having shown themselves happy to have Prior at six, Bresnan could, in most conditions, come in at seven as a third seamer (or fourth, if they want to ditch Monty…which could also be true if they want to revert to a four-man attack) – then reverse sweeper forecasts that the England team will see a reprisal of the tradition of Notts players going absolutely radge at each other, last seen in around 2008 with Ryan Sidebottom busting blood vessels at Monty’s shambolic fielding.

Young Samit [not really - legal team]

My logic is this: Patel is a Notts lad – and, it’s fair to say, of not entirely solid character (before your scurrilous minds start speculating unduly, I’m merely thinking of the lack of discipline of his mouth bouncers: “Sorry, cake. You’re not coming in. Not tonight.”) – while Swann has been with the county since the start of the 2005 season, when Patel was a mere slip of just out of his teenage years. They know each other reasonably well, I’d guess. Therefore, Swann’ll probably already have seen one or two indiscretions and, I’d hazard, several instances of all and sundry pulling out their hair. Furthermore, Mr Swann may well be the Fastest Wit in the West (Bridgford area), but he’s also quite narky on the field, at times. Witness the expression on his face when Samit failed dismally to be 6' 6" tall so that he could catch Prasanna Jaywardene in the Sri Lankan second innings, just as they were extending their lead from ‘Maybe, on a very, very good day, and if Herath breaks a finger attempting to snaffle a drilled return catch, we might knock these off, oooh, I dunno...1 in 4 times, max’ to ‘We’re absolutely fucked’. 

Bearing all this in mind, there’s no doubt he’s going to go mental at Samit soon. Probably in Colombo (according to Columbo).

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TWO DAYS IN THE BADGERS' SETT: DAY 1

the badger's sett, cropston

Four-day county cricket may get a bad rap from time to time – on account of such trifles as it not being profitable or attracting paying punters – but it is still, for better or for worse, the bedrock of the English game. That being so, it would seem odd that a lifelong cricketer and cricket-lover – albeit a shortish life (thus far) and (perhaps) an ex-player – had spent but a solitary day of his existence in attendance of County Championship cricket (at Derbyshire vs. Nottinghamshire, 1990, if you must know). This statistic wouldn’t exactly be suggestive of an enduring passion. Positively negligent, you might say. After all, I have donned the (incrementally expanding) whites on maybe seven- or eight-hundred occasions – which you simply don’t do as an uncommitted, toe-dipping dabbler – and I’ve always kept half an eye on the county scores, especially since t’Internet made them so readily accessible. However, as I say, up to 14 April 2011, I had only watched three measly sessions – long, tedious sessions at that – of our great County Championship.

a badger surveys the scene (© Nottingham Evening Post)

Thus it was with the kind of spring-heeled excitement that only the true, scorebook-keeping, wireless-hugging Badgers of the county circuit must regularly feel that I descended upon Nottinghamshire’s magnificent Trent Bridge ground to witness the opening day of their defence of the County Championship, a title secured on the final, belatedly sun-dappled afternoon of the season in Manchester, when nails were being chewed, dressing rooms paced, clocks and clouds and scoreboards from elsewhere scrutinized intently, and Notts sneaked home courtesy of having one more victory than Somerset, the still Championship-less rivals with whom they finished level on points. It was another ambitious southern Club they were welcoming today: arriviste underachievers Hampshire, whose Rose Bowl ground will this year become the ninth Test venue in England (and Wales), putting them in competition with Notts in both the paddock and the boardroom.

Collecting my Press Pass – text and elegant leaping stag logo in Lincoln green, of course – from the Ticket Collection Point on Bridgford Road, and only slightly regretting that this wasn’t the 1930s and that I didn’t need to slip this docket into the silk band of a natty grey trilby, I wandered through the main gates and round the back of where the old Parr Stand (now simply called the New Stand) once stood, emerging to see both sets of players going through their final warm-ups. The distinctive thwack of leather on willow echoed off the largely empty stands, a great contrast to the ambient hugger-mugger of a Test match morning, anticipatory hum and buzz fuelled by the oh-go-on-then, special-occasion abandon of those pre-opening hour, pre-toss fizzy looseners.

