Some cricket grounds have more of an aura about them than others, and when a friend phoned the other day to announce that he’d just attended a Lord’s Test match for the 50th consecutive summer, there was a degree of pride in his voice which might have been harder to detect had he phoned up to tell me that he’d just clocked up a similar half century at the County Ground, Derby.
Was it, for example, the prospect of making his first Test century which accounted for Alex Hales’ dismissal in the nervy 90s, the extra kudos of having his name etched onto Lord’s honours board? No-one qualifies for a permanent memento at Derby for making a hundred against, say, Northants, although I do recall shelves full of records – visible through a window behind the old Press box – in a tatty old building belonging to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.
Every ground has its own individual character, and the pity of it is that these days there are far fewer of them hosting county cricket matches than there used to be. Hinckley, Folkestone, Yeovil, Hastings, Dover, Buxton, Stroud, Blackpool, and countless other former ‘out grounds’, have all been airbrushed from the calendar to leave only memories. Or in one or two cases, supermarkets.
Yeovil retains a unique place in my own affections, not least for an abiding memory of the late Brian Close. It was a Sunday League game in the Seventies, with Leicestershire’s No.9 Norman McVicker facing Somerset’s Allan Arthur Jones, and the visitors requiring ten runs off the final two balls to win.
Close gave Jones an animated lecture before the penultimate ball, and, when it disappeared for six, an even sterner one before the final delivery. This one also went for six, and what followed was a bit like one of those closing sketches in the Benny Hill Show.
McVicker hurtled towards the pavilion in triumph, about a yard ahead of Jones, who was hurtling towards the pavilion in terror. And a yard behind him – and gaining – was the Somerset captain, with congratulation in mind for McVicker, and strangulation in mind for Jones.
The old wooden pavilion at Yeovil had thin walls, and the inhabitants of the Leicestershire dressing room couldn’t help being entertained by the lively conversation taking place next door, in which the four words heard most often were: “complete”, “you”, “Jones” and “tosser”. A period of relative silence followed, broken by a blood curdling scream which prompted McVicker to gasp: “Good God, he’s murdered him!”
However, the scream had come from Close, who, emerging naked from the shower, was in the process of making a beeline towards Jones for the purpose of adding to his earlier observations when the most delicate part of his anatomy collided with the hot stove employed to boil the dressing room kettle.
It couldn’t have happened at Lord’s, where you might collide with a pink gin, or someone in a straw boater reading about the relief of Mafeking, and far from running about the place naked, gentlemen are required, when inside the pavilion, to wear “ties and tailored coats, and acceptable trousers with appropriate shoes”. At Derby, by contrast, the strict pavilion rule is, or would be if they had one: “Gentlemen are required to wear cloth caps, braces, and appropriate pit boots, and keep the whippet on a lead, or at least a piece of string, at all times.”
I have watched Yorkshire play, down the years, at Headingley, Bradford, Middlesbrough, Hull, Sheffield, Harrogate and Scarborough. Yorkshire being several different counties rolled into one (Barnsley folk think there’s nowt queerer than Huddersfield folk, and vice-versa) the one thing every ground had in common is that no-one who’d paid their membership, or admission money, would ever miss a ball. Ergo, if you went to lunch at 12.59pm, you’d be first in the queue, but if you went at 1.01 pm, it would be half an hour until you got your hands on a meat pie.
They don’t take kindly to anything stopping play in Yorkshire, even if it’s affecting their own team. I remember one match at Bradford, when Yorkshire were losing wickets in gloomy conditions, and from somewhere in the crowd someone kept shouting: “Appeal against t’light, Yorkshire! Appeal against t’light!” This went on for about a quarter of a hour, whereupon another voice from a different part of the ground boomed out: “Oi! Go ’ome if tha’ can’t see!”
Voices in the crowd have always been woven into cricket’s historical fabric, and it’s hard not to believe that Eddie Hemmings’ decision to leave Warwickshire for Nottinghamshire in 1979 was not un-connected to a serial tormentor who appeared to be a permanent fixture in the old Rae Bank Stand.
Eddie would come on to bowl, send down three or four respectable overs, and then slip in a tasty half-tracker which the batsman would despatch for four. And it was a toss-up which would come first. The ball hitting the boundary rope, or a piercing cry of: “Roobeesh ’Emmeengs!” With the added echo effect you always get from an almost empty Test match ground.
The occasional variation, perhaps with a touch of humour, wouldn’t have gone amiss, but if this heckler ever had anything in his head other than the conviction that ’Emmings was roobeesh, he never shared it with the other half dozen spectators dotted around Edgbaston. I often wondered what he did when the cricket wasn’t on, and concluded that he almost certainly wandered around the Bull Ring with a placard warning shoppers that the end of the world was nigh.
Spectator contributions are always better when they’ve got a bit of humour about them, and one of the better examples came at Old Trafford many years ago during an especially stodgy innings from Harry Pilling. A bored silence prevailed until round about teatime, when a weary voice shouted out: “Get on with it Pilling! You’re still 8 not out in the Manchester Evening News!”
The old County Ground in Southampton used to have its fair share of crowd wags, but it’s now part of a housing estate, complete with signs reading, with a cruel irony: “No Ball Games.”
You’d assume Lord’s will be safe from the developers’ bulldozers, but just in case, in 100 years’ time, it’s been turned into the St John’s Wood branch of Tesco, they can at least remind the shoppers of what the old place used to be by hanging a sign over the Fruit & Vegetable aisle instructing gentlemen that access to the Cox’s orange pippins is strictly forbidden to anyone not wearing a jacket and tie.
This piece originally featured in The Cricket Paper, Friday June 17 2016
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