Food And Drink For Thought

The unfairly uncapped....

Photo by Brady Bellini on Unsplash

In Round The Wicket this week we have Michael’s memories of Old Trafford and reflections on players who should have won England recognition but never did. Do add your own favourite uncapped player. We have some thoughts on the World Test Championship and a list of the best-ever Australia versus India Test matches.

Then, after all that serious stuff, don’t miss the main course. We have selected a Food and Drink XI from cricketers with appropriate names. Please send us any food-related cricketers that we might have missed. Then we end with some curiosities and a playlist from the original Disco King.

Harry Pilling, The Disco King and the Uncapped

“They do things differently there” Harry Pilling

Dip a madeleine into a cup of tea, as they used to do in all the best Lancashire homes, and you never know where memory will lead you. Or, failing that, pour some salt on your tripe and wash it down with Dandelion and Burdock. Now, where were we?

At Old Trafford, on July 20 1967. A grim morning in a summer of love that reached Manchester only by rumour. The Beatles had just barged their way to No 1 with All You Need is Love, and the latest Bond film, You Only Live Twice, was cleaning up at cinemas all over the world. If only Lancashire could bat twice. Their Gillette Cup semi-final against Somerset, washed into a second day, brought defeat by 100 runs.

For one eight-year-old, though, it was Fairyland. Sitting in the old Wilson’s Stand, opposite the Victorian pavilion, he watched Terry Barwell push the ball towards the midwicket boundary and turn for a comfortable second run. But Harry Pilling, retrieving the ball inside the rope, whizzed in a throw, flat and straight, which broke the stumps. Barwell carried on running, back to that pavilion.

Samuel Beckett thought Proust had a poor memory because the person who forgets nothing remembers nothing. For Proust, memory was an instrument of discovery, not reference. So it is with cricket romantics, and anybody who truly loves the summer game must be a romantic. We embroider the past as we recall it, and the further we go back the more vivid those early memories become, modified year by year.

That summer the eight-year-old was coming to terms with a game which had hitherto been a mystery. Clive Radley’s forward defensive stroke was the principal memory of a championship match against Middlesex. The other championship match, against Derbyshire, brought a lighter touch when Peter Eyre’s ‘syrup’ fell off as he ran in to bowl.  But it was Pilling’s throw which fired the imagination. Did fielders run out batsmen with direct hits every time they released the ball?

It was a poor Lancashire side in 1967. Handy players had left the club in the early Sixties, and their successors were not always good enough. Jack Bond’s appointment as captain in 1968 coincided with the arrival of Farokh Engineer, the dashing Indian wicketkeeper, and the improvement was immediate. When Clive Lloyd, a bespectacled Guyanese, pitched up in 1969 the red rose flowered once more. Lancashire won the initial John Player League 40-over competition, and retained it in 1970, when they added the Gillette Cup, that wonderful 60-over knock-out trophy those of a certain age will recall fondly. When Bond retired in 1972 Lancashire had won it three years in a row. Glory days alright.

Lloyd was the star, though the feline Engineer was the young boy’s hero. Those excellent club men brought out the best in others so that, between 1970 and 1974, there were England calls for Peter Lever, Ken Shuttleworth, Barry Wood, David Lloyd and Frank Hayes. Each summer, it seemed, Old Trafford was the centre of the cricketing world, and one man represented Lancashire in flesh and blood: the man the commentators never failed to call ‘little Harry Pilling’.

He was a proper titch, standing at three inches over five feet. When he batted with Clive Lloyd, which he often did, to repair the Lancashire innings, their mid-wicket conferences between overs brought many a chuckle. But whereas ‘Clive’ became the star everybody knew he would be, little Harry fell a cubit short of Test cricket. Instead, he became the essence of the old county pro, for whom real life, away from the professional game, could be difficult. There was little money in the summer game, and winters searching for regular employment were long and lonely. No wonder so many, like Pilling, took to strong drink.

‘Hector Emanuel Filth’, David Green called him. Green, an Oxford graduate, was one of the fine players obliged to leave Lancashire in those dark years, but not before he had made his mark as an aggressive opening batsman and a noted wit. Shuttleworth and his wife were ‘Lord and Lady Dull’. Geoff ‘Noddy’ Pullar (he kept dropping off) was ‘Sir Nodris’. Pilling, who once described his occasional offspin as ‘height, flight and shite’, became either Henry Dirt or HE Filth.

