W.G. Grace And Me: The Last Days of The Champion

Everybody knows W.G. Grace. People with no interest in cricket know W.G. Grace. There can be no other sportsperson of any generation as instantly recognisable as the good Doctor – that giant, rotund frame and one of the greatest beards of all time in any field of achievement.

W.G. spent the last five years of his life in a quiet suburb of south-east London. In 1909, when in his early sixties, he'd moved to a large house called Fairmount which was – and is - just across the road from where I went to school. I used to walk past the austere frontage of the building on my way there and on my way home: it was an old people’s home then and twice a day I’d make a point of looking at the blue circular plaque above the porch and think about how lucky I was to pass so close to cricketing immortality.

Except W.G. wasn’t immortal. His achievements might be, his legend certainly is, but by the time he arrived in south-east London that giant frame was in a slow, terminal decline. The famous beard was grey, his features heavy. There was a sadness in his eyes; eyes that had been renowned for their twinkling mischief. In his time at the house he lost his beloved elder brother, E.M. Grace and then his close friend and fellow legendary cricketer Albert Trott to suicide. The Great War troubled him: two of his sons were in the forces and the Zeppelins heading for bombing raids at Woolwich Arsenal passed over his house, a terrifying experience for a population who’d never faced a direct threat from the air before.

With the school so close at hand and with it having a cricket field it’s no surprise that W.G. played there in his dotage. I played my first games of cricket on that same school pitch. I wasn’t very good, but in those early days of trying to keep my bat straight, tongue sticking out of the side of my mouth in concentration, freezing afternoons around the slip cradle and trying desperately to pitch it up, I developed a love for the game that has never dimmed. I made my very first runs and took my first wickets on that pitch. I suffered my first duck on that pitch. I’d bat low down the order for the school and scratch around for the odd run and streaky four off the edge.

One day stands out though; the day I was clapped off the field for the first time. It was after a match-saving sixteen not out on the very same pitch Grace had batted on more than seventy years earlier.

I was about twelve. At the time it was the best feeling of my life and I didn’t want that walk to end. I’d not made a hundred or even fifty, I’d scuffed around making sixteen, but I’d helped to save the game and it felt brilliant. I felt like a cricketer, at last.

The greatest player of all time had walked off the same pitch across the same ground in the golden twilight of the ultimate cricket story. I was far from being even the greatest cricketer on the field that day, but my feet fell in Grace’s footsteps back to the pavilion: where his cricket life had been coming to an end, mine was just beginning.

I’d never scale the same heights, nor even pull on to the approach roads to the foothills, as The Champion, but I like to think that for all his achievements over an unparalleled half century of cricket, his applause had still made him feel as good as mine did that day.

In the dark days of his final years he must have looked forward to those matches. His movements may have been slower, his reactions blunted since his heyday, the games on local fields for and against local clubs not quite as spectacular as test matches against Australia, but as soon as he stepped onto that cricket field the worries and heartbreak must have receded. He must have felt young again. He must have felt just like I did. Like a cricketer.

A little over a year after his last game on that field, his health having deteriorated after a stroke, W.G. died at Fairmount on 23 October 1915.

When I walked past his old house that evening dragging my cricket bag with me, the applause still echoing in my head, I had an extra spring in my sandalled step. I looked up at the blue plaque and nodded to it.

You know, cricketer to cricketer.

The Sad Swansong Of Harold Turner

It was the most one-sided match in cricket history and I was on the wrong side. However, I don’t remember that day because we nearly pulled off the world's most ill-deserved draw, I remember it because it was the last time I ever saw Harold Turner.

Harold was nearly seventy-five years old when we gathered that day at a gas board sports ground in the depths of Surrey in the depths of the 1980s. He’d played for Totterdown since before the Second World War and was still turning out every week, arriving on his moped wearing his open-face peaked helmet; his ancient brown leather cricket bag strapped across the back of the bike. His bat, circled with thick bands of yellowed tape to protect cracks and splits from long ago, was so old it was stamped with the endorsement signature of Patsy Hendren, a cricketer who’d retired in 1937.

