The Voice's Golden Moments 2007 no's 15-11...

Number 15 – ‘Jack vs Rob’

Date: Saturday July 14th
Opposition: Stanford Le Hope

Starring: Jack Sexton and Robert Catchpole

As the first team tried to save the game against strugglers Stanford, the Sexton family entered the park from the tree end gate and wandered down toward the pavilion. The first team players sitting in a line watching the play, all greeted them in a style befitting the family of their leader. However Robert Catchpole had other ideas, in the lead up to what appeared to be a second line gag he leaned forward from the line and asked Jack – “Is that Jack Sexton?”, Jack (possibly sensing a trap) replied “Is that Laura Catchpole?” cue a stunned silence from Rob and uncontrollable laughter from the rest of the first team, who all high fived Jack as he sauntered round into the club.


Number 14 – ‘The disappearing player trick’

Date: Friday July 28th and Saturday August 25th
Opposition: Chinghoppers and Hutton

Starring: Dave Clarke and Simon (f*cking) Wallace

Laying down the gauntlet first in the ‘who can be off the field for the longest competition’ was the ‘sledghammer’ Dave Clarke who by going off for a loo break midway through the fielding innings against Chinghoppers took so long about it that captain Selfington firstly asked someone to locate the first teamer and then left the field himself to find his charge. Dave was discovered seated at the bar, enjoying a cooling pint whilst his team mates exerted themselves. After about 7 overs he returned to the fray looking chilled and well rested.

Seeing that the title was his for the taking Simon (f*cking) Wallace, left the field against Hutton with a minor contact lens problem that he turned into a full scale disaster. After leaving the field Simon dropped the aforementioned lens, and then began the search for a replacement. This took what seemed like days, as he trooped in and out of the away dressing room 3 times then needed to borrow keys to Selfington’s car to use a pair of his lenses. After strolling the long way round the pavilion into the car park the sound of Selfington’s car alarm was heard for several minutes as Simon seemingly attempted to gain forced entry into a car he already had the key to. After removing a lens from the vehicle he strolled back round into the changing rooms, later emerging with eye wear back in place a full 10 overs after he had left the field.

Gold medal for fielding avoiding goes to Simon (f*cking) Wallace


Number 13 – ‘Just like shelling pea’s’

Date: Saturday June 16th
Opposition: Buckhurst Hill

Starring: Steve Brown

As dark rain clouds gathered over the picturesque Buckhurst Hill, Leigh took to the field amidst the fairly chaotic organisation of the Buckhurst side, umpires coming out with no bails or stumps, players turning up five minutes after the start etc etc. David Catchpole began his second over bowling to the taller opening batsman, a legside delivery was flicked out into the on side, straight (and I mean straight) to Steve standing at square leg. Brown proceeded to spill the easy chance much to the horror of Catchpole and his team. Catchpole’s fury was heightened as the rest of his over finished up going into the bushes on the cover boundary ‘at speed’. A few overs later, still hanging his head, wondering how that chance had escaped his grasp, Brown was moved to point by his trusting captain. The very next ball from Brian Pettitt to the tall opener was chipped out to point at waist height, travelling about as quickly as a teddy bear that has been thrown out of its pushchair by a small child. Brown steadied himself and with eyes firmly on the ball, dropped it again. Cue a primal scream from Brian and much head shaking from the slip cordon. One over later and the heavens opened and the game was abandoned. Have one man ever lost so much respect in so short a space of time?



Number 12 – ‘Fore!’

Date: Saturday May 19th
Opposition: Benfleet

Starring: Brian Pettitt

Leigh batted all day for 160 and as a mind numbingly dull afternoon watching Benfleet block dragged out before the second team, one moment livened proceedings for all involved. Someone noticed a golf ball lying on the outfield and then another one flew onto the field in the same vicinity. All eyes turned to where the balls were coming from….and suspicion fell (not unjustly) on a long haired gentleman and his son standing near the playground both holding golf clubs, admiring the quality of their iron play. Big Brian Pettitt decided to instruct the budding John Daly that he should ‘push off’, the golfer (who looked like a cross between a character from Shameless and Meatloaf) was not too pleased with this and in a loud voice instructed Brian that he come closer and say that, and then a loud conversation between the two began consisting of the golfer screaming ‘COME ON THEN!!!’ brandishing his 8 iron. Deciding that taking on a crazed lunatic with a golf club was not his particular brand of vodka, Brian turned his back on the fellow and after a while the man dragged his son and his 8 iron back into the trees whence they had come.



