Now and Then

By Dingy Bags
December 30 2008

Dingy Bags has produced an evocative memory piece to help keep us all warm over the winter. We hope this will inspire several other people to submit memory pieces, as we know from feedback in previous years that many of our readers particularly enjoy these at this time of year. Many thanks, Dingy Bags.

What do you remember, months or even years later, from a cricket match? A great catch? Stumps flying? If you’re anything like me, one of the things that stay with you is a great shot – and preferably played by a Middlesex batsman.

I went to Ebbw Vale in 2007 and commented in the match report that a hook from Shah would tickle the memory right through winter, or something like that. I do remember that violent flat hook and the idea lodged in my mind: what shots do I recall from years back? I don’t mean shots that won a cup final or a championship, although those do stay with me. I mean shots that were remarkable in themselves, whatever the context.

So here’s three, all, perhaps significantly, from championship cricket.

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The first was a hook by Roland Butcher. I can’t tell you the opposition, the bowler or the year. But my memory of the shot is vivid. I was sitting on the middle tier of the pavilion when some bowler with more strength than sense let a short one fly. Roly, pretty much a compulsive hooker, went for it but the illusion was that he had pulled out of the stroke. Rather than the full, West Indian swing at the ball, he stopped with his bat pointing roughly at me, the way batsmen do when the ball has got too big on them and they’ve thought better of it. But a fraction of a second later and one heard the noise, not a gentle plop, more of a gunshot. Then the eye picked up the ball as it flew through the gap between the old Mound Stand and the Tavern, flew, in fact, clean out of the ground and for all I know straight into the Thames.

It was the most amazing shot I’ve seen, no question. Roly has apparently achieved this with complete economy of movement, with no visible violent effort and with total nonchalance.

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The second shot was really two shots, as I’ll explain. And I can remember much more of the context here. It was at Uxbridge against Northants. We’d bowled them out for about 170 (I’m deliberately NOT looking all these things up, since the whole point of this article is about what stays in the memory). Clive Radley was on the way to outscoring the opposition on his own (and to a double hundred, methinks). David Capel was bowling from what used to be the Ski-Slope End and I was watching from the mid-wicket boundary. He bowled a wicket-to-wicket ball that Rad jumped across his stumps to and touched – and I mean only touched – to the fine leg boundary, virtually behind the wicket-keeper.

My mate had gone to the loo and, on his return, I started trying to describe this extraordinary shot to him but Rad saved me the trouble. He did the self-same thing again, as if to show that he could. With the kind of improvisation that has come into the game with 20/20 cricket, I suppose such audacity is more commonplace now. But:

i)                    this was championship cricket

ii)                  no one else played this sort of shot, even in one-day stuff then

iii)                I don’t think I’ve seen anyone get the ball so fine, intentionally.

It occurs to me that Clive Radley would have enjoyed 20/20 cricket and that we’d have enjoyed watching him at it.

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The third one is from Mike Gatting. He has to be there, not least because, when I was playing cricket and thus not a member, he very rarely let me down on the handful of times I went to watch cricket each season through the 1980s.

As with the Radley instances, I can remember the background. At Lords, sitting in front of The Tavern against Yorkshire. It was during the period when Illingworth, aged about 50, came back to captain the side. Middlesex were a way behind the Yorkshire’s first innings and had lost three cheapish wickets. It was a darkly cloudy day and earlier, as it got even darker, there had been the amusing sight of Illingworth scuttling off up the pavilion steps with a few of his side behind him, in the mistaken belief that the umpires were suspending play for bad light. Gatt was batting with Roland Butcher; they looked at each other and gestured quite vigorously to the exiting Tykes that they might like to come back and get on with it! Of course, today the umpires would have made the decision themselves and the crowd would have been denied what followed.

Butcher played the innings of his life, run out just short of a double hundred. He kept flicking sixes over my head and the head of the Yorkshire opening batsman positioned just in front of me. I won’t tell you his name but he seemed amused by it all, judging by the crooked smile on his faced as we kept fetching the ball for him.

Gatt also scored a hundred and it was the only time I can recall when he scored a ton and was upstaged, even when he went from 100 to 140 in about twenty minutes. This is the precise context for the stroke I remember so well. In the midst of all this mayhem, Yorkshire took the new ball. Graeme Stevenson, then an England bowler, was operating from the pavilion end. He managed five dot balls in a row to Gatt, who’d swung mightily and missed a couple of times, picked out fielders another couple, etc. The sixth ball was a low full toss, or Gatt, at least, made it into one. He hit it incredibly hard – I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a ball hit harder. The only reason he didn’t hit it for six was that he hit it low: it was never more than about five feet from the ground. Nonetheless, it only bounced once before smashing into the pavilion in a way that tested Victorian building quality to the full. “Oh dear me!” exclaimed Stevenson very loudly, or words to that effect.

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I hope this article jogs others’ memories of these matches, or even the shots themselves. More likely, those who, like me, remember individual shots more clearly than totals, results or bowling performances might like to contribute memories of their own favourites.

Dingy Bags