Making an anti-clockwise visual sweep of the ground through fingerprint-smeared specs, I took in the huge new electronic screen, the famous old Members’ Pavilion, the Hound and Fox Road Stands, floodlights, Nottinghamshire County Council’s the tower block (Trent Bridge House) looming over the old scoreboard, round to the well-appointed, functional, impressive sand-coloured Radcliffe Road Stand, whose first-floor would provide my home for the day. It was 10.40am and an announcement came over the tannoy that Notts had won the toss and would be bowling – still standard for Trent Bridge in April, despite this being far and away the balmiest curtain-raiser that any of the scribes could remember.

Everything was going swimmingly – too well, in fact. In an overly vigorous effort to remove the grease smudges from my lenses, I managed to push them straight out of the frames. The pair of stalwart Hampshire Badgers who had made their way up from Andover were split as to what I should do to rectify this emergency, although neither seemed particularly inclined either to look at, or talk to, me when proffering their suggestions, in that overly shouty way of the deranged. Reluctant to try and find a Lilliputian screwdriver to fix the frame back around the lens, I stomped back round to the cheery stewards at main gate, acquired a pass-out, and schlepped the five minutes up the road to West Bridgford High Street where a kindly assistant at Vision Express fixed me. By the time I was back at The Bridge, two overs had been bowled – enough time to lose a match, but not win it. 

Sweeping along the sun-starved bowels of the Radcliffe Road Stand, through the automatic doors, and up to the first floor, I entered the pristine and spacious 92-berth press box (a straw poll would later reveal that it was regarded as the best on the circuit among the pressmen), slipped into a chair at the back (it reminded me of many a lecture theatre, accessed this way, from the highest level), pulled out my laptop, connected it to the electricity juice machine, and got online, keeping a self-consciously low profile as I familiarized myself with my strange new milieu. It felt like my first day at school, without the wedgie.

room with a view 

Breezing in perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes after me (though with nothing like so apologetic a skulk), and bringing the number in the press box to a healthy and appropriate eleven, was David Hopps of The Guardian: bright of eye, earthy of wit, and with the gentle, slightly stooping gait of a veteran left-arm spinner, one apt to rub his hands in the dirt around the popping crease. Who did we – for we were most definitely a we, us pressmen – have in our XI?

Smack bang behind the bowler’s arm (early bird?), third row back, sat Matt Halfpenny of the Nottingham Evening Post and Simon, erm, just Simon from the Press Association, whose copy would be fired off to the ECB and to Ceefax, I discovered (perhaps in fluorescent blue pixellated font). To their left was Jon Culley of The Independent and Cricinfo; in front of him, binoculars in hand, sat The Telegraph’s Paul Bolton. To his right, in the central bank of desks, was the sartorially impeccable Richard Hobson of The Times, and further along from him in a Hampshire Hawks shirt, eschewing use of the desks for his laptop – into which were plugged all manner of USB devices – was another Simon, who I assumed must be Simon Walter of The Southern Daily Echo, someone who had interviewed me by phone a couple of times regarding a pair of former Moddershall professionals that I’d skippered, Imran Tahir and Rangana Herath, both of whom had joined Hampshire.

Behind Simon, to my left, was another local reporter from the south and, to his left , within stretching distance of the complimentary thermos jugs of coffee was a man at whom I had to take three long looks to make sure he wasn’t Sir Menzies Campbell. It turned out that he was a Scot, however: Mike Denness, former England captain and now an ECB pitch inspector.

Finally, Michael Temple, the Notts CCC Media and Communications Manager, was buzzing about, delivering the all-important lunch vouchers to these esteemed wordsmiths. I was looking for the first opportunity that presented itself to establish some sort of relationship in my strange, new environment (the Notts Press Officer, Chris Botherway, with whom I’d liaised to get my pass, was nowhere to be seen), so I followed Simon #2 over to grab a coffee.

“Are you Simon?” I asked, offering a handshake.

“Yes,” he replied, slightly bemused, the tone of apprehension that used when a policeman calls out of the blue.

“I’m Scott,” I now said, expecting that to clear everything up.

“Oh… right…” he answered, eyes and bodyweight shifting uneasily, the ellipsis evidently inviting me to clarify.

“Yeah, we’ve spoken a few times on the phone. About Imran and Rangana Herath.”

“Oh, okay” he replied, unconvincingly, unconvinced, whereupon I launched myself into a nervous, slightly fabricated tale of how Imran was doing after the World Cup, all the while wondering why he had been so stand-offish given our previous conversations and email exchanges.