Number 11 – ‘There’s two there’

Date: Sunday August 5th
Opposition: Bardoli

Starring: Dean Waller

After dropping 16 catches in the field Bardoli set about chasing down Leigh’s very competitive total. Early batsman showed that it was well past the tee off time and that swinging the bat and swinging the bat hard was par for the course. The main Bardoli batter, resplendent in sun hat was casually blasting everyone around the ground, even going so far as to dispatch Matthew Wallace into the lower field, smashing into a parked gypsy caravan on the full, much to the chagrin of its Romany inhabitant. Fielders were dispatched far and wide to stem the flow. In the next Wallace over the batter slapped a drive just to the left of Dean Waller on the boundary at mid off. Deano moved towards the ball and picked it up just as the dangerman was calling for the seemingly easy second. Waller and his left arm had other ideas and he fired the ball in toward the stumps furthest away from him. The ball then decided to do its best superman impression, accelerating through the air, before clenching its fists out in front of itself as it roared over the batsman’s head scampering the second, the ball then closed its eyes and dived head first into the leg stump, running the batsman out by a full 5 yards. Hit the showers!

Another cricketing week....

Sunday – By this time in the season getting out of bed has become something akin to a military operation, involving bugles, winches, cranes and, if you have got really drunk the night before, a dozen or so soldiers. This is due to Saturday evenings at the cricket club being a challenge either to get drunk enough, (quickly enough) that the barbed comments about your 3 runs that day don’t hurt anymore. Or else to get in and out before anyone you don’t want to talk to realises you’re there and comes over to rub in how many more runs than you they scored this week. They have probably done this for the last 3 or 4 weeks and greatly enjoy telling you and allowing you to share their joy.

Your injuries have got to the stage where you feel niggles every time you run after the ball on a Saturday but they don’t really hurt until every Sunday, which you spend moving around like someone that has spent a summer walking around in the middle of Baghdad wearing an ‘I love New York’ t-shirt.

Normally this is the day you would spend with your girlfriend, however after countless warnings about your ‘filthy’ cricket playing habits she has ditched you with the parting shot that “you didn’t want to spend time with me, and it was like you would rather spend it with your mates in ‘that club’” which unfortunately for the relationship was completely true. Now that you don’t have any justifiable reason to not play on Sunday, you sign up to play both days every week in the hope that your woes from Saturday can be blown away by a gritty 70 or a flashing 40, neither of these occur and you trudge back for 3 yet for the second day running (on the way back you see the person you tried to avoid Saturday night just coming out of the pavilion to clap you in)


Monday – After operation ‘get your unfit ass up’ has been completed, you somehow get into work and spend the day thinking about where the season went wrong and making excuses for your miserable performances. You didn’t really get to pre-season nets, you missed two of the first three games due to your (now ex) girlfriend and therefore you didn’t get the chances to ‘get your eye in’ early, the captain of the team didn’t give you enough chances (not quite as convincing if you are the captain and have been forced to drop down the order due to sheer lack of runs or stopped trusting yourself with the ball because of you averaging over 100 runs per wicket), you had 4 unplayable deliveries that even Viv Richards couldn’t keep out, the best batsmen and worst umpires seem to arrive when you get the ball, all the uneven bounce seems to be at the end you spend most of your innings batting, plus the fact that you have not scored above 9 all season and have bowled like a 4 foot arthritic gimp.