One summer, heartened by the good scores he was making, Pilling decided to wear the same jockstrap as a lucky charm. Come September and Brian Statham, the great fast bowler, arranged a ceremonial burning. Pilling got his own back, dubbing those team-mates who formed a glee club of imaginary musicians ‘the shithouse serenaders’. As Hartley wrote of the past in that famous opening sentence of The Go Between, they do things differently there.

By the end of his career Pilling captained the second XI, batting down the order, and keeping an eye on the younger men. They were fallow years for the county, but he had his memories, and the admiration of his peers. A career average of 32 didn’t tell the whole story. Batting at first wicket down for a decade, on uncovered pitches, against some outstanding fast bowlers from overseas, he earned his place in Lancashire folklore, a kind of pivot between Eddie Paynter and Neil Fairbrother. There were finer batsmen who wore the red rose. None represented Lancashire cricket quite like Harry.

Somerset were back at Old Trafford this week, so it wasn’t difficult to look back on those days of long-ago. How different the ground looks. The hotel which sprang up next to the pavilion now has a mate to keep it company, and workmen are hoping to complete its construction before the Test against Australia which begins on July 19. Old Trafford in 2023 is a conference centre, where businessmen may rest their heads at night, with pop concerts thrown in to amuse teenagers of all ages.

How innocent are those early memories, of wolfing down appalling cheeseburgers by the tunnel that led to the ladies’ stand, and buying scorecards embossed with adverts for Truman’s Steel. They have turned the pitch round, so it faces north-south rather than east-west, and the pavilion which used to look so mighty has been reduced to a glass-encased shell. Trapped between The Point and the first of those two hotels, it looks diminished. A symbol of days that will never come again.

They weren’t always great days, no matter what memory suggests, but that old contest, the one division county championship, made romantics of us. And every county XI had a man like little Harry. The names roll out like maiden overs: David Turner at Hampshire, Mike Smith at Middlesex, Robin Jackman at Surrey, Mervyn Kitchen at Somerset, Alan Jones at Glamorgan, Don Wilson at Yorkshire. Some played Test cricket, occasionally. Most played for the love of a game that did not always love them back.

The nearest current player Lancashire have to Pilling is Steven Croft of Blackpool, the only remaining member of the team that won the championship in 2011. Regular member, that is. James Anderson is still around but he is Anderson of England and Lancashire, in that order, as modern Test players are. That is not to doubt his commitment to the club, merely to acknowledge that two decades of central contracts have changed the landscape of the domestic game.

Batting at three for Lancashire is Josh Bohannon, ‘the disco king’, and very promising he is. (Anyone who doesn’t know the disco king, see below.) At 26, with five years banked, he boasts a first-class average of 45, though only a bold judge would declare he is 13 runs better than Pilling. He’s a more attractive batsman; of that we may be sure. But ‘better’? Different players, different times.

Will Bohannon of Bolton achieve a Test career denied to Pilling of Ashton-under-Lyne? Possibly, though he may turn out to be another thwarted Lancastrian. Harry Brook has declared his talent resoundingly, and neither Joe Root nor Ollie Pope are going anywhere soon. A punishing cover drive is delightful to behold but, as James Vince can confirm, it will never confirm the striker to be a Test batsman of unchallengeable virtue. Bohannon needs to swap those disco shoes for skates.

‘What’s that flower on your blazer?’ curious drinkers would ask Pilling in the snug bar of an evening, when he and John Sullivan, a fellow Ashtonian, looked through a glass darkly.

‘That’s the red rose of Lancashire’, he would reply. ‘And you’ll never wear it’.

Few wore it more nobly than little Harry, one of the great Lancastrians. Half a century later a man in the autumn of his years can still see that day in 1967, and those shattered stumps.

Michael Henderson

Can The World Test Championship Matter?

At The Oval between 7 and 11 June, Australia and India will contest the final of the World Test Championship (WTC). Every Test match matters but does anyone actually care about the Championship itself? The International Cricket Council (ICC) want all three formats of the game to have their culmination in a World Cup final. The one-day World Cup is now a fixture and the T20 World Cup has almost followed but the Test game certainly hasn’t. Not yet. The question is whether it ever can.

It doesn’t help that the tournament is so complex. I would defy even people keen enough to subscribe to a cricket newsletter to relate the rules. The cycle of games that will end at The Oval began in August 2021 when England played a Test series against India. There have been 69 matches between 9 nations over 27 Test series. Each team played six series and all teams played between 12 and 22 matches. It doesn’t help either that there isn’t really time to play home and away and two of the best sides – India and Pakistan – don’t play one another.