Harold would park himself in the slips - where he’d take the odd catch as long as it came straight at him - and bat at number eleven, where he would block what he could with an effective defensive dab shot of his own devising that dispensed with the need for any footwork at all. He never took a run but nobody minded: Harold Turner's place in the team was there for as long as he wanted it because he was a lovely, lovely man.

On this particular day we fielded first and it was soon clear the opposition were far too good for us. Every shot seemed to find both the middle of the bat and the gaps in the field and by the time the innings closed at tea the gas board had rattled up 275 for the loss of one wicket. Even the wicket was a fluke: a fizzing, arcing, low-trajectory cover drive that was about to fly over the boundary for six when our captain Sid half-heartedly waved his hand at it only to find the ball smacking into his palm and sticking there.

After tea, I opened the batting and watched as wickets fell at the other end with crushing regularity. Just as the last twenty overs were signalled we lost our eighth.

By this time we’d scored ten. Ten. We were 10 for 8 and I was top scorer with two thanks to a streaky edge through the slips. Actually I was second top scorer - there'd been four byes.

My dad walked out to bat and we resolved to leave any ball that would miss the stumps and play only the straight ones in an effort to achieve the most unfair draw in the history of the game. Twenty overs between outright humiliation and, well, outright humiliation combined with daylight robbery.

Time passed slowly and the number of remaining overs on the scoreboard gradually, almost glacially clicked down into single figures. Dad and I shouldered arms at anything we didn’t actually have to play and blocked the rest - as an exercise in concentration and patience it would have been pretty impressive were it not at the arse end of the most humiliating performance in Totterdown’s (and possibly cricket's) history.

We added no runs to the total but runs were irrelevant: we just had to bat out those last overs.

As the setting sun turned the Surrey sky a deep orange and the trees turned into dark silhouettes there were two overs left: we just had to survive twelve balls. Dad faced the first. The bowler thundered in and sent down a delivery on a good length homing in on dad’s middle and off stumps. He didn’t get forward quite enough, the ball struck the bat higher than he’d intended and lobbed in a gentle arc back into the hands of the bowler. There were delighted yells from the gas board team: eighteen overs of stonewalled frustration and now they just needed one more wicket.

As dad headed back into the pavilion, in the fading light I saw a familiar portly figure begin making his way slowly towards the middle. Harold appeared out of the gloaming - his cricket clothes yellowed with age, that ancient bat in his hand - like a ghost from cricket's golden age. I met him at the corner of the square as the fielders resumed their places.

“We can do this, H,” I said, my mouth dry with the tension. Harold brushed back a thin strand of white hair from his forehead and looked at me through eyes that had more than half a century of experience behind them. He’d been in closer finishes than this; he’d made more runs in his lifetime than I ever would.

“I’ll try not to let you down, son,” he said.

I patted him on the back and went back to the non-striker’s end. Harold walked to the wicket, planted his feet either side of the crease and looked up as the tall gangly fast bowler pounded in, whirled his arms and arrowed a good length ball at Harold’s stumps. The old stager performed his trademark dab shot and killed the ball stone dead in front of him. It wasn’t a textbook shot but it was one that Harold had developed as the years advanced and his mobility declined. It served him well.

Just four more balls for Harold to survive and then it would be down to me to see out the last over.

The next two deliveries were wide of the off stump and Harold stood motionless as they passed. Each was greeted with a mass exhale by the fielders. The third ball was straighter and given the Harold Dab.

The bowler thundered in for the last ball of the over, whirled his arms and sent the ball pinging towards Harold’s off stump. To this day I don’t know whether it moved off the seam or a crack in the pitch or what, but instead of meeting Harold’s ancient taped willow in the middle there was an audible snick as the ball flicked its edge. The slips were already leaping into the air when the ball thwacked into the wicket-keeper’s gloves.

All out for 10, we’d lost by 265 runs. Some kind of record for Sunday afternoon cricket surely.

As the umpires removed the bails and the opposition skipped towards the pavilion in a flurry of back-slapping and the throwing of sweaters around shoulders I walked along the pitch to where Harold still stood, leaning on his bat, just staring down at the crease.