Tuesday – You begin to email your cricket friends and complain about your horrific bad luck and ask them if they have noticed anything in your game that is holding you back. Due to watching sky sports coverage of Test Match’s you know all about trigger movements, head positioning and various other minute aspects of the game that are important in the top echelons of cricket, you ignore the fact that you are just missing the ball, or hitting it in the air straight to fielders. You resolve to work on your ‘forward press’ next week and see if that helps.

Wednesday – You practise your forward press in your mind and start miming cover drives around the office. You discover that your stapler is a bit toe heavy but your post it notes have a nice pick up. You dream of scoring flowing 50’s and big hitting centuries whilst somewhere in the distance a phone rings and rings and rings and rings…….


Thursday - Having tried and failed to convince yourself (and anyone else) that it is not your fault you can’t score any runs or take any wickets at the moment, you have now convinced yourself that this season is a blip on your otherwise faultless career and have decided to completely write off this season and begin to look forward to the next one. Next year the sun will shine much more often, the wickets will be flatter when you are batting and instantly turn green (or dust bowl beige if you are a spinner) when it’s your turn to bowl. You will have got the full benefit of nets, you will not have the (ex) girlfriend stopping you playing whenever you wish to, your bat will have developed a salix-esque middle so anytime you manage to hit the ball it will races away taking any fielder that is stupid enough to be in the way to the boundary with it.

Friday – With your new outlook, you are re-invigorated, this season doesn’t matter anymore, you are free from the pressure to perform. Your injuries are starting to feel better and now you are genuinely looking forward to Saturday. Why not start the new season now? You could get your best score for ages with this new frame of mind….you email the captain and tell him of your new impetus toward the game. He feigns interest and pencils you in for a specialist number 8 role.

Saturday – This is the day you have been looking forward to, a fresh start, a new cricketing you. A middle order collapse gives you the chance to shine; you stride manfully to the crease, head held high, completely free from any pressure at all. You take guard with a confident voice and prepare to face your first ball with thoughts of your new forward press that you have been practising with a ruler in front of your full length mirror at home. You proceed to smash the bowling all around the ground, looking better and better as the innings goes on, until it is brought to a slightly premature end by an unplayable straight one and you trudge back having scored 3.

Bugger

For the love of the 'gag'...

This weeks special guest writer Richard Selfington (edited by 'The Voice')

As part time cricketers we all aspire to believe that we have at least 1% of that ‘X factor’ possesed by those lucky few that make a living out of throwing, hitting or catching a small red ball. This doomed aspiration is annually scuppered when we look at the averages at the end of the season and our hearts sink to see that despite thinking we had an ok season, in actual fact we averaged significantly less with the bat, and significantly more with the ball than the spotty 15 year old that had been called into the side as a ‘specialist fielder’ for 2 games (this embarrassment can be held off for several years if you happen to be the captain of your side and have gone down the road of using previously unrecorded statistics to fix the figures so that you come out on top (boundaries hit, bowling strike rate, balls faced or average price of cricketing equipment used are all useful tools to propel you to the top of this most important of tables))

The pounding that our sense of self worth takes as our stumps are re-arranged every week would no doubt floor Lennox Lewis, and although the average cricketer is famous for having more ‘comebackability’ than Jonny Wilkinson, there are surely limits to this human suffering.

Where does the need to turn up and face constant humiliation come from?

When considering this, it is necessary to understand the motivation of those who participate.
Firstly and foremostly, there is the die hard cricket fan that plays purely because they love the game and would gladly spend every waking minute involved in it in some way if they could. This type of individual moves seamlessly from junior player, (who brings full whites to watch every game he sees (including Test matches) just in case the captain is looking for a small fairly talentless child to fill in for someone)) through being a die hard play anygame, anytime, anywhere, for anyteam senior member, to being not quite mobile enough to be considered a player but will be glad to stand out there and umpire, and then when their bones cant quite cope with the walk to square leg they volunteer to sit in the scorebox (pending stairlift installation). These players are like gold dust in club cricket and should be encouraged to continue their obsession at all costs, (it may be wise to consider giving them a position of power within the club or offer to finance their (now weekly) visits to a psychiatrist). They are "The Cricket Tragic".

