It's Raining Bats and Pads , livre ebook

Pitch Publishing Ltd - Jamie Magill

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164 pages

English

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It's Raining Bats and Pads: The Story of Lancashire County Cricket Club 1988-1996 vividly captures the sporting and cultural landscape of the late 1980s to mid-90s, and shows the sea change between then and now. It's a romantic jaunt through the halcyon days of Mike Atherton, Neil Fairbrother and Wasim Akram as seen through the eyes of the author, who as a child and young adult lived through that era. It harks back to the glory days of lazy linseed summers when life was much simpler, time was not strictly of the essence and kids had to entertain themselves. Although primarily a tale of Lancashire's success on the field - punctuated by some lively spectator incidents at the grounds - the book also explores broader societal questions. Is the game in a better place now? Has the standard of cricket improved? Has freedom of choice caused the game's popularity to fall among the young? And is the Hundred an allegory for a society that simply can't wait for better?

Sujets

Críquet

Lancashire

Lancastre

Cricket

Informations

Publié par	Pitch Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	14 mars 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781801502337
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2022
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Jamie Magill, 2022
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright.
Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781801500678
eBook ISBN 9781801502337
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Contents
1. G. Fowler
2. G.D. Mendis
3. M.A. Atherton
4. N.H. Fairbrother
5. D.P. Hughes*
6. J.P. Crawley
7. M. Watkinson
8. W.K. Hegg+
9. Wasim Akram
10. I.D. Austin
11. G. Chapple
12. P.J. Martin
13. P.A.J. DeFreitas
14. P.J.W. Allott
15a. N.J. Speak G.D. Lloyd
15b. J. Simmons G. Yates
15c. I Folley and Pete Marron
Photos
I dedicate this book to the memory of Ian Folley (9 January 1963-30 August 1993) a fine Lancashire slow-left arm spinner taken far too soon.
1
G. Fowler
OH FOR the halcyon summer days of Athers, Foxy, Harv, Was, Daffy, Winker, Bully, Digger, Chappie, Simmo, Yosser and Chuckie! Played beneath perpetually leaden Mancunian skies. Stressed-out umpires fiddling around with light meters which looked like superannuated Geiger counters from World War II: Dickie Bird would turn to David Shepherd and swear on his Yorkshire cap that the apocalypse was nigh from behind the bowler s arm at the Stretford End sometime just before his meat pie lunch. Sure, it looked Stygian and chaotic, but it betrayed a secret code to Betty in the pavilion, Get the bloody tea urn on love. If you were really lucky it might be a BBC televised game in the Benson Hedges Cup or NatWest Trophy: Tony Lewis moving Hamlet s heaven and earth to keep his syrup on during the rain sweep and Richie Benaud - looking super dapper in his cream jacket and grey slip-ons - opining that the inclement weather may make it slightly more tricky for the finger spinners to grip the ball. You just wished it would rain forever in the coziest living room in the world, until Geoff Boycott turned up in his sky-blue jacket - grinning (PS - if you have never heard of Dickie Bird or David Shepherd, and his nervous jig on a live Nelson, then this might not be the book for you: try something cooler like Raskolnikov or Capote).
But we need to get there first, don t we? You can t have the implacable drizzle (which we all secretly love to bits) without the sun-dappled light which strains our eyes just after tea and sends us to the hand-pulled safety of the Bass Bitter bar staffed by good old Nigel. Ah, Nigel - part of the fabric of the club: an avuncular retired detective from Greater Manchester CID with bullshit stories and whisky nose to match. He would always be there with hearty applause when the hard-earned county caps were handed out in front of the pavilion by Cyril Washbrook or Cedric Rhodes or some other such Lancashire grandee, in the days when players passionately cared about county caps and would wear them with fierce red rose pride - even the international lot. Nig would have a mate (probably an ex-bobby on a final salary pension wedge) who would maintain the strict dressing room hierarchy with an iron rod and spare truncheon from his battles with the Mau Mau; he would segregate the capped players from the uncapped and the colts from the seasoned pros (who would change in separate rooms on different levels of the old pavilion) and maintain the gravitas of the captain s private chamber: even knights of the realm and individual members of the Beatles had to knock on the first-team door before entering.
Bring back the Village Green Preservation Society and the county capping ceremonies; bring back the bucket rattling-benefit games for the veterans and custodians of the club you had never heard of; bring back the spirit of Jack Bond and Jack Simmons and dressing room attendants called Spriggo with their pots of lukewarm tea for the captain - it might make us all feel a bit less lost and lonely. A decent pint of hand-pulled Bass wouldn t go amiss either. Don t tell the second XI a brew or an ale is on the cards though. They don t call themselves The Mushrooms for no reason - they like to be kept in the dark. There was fun to be had at Old Trafford before Freddie and Jimmy you know!