“Never mind H,” I said, resting my hand lightly on his shoulder, “that last one moved a long way. Anyone would have snicked it. It was unplayable.” He didn’t say anything, just turned and commenced the long, slow walk back to the pavilion. As septuganerians go Harold was a sprightly one, but on that walk back from the wicket he was suddenly an old man. Something in his gait had changed; something was different. I walked with him, and by the time we reached the dressing room the rest of the team were already changed, in the bar and commencing the submerging of sorrrows in golden fizzy liquid.

I showered and dressed as Harold piled his kit slowly and thoughtfully into his ancient cricket bag. I started collecting the assorted items of club equipment strewn around the room into the big canvas bag in the middle of the floor while Harold sat there looking utterly crestfallen. His eyes were red around the rims.

“I let you down today, son,” he said eventually, looking at the floor.

“Don’t be daft H,” I said, “it wasn’t down to you. They were too good for us and we were rubbish. It’s not your fault, we didn’t deserve anything.”

He said nothing; the only sound was the slow, echoing drip of the shower.

Eventually we walked out of the pavilion together and headed towards the clubhouse. Harold put his bag across the back of his scooter, lashed the bat to it and put his helmet on, looking out at the dark empty field we’d left half an hour or so earlier.

“Not coming for a drink, H?” I said.

“Not today son, no.”

“Sure?”

He paused, still looking out at the field.

“I just played my last game for Totterdown.” he said.

“Don’t be daft, H.”

He eased himself onto the scooter and started the engine.

“No, I let you down and I let everyone down. It’s time for me to call it a day.”

Before I could protest further he kicked the scooter off its stand and accelerated across the car park into the gathering darkness. I saw the indicator light winking as he turned out of the gate, illuminating that faithful old bat, and then he was gone.

None of us ever saw Harold again.

Sloggers and Bloggers

During the 1980s and early 1990s I played cricket for a wandering team from south London. We were called Totterdown CC and took our name from a road in Tooting where the club's inaugural meeting was held some time way back in the early 1920s.

We weren't very good.

I first played for Totterdown when I was thirteen: that day the oldest member of the team was 72. An age spread of nearly sixty years would correctly suggest we weren't the greatest team in the world, but still, nearly all my teenage summer Sundays were spent playing cricket around south London and Surrey thanks to a fixture list comprising insurance companies with beautifully-appointed grounds and village greens spattered with dogshit and broken glass.

Totterdown CC doesn't seem to exist any more. I'm sad about that but not really surprised. With no ground - and hence no return match to offer - filling that fixture list was hard even back then. The driving force behind the club was Len, the secretary, who would somehow persuade teams who played a good standard of cricket in their Saturday leagues to accommodate us, an itinerant bunch of chancers in a startlingly idiosyncratic array of kit, on a Sunday.

Len was pushing eighty yet still pulling off miracles every weekend in just getting a team out. The Tuesday phonecall asking, "are you available to play on Sunday, if selected?" was a summer ritual as important as the matches themselves. The "if selected" was the killer, as if we had an enormous pool of talent fighting for a place when most weeks just getting eleven players capable of standing upright and gathering in the same postcode was an achievement.

I can't remember Len ever missing a game except on one occasion - the weekend after his wife died, and even then the phone rang as usual on the Tuesday night with a familiar voice asking, "are you available to play on Sunday, if selected?"

Len had been with the club for more than half a century and as I'd see him shuffling slowly around the boundary to impart some nugget of advice to the next batsman, who'd be sitting nervously on a picnic chair in his pads and smoking furiously, I used to picture him as a young man in immaculate flannels and brylcreemed hair zipping around the same boundary to stop the extra run and keep the new batsman on strike while dark clouds gathered over Europe and war drew near.

Len was Totterdown CC, and when he died I presume the club died with him.

In The Totterdown Chronicles the old club name at least will live on in some form. The inevitably chaotic, unreliable and barely competent nature of the site will also echo the spirit of the team to which I devoted most of my formative summers; summers that could otherwise have been spent reading improving literature, doing charity work or, you know, trying to get a girlfriend or something.

With no Totterdown CC any more this is my cricketing outlet. Like my own cricket career it may score higher in enthusiasm than technique, but if it's over quickly we can always have a beer match afterwards to kill the time until they open.