Secondly, there is ‘The Talent'. One of those lucky, (though somewhat despised) individuals who actually has a semblance of genuine cricketing ability and goes about proving it more weeks than not against those slightly less fortunate. They have no trouble in smashing bowling all around the ground whilst their team-mate struggles to lay bat on ball at the other end; they then rip through the opposition batting with tidy swing and seam bowling. They can recall countless times when, after a particularly hard night out, they have rocked up at the game, thrown back a red bull and then gone and got a quickfire 80 and taken 6 for 32. They have a jug with their name on it because of such frequent usage. They are either the captain of their side or are receiving regular payments from the captain which they are now using to fund their growing need for illegal narcotics, which they seek in a doomed bid to get the ‘high’ cricket simply no longer provides. They will therefore burn out by the time they are 35, due to unsustainable substance abuse. No one is quite sure of ‘The Talent’s’ motivation - is it for the love of the game, or the love of being better than everyone else. For "Talent" read "Egomaniac".

Thirdly, we come to the person who simply has nothing better to do. At one time they played for a reason, they shrugged off complaints from girlfriends and friends that they had not seen them in weeks. They put off attending important family occasions so that they could turn up and score 0. Now it has been several years since the last party invite came to them and the line of girls willing to be second place to cricket has dried up like an Arabian desert, they have nothing better to do than once again don the creams and step out with whatever motley crew has been assembled to do battle with Old St. Thomasonians Sunday B XI, or whoever is playing that day. The opposition isn't important, the competition isn't important, who they're playing with isn't important...all that matters is that 8 hours of their day will have some semblance of purpose. These are the "Losers".

Lastly, we have those that play for one reason only, to harvest humour from everyone’s misfortune (even including their own). They too turn up every week, but rather than overtly worrying about whether the team have squeezed to a win or crumbled to a sickening defeat, all they worry about is who has made the biggest fool of themselves. This poor unfortunate will then be pilloried for a few weeks until he is replaced by the next one. These are the people that will travel up to play The West of West London Asian All-Star XI with a huge smile on their face, safe in the knowledge that someone’s’ bowling is going to be utterly annihilated, and that only humour can come out of such embarrassment. They will readily endure the wrath of their better halves, forget the string of failures they themselves are experiencing, and ignore the nigglely stomach injury (sustained laughing at a team-mates attempt at a high catch) that will cause them to be house bound by the time they are 40. The fear of there being a moment of sheer comic brilliance taking place and them not being there to witness it is simply too much to bear. Their sleep is interrupted by visions of being on the fringe of their friends humorous banter for weeks to come with no real understanding of what happened. The fear of missing out on Damian Liston having one of 'those' days that so dent the Australians’ pride, not witnessing a battle of wits between Simon Wallace and Clark Emmons, or not seeing Nattrass stride out against the biggest West Indian since Joel Garner to open up when he knows (or at least should do) that his game is likely to be over within tenths of a second (or however long it takes a red sphere to travel 22 yards and be halted by one of three wooden poles) is simply too great to give concern to the latest "It's me or cricket threat", or the concept that in ten years we will only be able to walk with the help of cortisone injections.

The 'gag' of it more than anything draws us all back. At heart, it really seems that when all is said and done...we’re all just a bunch of wannabe Clowns!

The thrill of 'The Chase'...

Leigh on Sea Cricket Club has lots of very well known characteristics:

• Formerly snooker baize like outfield (which all visitors that play remind us of but that is now more remiscient of the famous ‘river of tranquillity’ area on the moon)
  
• Reputation as being one of the most (if not the most) sociable club in the South Essex area.
  
• Having possibly the heaviest (and nosiest) sightscreens outside of the subcontinent (where they actually make then out of 10 inch thick lead without wheels attached and need a team of 20 men to lift)
  
• Having a pavilion that, when it has just been painted (most of the time by Ben), attracts spray paint touting 14 year old hoodlums with the same power that reflex attracts Steve Elliott after a Jaeger bomb or two.
  