The answer to my miffed bewilderment arrived less than ten minutes later, when a third Simon entered the box, nestling down alongside Halfpenny. This was a Simon from the Southern Echo, one whose face actually resembled – I now recalled – the by-line photo I’d seen in 2008. The ha’penny now dropped. Muppet! This was my old acquaintance, my mucker; I soon discovered that the other Simon was Simon Vincent, Hampshire’s Press and Media Officer – perhaps expert in the new media, judging from his tweets, but fairly inexpert in the old medium of conversation. Why not simply say: “Sorry, but I’ve never spoken to anyone called Scott about Imran Tahir”? Then again, I guess I could have asked him whether he was Simon Walter… 

Anyway, in my eagerness to discover how things worked in this alien environment – the etiquette, the pecking order, the jargon – I felt as must an anthropologist upon arriving in, say, deepest Gabon to study the kinship system of some ancient tribe or other; only, these tip-tapping typists were neither spearing animal bones through their scrotum, nor ingesting wildly psychotropic plants for the sake of sacred communion with the forest spirits. At least, I didn’t think they were… Indeed, as play unfolded and these grizzled reporters of the county circuit reacquainted themselves with one another after their off-seasons, a few snippets of gossip emerged. Other chitchat revolved around tweets from Michael Vaughan about Kevin Pietersen’s appetite to play for England, Twitter simultaneously providing good copy and the basis of scurrilous tittle-tattle. 

As the morning session ambled to its final half-hour, Hampshire still without loss on a bowler’s morning and very much in the ascendency, the press box became noticeably busier. Chris Botherway arrived, as did Chief Executive Derek Brewer, both here for lunch. In, too, came four or five of the snappers, busy uploading their shots and zapping them off to various press agencies and newsdesks. The experienced old hands among the scribes were already wiping errant gravy from their chins before the players had finished their session of cricket, a smart move, I discovered, when queuing up in the canteen across the carpeted concourse behind the box with the massed ranks of Members. Still, it wasn’t too long a wait and I did manage a brief chinwag with David Fulton, the former Kent opening batsman, now Sky Sports’ very own Roving Reporter, the Tim Abrahams of the ‘Champo’, looking sharp in his electric blue suit.

Dr Dre 

Fulton was eulogising over Andre Adams, leading wicket-taker in the County Championship (Div 1) last year, who had picked up where he left off in Manchester last September, nipping out two good wickets prior to lunch as each of the session’s last three deliveries produced wickets. “He’s just a yard quicker than he looks and doesn’t allow the batters to get any rhythm,” he synopsized in his syrupy TV voice. “He nips it both ways, moves around the crease and is always causing the batter problems.” I nodded in agreement, suppressing the massive temptation to tell him that I – the rotund, bald, bespectacled limper beside him – had scored a measured 41 from 71 balls against the same bowler only last June, clipping him for a boundary through square leg and getting away a back-foot punch through backward-point for four, too (I was eventually dismissed run out, duped into taking a third run by a crafty fielder, exiting ignominiously, covered in dust and with broken spectacles, damage that doubtless contributed to my earlier trip into Bridgford).

****************

Sitting down for the afternoon session after what David Hopps had described on the Guardian blog as the “Samit Patel Chicken and Mushroom Pie”, I was delighted, overjoyed even, to have a hot dessert brought over to me from the canteen, as requested, just as I settled in to do some actual work (well, of sorts…). Glancing through Notts’ official magazines – a glossy A4 quarterly entitled Covered (£2.50), and a smaller companion, Extra Cover; no extra cover price but free to the gentlemen of the Fourth Estate – I started to compile a list of questions in preparation for my interview with Mick Newell, Notts’ Director of Cricket, for Nottingham’s premier cultural organ, Leftlion, the reason I was here lest I get carried away with my warm jam sponge and custard and other luxuries.

While putting together this list of questions, a first trick of the journalist’s trade became clear to me, one that I thought I might as well utilise. I had noted that some of the paragraphs from Extra Cover and Covered were appearing, practically verbatim, in the blogs and round-ups of my new ‘colleagues’. For instance, readers of all four national broadsheets would be learning by the following morning that Andre Adams had actually retired from the game in 2008 and was halfway up a mountain, on a skiing trip, when former teammate Lou Vincent called him to say that someone was interested in signing him; due to the poor mobile reception, ‘Dre’s reply of “not interested” was misheard and the next day he received a follow-up call from an agent bearing a concrete offer from Nottinghamshire, a county in which he had previously played club cricket for Kimberley Institute CC. This soon to be dog-eared tale was the not-short cover feature of Covered, being covered (or plagiarised, as it is more commonly known in academic circles) by my co-press-boxers. So this is how news is passed up the food-chain, from the county’s two-man PR and media apparatus to the national hacks and out into the world.

