The championship-winning
season of 2008 was, as you might expect, an exhilarating ride. At least, it ended
up that way. Moddershall had finished the previous two seasons grateful to have
survived a relegation struggle and the prospects for the following summer were
not helped by the loss of the team’s best two cricketers, Iain Carr and Richard
Holloway, as well as very capable all-rounders in Darren Carr and Joe Woodward.
I had stepped
into the captaincy from the outside, after a two-year stint in Nottinghamshire,
so, initially, was unaffected by the pessimism about the place. Even so, I wasn’t
convinced we had the ammunition even to stay up, let alone do what we did. But
I wasn’t yet wholly gloomy about things. However, the irate reaction of Andy Hawkins
after the Chris Lewis game – the season opener against Porthill Park when, in Baltic
winds, we were denied a certain win by (the umpires’ interpretation of) the
light – brought home both the severity of the task (why get so het up about a
few points unless every one was seen as gold dust?) and the mood in the camp.
Our
problems, it seemed to me, could be boiled down to two: batting and bowling.
The batting was either inexperienced or, well, a bit too old. Bowling-wise, we
had lost 73.16
% of the previous season’s first team’s overs, which would rise to 79.08%
with the departure of Martin Weston one game into the second half of the
season, and to 96.47% (NINETY-SIX POINT FOUR SEVEN) two weeks after that, when
Moose had a one-tonne electronic control panel fall on him, shattering his
femur. Ouch! But the cupboard was fairly bare to begin with. Indeed, after our second
league game – a draw away
to Longton (more of which in a moment) – I asked Dave Edwards and ‘Taffy’
Kenvyn, old sparring partners (not literally, because I’m not mental) not known for their charity,
whether they thought we had enough to stay up. They may or may not have
chuckled in response – the memory fails – but I do recall them saying: “No
chance. Immy will definitely win you a couple of games”. Which was kind of them.
It was true:
we had Immy – Immy! – also returning to Modd after a two-year hiatus. And as
the ancient Greeks used to say: “Where there’s international class leg-spin,
there’s hope” (although, having said that, going into the fifth game he had 4
for 236 at an average of 59…).
However, an almost equally important job was
done that year by a couple of other twirlers (if that’s not too extravagant a word
for them): SLA Matt Stupples, who subsequently left for what he thought would be
the green pastures – well, the dustbowl-a-rama – of Stone and now languishes up
at Swynnerton; and Cheadle refugee Roger Shaw, who went into the season fresh as
a daisy after his hip op (coincidentally, his favourite genre of music), a
procedure that definitively put paid to him taking up the wicket-keeping gloves
again. No, after a twenty-odd-year first team career with the mitts on – lazy
feet, great hands – he’d now be grazing. And tweaking (more of which in a moment).
If Imran Tahir would
be the obvious and clear favourite for our season’s Best Actor Oscar – speak to any of Leek’s paid
amateurs that year and they’ll suggest that, like Eddie Murphy in Nutty Professor, he pretty much did
everything – then Stupples and Shaw were pleasantly surprising nominees for the
Best Supporting Actor gong. In fact, it’s almost no exaggeration to say that
Rog’s bowling success that year – its origins a winter-net hunch born
of desperation – gave me more pleasure than anything else all summer. Almost. I’m pretty
sure he was in the top ten of the Premier League averages until the latter
stages, before you needed 20 wickets. It certainly provided a kind of gleeful,
slightly delirious pleasure for our team, seeing this keeper-for-life tie up or
dismiss several decent players (his 14 burgled scalps included Staffordshire players Rob King, Paul
Goodwin, Darren Long, Ross Salmon, Dave Fairbanks and John Hancock). And a team
that laughs on the field is a healthy one.
Anyway, the
toss at Longton was the first time I’d come face to face with Nathan Astle – “probably the biggest name the league’s seen since Mushtaq Ahmed”, parped Nigel
Davies the previous year (before being ousted by him as skipper – that’s
gratitude! – and heading for Nantwich. Again). The pitch was as green as spinach
and we lacked the tools to exploit such conditions. So, not particularly
logically, I shoved them in.
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| a bowling day at Longton |
Moose – who
(possibly only accidentally) had beamed
Astle the previous year, a delivery which I’m led to believe hadn’t been that well
received (or played) – is generally an overhead conditions man, and both he and Baggers
went for over 5 runs per over on a wicket they should have enjoyed. Immy,
meanwhile, was neutralised and toiled away for figures of 27-6-89-1. So, with
40-odd overs gone and Longton already close to what I felt was par, I brought
on Rog the Dodge for a first ever bowl in the top flight (which, coincidentally…).
It wasn’t a complete surprise to him. I’d already primed him at winter nets. He
laughed at the time (“dunner be bozzuk”), but wasn’t really the nervous type, so, come the Big Day – he hadn’t been required first game out – the gamble didn’t seem that great. Sure enough, out rolled his offies, slow
and accurate, just gripping a touch on the tacky surface, and he returned a
cheeky little 4-0-14-2 (the victims: Edwards and Kenvyn, neither of whom, bizarrely, mentioned him as a potential factor
in our likely survival). Still,
Longton scored 238-8, declaring after 56 of the game’s 110 overs.