One of the lesser known characteristics, which everyone in the club knows, but we keep very much to ourselves, is this…..’We….can’t…..chase’. Now I know that this could lead to many countering with various pieces of evidence to the contrary. Stuart’s side chased down 204 last week with absolutely no problem at all. Various other teams have also chased effectively every now and again. The fact remains that although every once in a while we make a chase seem easy there is 7 or 8 cases that, with the players available, and in the face of a target of 250 we melt like a poorly compacted snowball in the microwave. There are a number of factors for this; firstly I would dismiss the argument that we simply don’t have the quality anymore. True, back in times of yore, the first team could call on such Leigh legends as Powell, Holmes, Goggin and various burly West Indian overseas players, the likelihood of tracking down a total might have been slightly higher. But with the players we have now throughout the club (names like Burch, Waller, Clarke, Dyos, Hewitt (V or T), Winn, Luker, Elliott (S,S,S, J or C judging by her ton last week)) we should still not have any problems whatsoever strolling to a comfortable win 6 times out of 10 in any team in the club.

Why then is it such a struggle? There is somewhat of a pattern to most Leigh chases, they all start fairly positively, the openers getting a start to get to 30-0 or similar scores. The first wicket falls and another follows. The score drops slightly as 4 and 5 re-build, this happens fairly slowly and they are just getting going when they both are dismissed in quick succession. The lower order now need quick runs but with few wickets in hand, and are then stuck between a rather large boulder and what can only be described as the hardest of hard places. The last pair or so are then left to bat out the last 10 overs to secure a particularly shaky draw (this final pair normally consists of either John ‘Corleone’ Elliott, Ken Webb or Ben Giles, regardless of whether they were actually playing in the first place, they still always appear at the end)

I fear that most of the problem lies with the way we cope with the mental state you need to be in to chase a total. As batsmen we all enjoy watching the ball fly to the boundary, some see it more than others, whilst some of us are reduced to the excited state of a small child on Christmas morning purely because the ball has taken the edge and raced through the slips for a boundary (it was a late cut, honest). Many look to ‘Flay yourself in, then play yourself in’, the fairly obvious meaning being that by moving the field back to stop your whirling dervish like attack it becomes much easier to knock it around and harvest the singles. This strategy is slightly more high risk because you have not had time to adjust your eye to the game or the bowling. It does have the large benefit of completely wrong footing the opposition, who would naturally bring the field in for the new batsman (unless you happen to be Royston Smith, in which case the field goes back for the new batsman)

I would use the example set by possibly the best ODI player ever, ‘The Finisher’ Michael Bevan, who averaged a staggering 86 when the canary yellows won a ODI batting second. Bevan would remain shotless for the first 10 or 15 balls of his innings before attempting to whittle down the total however large bit by bit. Breaking the total down into chunks and working out how many could be scored from over to over. His best weapon was to be versatile, to be able to turn a one into a two one minute and being able to send a ball into the crowd the next. What we need to do is be able more easily is move between these two states of mind, the boundary hitter and the nurdler, the Gilchrist and the Thorpe, the Waller and the Wallace.

And remember, there is always more time than you think!

We can talk the talk.....

Ricky Ponting (2004) – “Aww look, a lot of English players have put their hands up and grown in stature in the last year.”

The sentence above, delivered by part time weasel look-alike and Australian cricket captain Ricky Ponting is a classic example of the rubbish that is talked by international cricketers these days. It is almost as though ‘management speak’ and ‘cricketing terminology have both gone out, got drunk, booked into a cheap hotel room, spent the night together and 9 months later ended up with a rather ugly looking b*stard offspring. Now this new language, normally the sole lexicon of the Test cricketer, is disseminating through lower level cricket too.

Lets look at some of these new phrases, and lets also remind ourselves of the classic ones we have all come to know and love throughout our cricketing lives. Those little bits of knowlegde and wisdom that have been drilled into us since the year dot (or earlier). Obviously they all can be applied to any team so here is what they really mean in terms of our fair club:


‘Putting your hand up’ (Normally used to suggest that someone has performed above the call of duty in some way. Alas at our level anyone that puts their hand up, puts it down again very quickly when he realises he is being lined up for a spot of cleaning the field by the days MM. However people are extraordinarily keen to put their hands up if someone has gone to the bar and asked if anyone wants a drink.)

