A wonderful evening on Tuesday at the Northern Cricket Society's Spring Dinner. We have been blessed by a succession of excellent speakers at this function for some years now and Harry Pearson, the sage of Teesside, was no exception. I first came across Harry when he wrote his excellent book on football in the north east 'The Far Corner'. Since then he has written on endless different subjects such as the one I still have 'Racing Pigs and Giant Marrows'. In more recent years he has written two prize winning cricket books 'Slipless in Settle' on league cricket in the north of England and 'Connie' the story of Learie Constantine.
He stuck to the cricketing script on Tuesday on the theme of famous names, who followed Constantine into the northern leagues and did not bother to mention his most recent offering 'The Beast, The Emperor and the Milkman', which is sub-titled a bone shaking tour through cycling's Flemish heartland. The first surprise was to find out that he is six foot five inches tall, which I should have remembered as he mentions it in one of his earlier books.
He hardly stopped for breath in his remarkable speech, running through tales of the long list of international players who came to the north of England to ply their trade and to make more money than they could in county cricket, with the help of large crowds and consequent large collections for fifties and five wickets. There are enough stories about people like Cec Pepper, Bill Alley and Roy Gilchrist for yet another book one would think.
Another favourite cricket writer for many years, Martin Johnson, seemed to hit the nail on the head today in the new edition of the 'Cricket Paper'. With all the negative publicity regarding the future of the game, ahead of the imminent start of the new season, we need a little hilarity from time to time to keep our sanity. Mr Johnson has a timely dig at Harry Gurney, the four overs a match for loads of money merchant, who thinks that all club cricket should be in T20 mode. He describes T20's format as one which will eventually kill off all rivals, like the grey squirrel and Japanese knotweed, either taking over their natural habitat, or choking them to death.
Johnson also has a go at the IPL commentators and I like his comment that they force-feed you such a babbling stream of enforced jollity it's a bit like arriving sober at a pub and having to join in with with people that have had a ten-pint head start. His comments on the presentation ceremonies, not to mention the infamous Danny Morrison are also well on the mark.
So we are almost there, in fact Hampshire started a friendly with Middlesex yesterday apparently and next week sees games between some counties and university sides. To date the forecast doesn't seem too bad, but we will no doubt take several layers of winter clothing with us whether heading for either Derby or Chester-le-Street where action is due to start on Tuesday. Durham appear to have sprung a surprise by appointing new Australian signing Bancroft as captain, even though he has had another suspension since the ball tampering affair and will miss the first county game as he has been told he must attend a dinner in Perth. Liked the tweet yesterday which suggested he might be going to live in that well known Durham resort 'Tamper Bay'.
Be that as it may, we will probably again see more of Durham than Yorkshire in the coming season, particularly in view of the imports from far and wide who will obviously take the places of the up and coming local lads, many of whom did well on the pre-season tour of South Africa. We will continue to support the Yorkshire Academy most weekends and yet again later in the season the Yorkshire Under 17s who won the national competition last year and have many fine young players in their ranks. Just to remind you here is their title winning team photograph.
No comments:
Post a Comment