Now, bearing
in mind (a) Moddershall’s struggles the previous two seasons, (b) the opposition’s
reasonably strong seam attack (Edwards, Kenvyn, Astle, Tom Oakes, Dan Cumming,
Grant Thistle) and (c) the lush, green pitch, I felt the target was beyond us, so instructed
the batters to aim for 175 and full batting bonus points, reckoning that
banking some confidence would be useful down the track. This approach seemed
vindicated when, after the very first
scoring shot of our innings, a block through extra cover for two, Astle
removed his second slip in order to plug that hole.
Unsurprisingly,
the game petered out to a draw. Amer Siddique – whose self-confidence is best summed
up by the fact that, the very day he met me, he described himself as “the
best-looking Asian in Britain”
– grafted hard for 60-odd. After the match, the captains met to discuss the
game and mark the umpires, who, oddly, were sat there with us as we
deliberated, a new gimmick that year that was presumably designed to promote more harmony (in the
end, however, this ‘transparency’ simply meant captains went through the motions
with their marking, keeping the officials onside lest their judgement be clouded by personal matters...).
Astle, kindly, told
me that he was “surprised we didn’t take the chase on” (kind to take the time, not the way he said it). I told him that I was
surprised he didn’t declare earlier, that he batted on at least three overs too
long, perhaps because he didn’t really know the strength of our team or state
of our confidence – our narrative arc. He then told me he thought we were “a bit negative”
and that we should have “gone hard up front, maybe for a couple of wickets,
then re-assessed”. I told him he might have kept a few more catchers in – you
know, beyond the second over… In truth, the pow-wow wasn’t excessively hostile,
although, with me focussing less on his stature as a player and more, y’know, on the soundness of
his argument, neither was it particularly amiable. We signed the forms, shook
hands, and went our separate ways – us to the title, them to a slightly
flattering third-placed finish.
Over the
following weeks, Longton’s celebrated skipper appeared frequently in the local
rag, The Sentinel, invariably
bemoaning the “negative cricket” being played. Said paper seemed quick – positively buckling at the knees – to
trumpet the notion that the champions of 2003, ’04 and ’05 were playing “a
positive brand of cricket” despite little evidence to support it. By the time we
played them again, we were on a streak of 131 points out of a possible 147
(given the decision at the toss, whether 20 or 25 points were on, plus an abandonment for rain that yielded a fixed two points). The only game in
which we hadn’t taken the maximum available haul was against
Audley, which finished with them hanging on, nine down.
This time round,
then, we were a different animal – confident in both our ability and our gameplan.
Also, I was reasonably sure the pitch
wouldn’t be quite so green as the one
at Trentham Road
had been. This deck might well have started out that way – y’know, four or five
weeks earlier, before the first game on it – but now, perhaps some eight or
nine games into its remarkably long and incident-packed life (and it still had
a couple more to go!), it had a slightly beige, sandy hue, like the outmoded suit
of a clutch of wrongly-convicted 1970s terrorists waving outside the High Court some time in the early 1990s, post-appeal. Oh, and
before we’re accused of trying to gain an unfair advantage, you have to bear in
mind that, two
weeks after this game, the 5’ 3” batsman Sam Kelsall would be our second seamer...
The game. Well, we had been
batting first, almost exclusively, and when the coin again fell in my favour I had no hesitation in doing the same (after I’d wiped the dust from it, of course). I
cannot say Mr Astle was particularly frosty at the toss, but the only thing
that was cordial thereafter was ferried out in two big jugs. First, Dave
Edwards complained about the footholes and was ‘forced’ to go around the wicket
very early on (I have to admit that I sympathised with him here; it wasn’t
ideal and I wasn’t aware they were quite so bad…). The guy with 75 Test caps
for New Zealand
didn’t appear all that chuffed, either.
We chiselled out 184 all out, which they’d have
51 overs to chase down. It was turning. Oh, it was turning (they had no spinner!). And big. But – and I think this is very
important to stress here – six years
earlier Astle had blasted the fastest double-hundred
in the history of Test cricket and so constituted a considerable
x-factor in my declaration calculations (rendered obsolete by a fine spell of
round-the-wicket yorkers from Eddie, ironically enough) and subsequent tactics.
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| Astle fends off Shaun Brian's beamer |
An
over before the aforementioned cordial was shipped on, twenty-five overs into
their reply, Longton had made just 46 for 2. Nathan “I think you should have
gone hard up front” Astle was fighting hard as the ball spat viciously from a
surface that was more Mumbai than Moddershall. Mike Longmore was showing
considerable skill but struggling to score, despite at times having four close
catchers plus ‘keeper for company. But with them requiring another 139 from 26
overs, 13 of which would be bowled by Immy, I thought I’d try and entice a few
shots: two skilful, well-set batsmen munching the next eight to ten overs would
probably kill the game, so I asked Roger Shaw to have the last over before
drinks. The former wicket-keeper, Roger Shaw.