With fellow Stokie (fellow veteran) Dominic Cork managing – like, say, Dengue fever, or some other subcutaneous parasitic protozoan – to get himself under the not particularly thick skin of Notts’ seamer Luke Fletcher within minutes of arriving at the crease, and now, adrenalized, leading something of a fightback, I popped over to the Boot’s Ground at Lady Bay to catch up with a couple of former Moddershall and Wollaton teammates of mine – academy prospect Sam Kelsall and newly-contracted Scott Elstone, respectively – who were playing for Notts 2nd XI in a friendly against Cambridge University, before returning to the press box and reacquainting myself with the story of the game via Hopps’ County blog (and Hopps himself).

Hants had been skittled for 218, and the Notts’ openers – Franks and Wagh – negotiated a pair of overs before the afternoon gloom took the players from the field. Up in the press box, we twiddled our thumbs, me especially nervously as I awaited my maiden interview (giving, that is), still not 100% sure that I even knew how to operate the mp3 dictaphone that I’d purchased only the previous day (with money earned skivvying for Wollaton’s own high-profile Director of Cricket, Ed Savill). As it turned out, such know-how was redundant; for I didn’t actually get the interview (which I was under the impression would be arranged by the Press Officer). Evidently, I ought to have taken my cue from the other quote-seeking local reporters and made a bee-line for the pavilion at close of play, specifically requesting an audience with the usually accommodating Mr Newell. “Never mind,” I told Botherway, “I can come back tomorrow. Would you leave me a pass at the ticket office?” I asked, already slavering at the thought of tomorrow’s lunch.

As the press box emptied out, I button-holed David Hopps and asked if, tomorrow, he’d mind if I picked his brains about cricket writing and journalism in general. I emailed him a short piece I had written in hope of publication in The Wisden Cricketer (well, I actually pitched a full-length interview with Snape, but that was rejected on the basis that he’d written for them a fair bit in the past; so, desperate that the deputy editor didn’t hang up without me having etched myself on his consciousness, I pitched the piece about choking: ‘The C-word’) and he said he’d have a chat the following day.

So, having reached the end of what might be loosely described as “my working day”, I wandered up one flight of stairs in the vast Radcliffe Road Stand and got stuck in to an indoor net practice session in the Sobers Hall with the good folk of Wollaton CC, that night including the soon-to-be-retired veteran spinner and beguiling raconteur (perhaps beguiling spinner and veteran racaonteur), Gerry McMahon – father of an off-spinner who, in a parallel universe, might well have been out in the middle doing a job for Notts today (probably carrying drinks, mind, given the conditions and the coach’s fondness for a seamer).

Repairing to the Larwood and Voce for a post-net libation, Gerry mentioned a half-page photo that I had spotted, almost accidentally, in the April edition of The Wisden Cricketer. Much as I had been when first joining Wollaton in 2006, I had been struck initially by the quaintness of the pavilion in the shot, but had not yet realized where it was, nor who it featured. On closer inspection, the caption – “blue fingers: The Parks on the first day of the season, 2003” – revealed the location; closer inspection still revealed that there was an off-spinner bowling (judging by both the field and the delivery stride) for Oxford University, and I reckoned there was a good chance it was Paul.

So, I emailed him at work, seeking confirmation of this: “It’s 73 for 1, coming up to ten minutes to one, and there’s an off-spinner bowling toward the pavilion end. Looks like the delivery is going to rag. Is that you?” Consummate Badger himself, Paul remarked that it was “probably” him, upgraded to “definitely” when a scan was sent over and, presumably, the position of the right hip could be verified. Gerry was very keen to acquire a copy of the photo and asked me how he might go about it. I suggested writing to the magazine’s editor for the source of the image would be a good idea. “It’s probably Getty or Associated Press,” I proffered, affecting knowledgeability of ‘my’ new world...

Part 2 can be read here.

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