The points system is byzantine, too. A win was worth 12 points, a tie scored 6 and each team took 4 points for a draw. A point was deducted for every over that a team fell behind with their over rate and then a percentage score was calculated by working out what proportion of their available points a team had in fact won. Are you still with me?

The WTC was a long time in gestation. It was first mooted, with Martin Crowe in the ascendancy, in 2009 but didn’t actually get going until 2019 and even when it did, ran straight into a global pandemic. New Zealand – a nice testament to the late Mr Crowe - beat India in the first final in June 2021. The original idea was that the WTC would replace the ICC Champions Trophy and you can see the point.  With attendances at Test matches declining and the T20 form gradually eclipsing the others – measured by revenue, at least – a competition in which all Test playing nations participate might generate more interest.  

We should stick with it, for that reason and perhaps there are a few reforms that could make it a more viable competition. It would help if the ICC would subsidise the prices a little. The Oval is charging £160 a head for the Australia versus India game and that is pretty steep outside the overlap between people who are deeply committed and have plenty of money to spare. Surely it would help to build the credibility of the tournament if the ground were full, even if half the attendees were local children let in for next to nothing? Sponsors could be prevailed upon to buy a block of a thousand tickets each which would then be distributed among the schools of south London.

But the Championship itself needs some work, before it even arrives at the final. Games need to be weighted, so that we get closer to a proper league, in which everyone plays everyone else. Clearly, this is only possible with the consent of national schedulers in the cricket authorities. The WTC is, in this sense, a victim of the absurdities of the cricket calendar. Whatever pressure the ICC can bring to bear here would be salutary because it is making a mockery of their own tournament.

Then, rather like the European Champions League in football, the tournament could be split into two phases, a league phase and a knockout. At the moment Afghanistan, Ireland and Zimbabwe are full members of the ICC but not participants in the WTC. They should be. So, in fact, should some of the associate nations in a qualifying tournament rather like the qualifying preliminaries before the World Snooker Championship. The games do not need to be granted Test status but one team could emerge as the qualifier, to take the official league up to a round ten.

Then, there needs to be more jeopardy to increase the interest. Almost nobody knows the tournament is happening until the final. A World Cup in any sport needs to be a festival, for which everything else stops. This is harder in a game that last five days than it is in a game that lasts ninety minutes and a break at half time. But it has to be possible, as indeed the arrangements for Covid games showed, to carve out time. There should be a WTC festival in which the top four qualifying teams contest two semi-finals and then a final. They can be back-to-back Tests, to minimise the disruption, though every game should be played, timelessly, to a conclusion. These days, though, it is hard to imagine a game going beyond four days let alone five.

Whether this would be enough to turn the WTC into a genuine World Cup is unlikely. But, slowly, it might establish itself as part of the rhythm of a cricketing year. It might become a tournament that the players want to win and thereby help to retain the allure of Test cricket. It is worth a try. And if you think you will ignore the WTC, think again. Whether you know it or not, the 2023-2025 cycle begins with the first Ashes Test.

Philip Collins

Photo by Ajay Parthasarathy on Unsplash

Border-Gavaskar Skirmish

The World Test Championship final will be a great game if it lives up to the standard set by India and Australia in the past. Here is a good guide to some of the great Test matches the two teams have played:

Australia v India - The 10 greatest matches | Cricbuzz.com

The best of all, surely, was Kolkata in March 2001. Australia had forced India to follow on but VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid put on 376 runs and Harbhajan Singh took six wickets (13 in the match) and India won the game.

Australia vs India Scorecard 2000/01 | Cricket Scorecard (espncricinfo.com)

One more of recent vintage can be added. Going into the 4 h Test, in Brisbane in January 2021, India and Australia had won one Test each. Virat Kohli had gone home and injuries meant India were fielding a third-string bowling attack. But Siraj, Thakur and Natarajan bowled them to the brink of victory and Gill and Pant took India to the target of 329 and a series victory.

Australia vs India Scorecard 2020/21 | Cricket Scorecard (espncricinfo.com)

Food And Drink XI

This is the first in a series of teams selected according to a random criterion. In this first instance it is food and drink. Can a team be selected comprised entirely of players with a foodstuff or a common drink in their name?  We are delighted to announce that it can.