‘Coming to the party’ ((See: Putting your hand up) In terms of Leigh, the doormen normally stop us getting to the party if by some miracle we find it in the first place, and we are normally one man short because Wills is going to ‘meet us there’)

‘Stepping up to the plate' ((See: coming to the party))

'Good areas’ (Playing at Saffron Walden, as opposed to….)

‘Bad areas’ (Playing at Benfleet)

‘A bad ball always gets a wicket’ (A very truthful phrase, 's.c.' Sibley has god knows how many wickets this year, and Dave Thompson took 5 in a game during cricket week. Villani bowled unbelievably well at Harlow got nothing, then Bass comes on, wide full toss, straight to cover, 1-0 Bassett! The prosecution rests your honour)

‘1 brings 2’ (In the second team game against Hutton this year, 1 not only brought 2, it had room for 3 and 4 in the back seats with five gagged and bound in the boot)

‘If you're going to flash, flash hard’ (Many believe (Harlow’s first team for….eleven) that this is the unofficial Leigh on Sea motto, and who can argue with them? Damian? Ha ha)

‘Run the first one hard’ (Particularly important if you are batting with Steve Elliott as he is probably turning for the second already, holding his breath…or Matt Wallace because it gives you extra time to see whether he might run you out or not)

‘Catches win matches’ (That is certainly true if you have spoken to Dave or Rob recently, and have not instantly dismissed what they have said as sheer hyperbole)

‘The umpires decision is final’ (Sometimes a difficult one to adhere to, but even if it is an absolutely unbelievable decision…..and the umpire is a total s**t…..please resist the urge to rip out a stump and chase him into the pavilion with what lawyers would call ‘intent’)

‘One for the throw’ (Very true if the fielder is either 'Antichrist' Brown, Selfington, 'The Pied Piper' Willson or Vince Major, less of a wise move if it's gypsy hating ’Dead eye’ Dean picking up the ball on the boundary)

‘You can’t score runs in the pavilion’ (Far too many people to use as evidence for this one, it's true you can’t score runs there, but, there are more packets of crisps available and the proximity to alcohol is much greater. You pay your money and takes your choice)

‘Bowl just back of a length’ (For anybody with a sprinkling of pace, doing this on the pavilion side pitches of The CPCG could lead to batsman either losing teeth or suffering from horrifically broken metatarsals in both feet)

‘Hit out or get out’ (Written on the The Liston family crest, with instructions that these words are to be shouted at any batsman who does not score from 4 successive deliveries. Damian fulfils his oaths to punish those who go against his family motto with pride)

‘Have a look’ (Can be translated as ‘I have no idea whether this guy bowls more like Warne or Stubbington, so don’t try and slap him into the road first ball and get out yeah?’ Most likely to be said just before you try to do exactly that and get out yourself)

‘Play with the spin’ (This phrase assumes a. you can work out which way its spinning and b. you can pick a shot as its coming down depending on said spin. For many of us players at Leigh this would be what Nasser Hussain would describe as ‘a big ask’. This does not apply to prolific shot makers like Villani and Deano because whatever way it spins its still going to disappear somewhere…….fast)

‘Play in the V’ (A very loose term for the ‘quality’ batsman who chooses where he considers his V to be. Clark ‘Plato’ Emmons’ ‘V’ goes from Mid on round to mid wicket, Sackovs' comes round a bit further to mid off, Antichrist Browns' ‘V’ is between wide gully and first slip)

'Wicket taking delivery’ (Anything bowled by John Elliott in a third team fixture)

‘There or thereabouts’ (Bruce Taylor’s supposed proximity to the seabed in the English Channel, 'he is possibly there or thereabouts')



There are also sayings I’m sure are used mainly by Leigh players:

‘Bowl there all day – Damian Liston’ (Needs to be said with a thick Aussie drawl for full effect. Also means the next ball will no doubt be either short or full and will be despatched to the boundary as if to demonstrate the sheer good fortune of the previous ball)

‘Good bat speed – anonymous’ (Was funny the first time we heard it, the second time slightly less so, now on the 11,045th time, shotguns are routinely carried onto the field just in case someone says it.)