Weren t A-Levels bloody hard in the 1990s? I can remember now the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach before my French oral exam, trying to memorise my responses to likely questions about Le Silence de la mer. Almost 30 years later I can recall verbatim a missive the examiner would receive whether he liked it or not - I had broken blood learning it for two years so it was the least he could do to oblige. I would feel better until I got home and realised his question was actually about the weather or the price of fromage in Le Portel or Michel Platini or Philippe P tain and my life was actually over. Or so they told me; they said the same rot to the builders and craftsmen who were millionaires by 27.
Pour von Ebennac une union culturelle entre Les Francais et Les Allemands est devenue une obsession a telle point qu il ne pouvait pas s en passer.
And? So there was this German geezer in Le Silence de la mer who was forced on a French family during the occupation; he was blind to the true purpose of the Third Reich and actually thought all the toy soldiers in the Ardennes was a bit of foreplay which would inevitably lead to a deep cultural union between France and Germany. This marriage of art and science and literature and enlightenment obsessed him to such a point that he could not live without it.
You see this quote never actually applied to cricket when I was a kid of about ten. Football, definitely, but not cricket. It was not an obsession and I could - and did - happily live without it. It was, well, a bit too P.J.W. Allott? As in slightly impenetrable? You never said Ian James Rush did you? That would be plain daft. Or Gary Winston Lineker? Besides, most footballers of this era were too poor to have one middle name, let alone two. That would guarantee you a kicking. So why exactly then do I need to know Paul Allott s middle names? It seemed a tactical device to keep the great unwashed away from the pavilion gates but you just feel things at ten and I just felt it was complete bollocks: as relevant as yesterday and Spearman s Rank Correlation Co-efficient. The announcer at Old Trafford was a fan of this G.D. Lloyd bullshit too but by this (later) stage I was deeply in love with the game and I didn t mind it one bit - it became part of its appeal.
And I thought everything about cricket was much the same: complete bollocks. Why did I have to wait around in the field for 100 years before I got a bat and then be adjudged lbw by Jason Braithwaite who had been out at least a dozen times during his patiently made 37 not out? Or listen to that divvy Andrew Blanchard sing Strawberry Fields Forever in the outfield for seven hours straight until I got near a glove or pad? Deferred gratification is for the bookworms who don t care and entrepreneurs who know deep down they are going nowhere save insolvency. I was normal (at that point anyway) and was not prepared to wait. Why the hell should I? I could wheelie off on my BMX Super Burner and smash some penalties in the five-a-side nets instead: those nice orange nets too - like Dundee United s. It would rain soon anyway and I could bathe in the flotsam and jetsam of World Cup success as the ball hit the rain-soaked onion bag. Or I could sack it all off and go to the leisure centre - mess around in the deep end for a bit with the inflatable octopus or deflate the bouncy castle to see the kids cry or stand in the overhead gallery and tell the fat prawn cocktail sweaties playing squash below to fuck off before disappearing out of sight to snaffle unclaimed change from the drinks machine for highland toffee and iced gems. Pretty easy choice, right? What would you do? Yes, you.
And the brutal totalitarianism of the primary school regime offered very little cricket solace either. Mr Brown, the headmaster, was a cricket fan; ergo we were not. He once slippered a lad (those Dunlop Green Flash really did hurt) for not knowing who had scored a century for Lancashire in the Roses match the previous weekend. I just looked it up before you do, and it was Neil Fairbrother (or should I say N.H. Fairbrother), who notched 128 against the Yorkies at Old Trafford in the damp May of 1985. When we did have a cricket knock-about then Brown - Broomfields Junior s very own Iago - would join in, unannounced and (of course) unwanted. Any lads who tried to sneak away to the safety of the hop-scotch court would be rounded up and ritualistically shot by the pig bins before woodwork.
There was no cut strip and only around ten yards between the makeshift stumps at either end. This would not deter Harold Larwood, who would produce a rock hard cricket ball from goodness knows where (we were only allowed to play with a Slazenger tennis ball, apparently from Wimbledon) and then steam in off a long run: rolled up sleeves flapping away like deep crimson flags of war. There were no pads or gloves; he was determined to incarnadine the strip with the blood and bone of as many ten-year-olds as possible in 35 minutes. He would then ask for his bowling figures - all smiles and handshakes - and congra