Astle was
on strike and, to my amazement, played out a maiden, showing all the sprightly intent
of a student stoner deep into the second week of the World Snooker
Championships. As ever (well, not quite ever), Dodge shuffled in to the wicket as though in carpet slippers and,
predictably enough, dropped it on the spot. But he was hardly putting monster
revs on it. There was no frrrrr of vibrating air. Still, The Man With The Fastest Double-Hundred in Test History
(TMWTFDHITH) – a man who, as I may have mentioned, had advocated us “going hard up
front” in conditions tailor-made for his attack – declined to do anything rash before
the refreshments. Not against a man who, ten weeks earlier, had never bowled a single over in first XI
league cricket. Oh no.
True, Rog had racked up some thirty-nine first-team
overs by this stage of his career (averaging a Muralitharanian 9.76). And they
do say a spinner reaches their peak in their 40s. But still, it was all quite
baffling. Even more so when you consider that the only man fully back on the
boundary for TMWTFDHITH was on the sweep, while both mid on and deep mid-wicket
were ten yards off the edge – something of a concession on a club-sized ground
for a man who smote eleven huge sixes
that day in Christchurch. Off Flintoff and Caddick. (Just to give you the full
picture of the potential runs available for the hypothetical Adventurous Batsman, the other
fielders were the 45 man, square leg, straight mid-wicket, slip, point, and mid
off.)
Now, I have
to confess that, during the drinks break, I was starting to bristle at it all –
partly because I wanted Astle gone, but mainly because I felt he was being a
hypocrite, not practising what he preached. It certainly appeared he’d had
something of a u-turn on his “go hard up front” ethos. So, upon resumption, I
kept Rog on, only I now slid square leg into short leg – short leg! – with the express
instructions to start sledging Mr Astle. I had the perfect candidate for Radio Chirp,
too: thick-skinned Lancastrian Mick ‘Rick’ Astley, in for his first game that
year. He’d earlier grafted out a not-pretty but pretty useful 27 at the top of
the order and in 2004 had received – and withstood – some fearful sledging from
the Longton hyenas as his unbeaten 46 got us over the line in a low-scoring
game.
Rog – who,
I think I’m right in saying, still hadn’t
developed a doosra by this stage – floated
out his next over, short leg now in place, yet still TMWTFDHITH played him from the crease, patting
back a second maiden (or perhaps getting off strike with a leg-bye toward the end). It was all becoming more and more surreal (at one stage I’m sure I started to
hallucinate Rog bowling in massive wicket-keeping gloves, trying to impart spin
on the ball yet failing due to giant sausage fingers). Meanwhile, Astley
chirped Astle and I briefly and sheepishly (for me) started to slow handclap,
saying (stealing a sarcastic line I’d been on the receiving end of a few years
earlier): “Really bringing the crowds back, this is…” He glared at me.
Anyway, as victory
drifted away from us, TMWTFDHITH at least went up a couple of gears, smearing a
straight six off Immy before falling for 43 a little later while attempting the same shot, skying to mid-off with the score on 117 and just over eight overs left, game safe. Longmore
fell in the same over, but a few late blows took them to 158-6, only 27 short (that’s 85.87% of the required runs, compared to our somewhat pathetic 81.93% at
Longton). I walked off in the direction of Astle, standing at the head of a line of players,
for the customary hand-shake, and – momentarily distracted by how incredibly
crooked one of his fingers was – heard him say: “don’t ever f**king bag me out
on the field again, mate”. Oh, right.
I sat in
the dressing room a while, briefly de-briefed the team, then went for a beer
and to fill out the various forms. I was told by the umpire – the then League
Chairman, who presumably had a part in the new lets-all-sit-down-together-and-hug-it-out marking procedure – that Nathan had already filled out his bit. Oh, right.
TMWTFDHITH’s
great friend, Chris Cairns, had a motto in cricket: Go hard or go home. Naturally, therefore, I assumed Astle had done an Elvis and left the building. He hadn’t.
So, having taken care of the necessaries, I went over to where he was holding court (with
a team that, I later discovered, had only good words to say about him), tapped him on the
shoulder – “this aggression will not stand, man” – and asked: “Nathan? Excuse me,
Nathan? ...Nathan? Nathan?I’m not being funny but what, exactly, was the difference between what
we did at your place and what you did today?”
He told me, curtly, that we had a
world-class spinner playing – I assumed he wasn’t referring to Rog, who finished
with an average of 13.86
that season, at a superior strike rate to
Immy – and refused to discuss it any more.
Oh, right.
Previous columns for Moddershall CC's newsletter, 'Barnfields Buzz':
BB02: The King and I | Early forays in the press box and meeting IVA Richards