We need some ground rules. Is the principal criterion cricket or comedy? Are we selecting the best available side or the funniest? If comedy were our guide, then Wasim Jaffer would undoubtedly open the batting with Russell Cake. It would also feature Rakheem Cornwall and Russell Cobb as Corn and the Cobb. We could have opened the batting with Salt and Pepper. But we won’t do that. We’ll pick the best team available. Sadly, that means we can’t have Rice and Dal opening the bowling either. That’s Clive of Nottinghamshire and Anuj of Derbyshire.

How strict do we want to be about food? There are 65 Cooks who have played international cricket, including Ryan Cook who played for France, but we thought that too many Cooks would spoil the game, so we have excluded them all.

The same is true of CB Fry who is a method of preparation but not a foodstuff and of Reginald Spooner who is an implement. If the criterion were laying the table for dinner, he would be picking up his bat.

There was a related problem of strictness about the names. It is tempting to follow Allan Lamb with Alec Stewart to make Lamb Stew in the middle-order, but Alec was known universally as Stewie and nobody eats a Lamb Stewie. He doesn’t make it. Neither does Beefy. Nicknames don’t count. So here is the team:

1.     Phil Salt: a dash of seasoning at the top of the order. 

2.     Robin Utappa: a savoury pancake in Tamil cuisine. Soak rice and lentils for several hours, grind to a thick batter and ferment until light and airy. You didn’t know you’d get recipes as well as cricket teams, did you?

3.     Hashim Amla: an Indian gooseberry which makes a fine juice said to enhance the health of the liver and kidney and to stave off baldness. Not for Hashim, it didn’t.

4.     Clive Rice: the staple of the team, the substance that makes the other players better.

5.     Allan Lamb: you need a meaty middle-order batsman. None meatier.

6.     Basil D’Oliveira: one of cricket’s great stories, the most unremarked aspect of which is that he makes the Food and Drink XI twice over. Once as a spice and once as a vegetable. That’s what all-rounders give you. A legend of the game and a legend of this game.

7.     Phil Mustard: The perfect English condiment stroke wicketkeeper.

8.     Bob Appleyard: Recovered from childhood TB to be a great fruit-related seamer.

9.     Graham Onions: Henderson says that when Onions opened the bowling with the erratic Steve Harmison, they were known in the press box as Tripe and Onions.

10.  Bob Crisp: Opening both the bowling and the evening’s eating, a seamer who later became a journalist.

11.  Michael Beer: a team needs refreshment and short of cheating (I Tea Botham) there are not many cricketing drinks. Plenty of drunks but fewer drinks.

Should any of the team eat or drink too much, then carrying the amla juice will be Finley Bean.

A team, like a meal, is a blend of its parts. We have here a full meal. Crisps and olives on the table as we enjoy a beer or a refreshing amla juice. An utappa for starters, a main dish of lamb, onions and rice seasoned with plenty of basil and salt and a touch of mustard. Apple crumble for afters.

As the coach of the team, we want someone whose family heritage is bringing foodstuffs together and creating something greater from them. A team, like a meal, is a blend and so that’s why we need Geoff Miller. We thought Mark Butcher might set the wrong tone.

Philip and Mani Collins

Out In The Middle

For anyone confused by Henderson’s reference above to “The Disco King”, we should explain that Hamish Bohannon was the drummer in Stevie Wonder’s band who went on to become a big figure in the 1970s disco scene. The authorities at Old Trafford really ought to play Let’s Start The Dance every time their own Disco King comes out to bat.

Hamilton Bohannon - Let's Start The Dance (Original 12 Inch V) - YouTube

The Best of Hamilton Bohannon - playlist by Trevor Claude Thomas | Spotify

A lovely account, by Paul Edwards, of a titanic battle between Ollie Robinson (14 wickets in the match) and Azhar Ali, whose century saved the game for Worcestershire:

Recent Match Report - WORCS vs Sussex 2023 | ESPNcricinfo.com

Simon Wilde has written a history of England’s overseas tours. A review to come but if you want to get there before we do:

The Tour | Book by Simon Wilde | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster UK (simonandschuster.co.uk)

A profile of Virat Kohli from July 2019 before he stood down as captain:

How Virat Kohli became one of the most powerful men in India (prospectmagazine.co.uk)

A case, and a good one, by Yas Rana, for Ben Stokes to follow the example of Brendon McCullum and promote himself to open the batting.

Ben Stokes Opening In The Ashes Is A Plan Just Crazy Enough To Work (wisden.com)