‘Shot Helmet - James Braithwaite’ (Has the potential to sweep through the club, and no-one knows why, probably because we’re scared not to say it)

‘SAAAAAVE EM – Ed Freeman’ (Came back from Oz touting this as a catchphrase. These days it means ‘keep running’, the long CPCG grass will hold that certain 4 up no problem and you will look like a prat for just cantering 1 for it)

‘You and me buddy, you and me – David Catchpole’ (Keeping, bowling or fielding, Dave just wants to have fun, ohhhh Dave, just wants to have fun)

‘Snicky Snicky – Richard Bassett’ (Delivered in pure Welsh this gets right into the brain of a batsman, all it needs is a mwahahahaha on the end to round of the pure evil undertones)

'It's all good for us boys, it's all good for us - Dave Clarke' (The batsman has just been verrrry lucky to avoid being caught after that shot, and Dave Clarke wants him to know that he knows how lucky he was)

'Come on fellllllaaa's - Sean Elliott' (Before he became the crippled shell of a man he is today, Sean was a young, slippery fast bowler and captain of the Sunday 1's, this....was his rallying cry! Hardly Churchillian but hey...)

How important is 'image' in cricket?

We all know that, in the modern day social scene, looks count for a lot. There are those that contest that ‘beauty is only skin deep’, but I am sure that most of us (obviously excluding Gilo, for he is basically ‘Brad Pitt with a better face’) would take a little bit more beauty if it were offered to us. In fact there are some of us who would take a little bit more and still look like a welder’s bench and an unattractive welders bench at that. Good looking people always seem to be at the top of the tree, earning the money, getting the adulation, never see them struggling through life, when was the last time you saw a handsome homeless person?

So it is with life as a whole, but is it the same with cricket? Obviously there are similarities to be drawn in that we all want to look good when we play. Some have taken the Stubbington mantra of ‘Look good, feel good, play good’ (ignoring the grammar) to their heart completely. We all would secretly want to shell out hundreds of pounds on cricketing equipment to look like a Test player if we could. £150 bat – check, £100 helmet – check, £60 pads – check, god given talent………..can I get back to you on that one?

The exact polar opposite of ‘look good, feel good, play good’ has its own saying, which we would all recognise as ‘All the gear, but no idea’. This saying is embodied in many ways by some time Leigh bowler and full time Montgomery’s CC Chairman Mr Matt Couzens whose quest to purchase every piece of Gray Nicholls batting equipment currently on the market (he is even rumoured to have travelled to a black market stall in Portsmouth to buy some knocked off Gray Nicholls endorsed bat tape) has left local psychiatrists baffled as to what potential use he is hoping to put it all to. Many think he is hoping to earn enough G.N. reward points to get a few much needed net sessions with Andrew Strauss.

The Stubbington catchphrase also has another meaning, rather than simply being a case of breaking out the gold card and heading off to Romida for the day, it also stands for having a flash of quality about the way you (attempt to) play the game. It is something that goes through most of what we try to do every weekend i.e. look like someone that knows what they are doing. It is what we all want. We want the opposition and our team mates to look at us and think ‘hey that guy looks like a cricketer’. In some of us it takes the form of holding that forward defence just a half second longer than is absolutely necessary, or not moving a muscle when we cleanly strike the ball through the covers, or swaggering to the crease with all the confidence of Asafa Powell going down on his blocks at the Olympic 100m final and looking across to see that his only challenger is Rob Catchpole.

To build up this reputation within the cricket community it is always good to score runs against a side the first time you play them in the season. Smash one set of bowlers around and then the next time you walk out to the crease you are afforded a certain degree of respect due to your efforts in the preceding fixture. This always makes it slightly easier to settle in early because you don’t need to go through the rigmarole of proving to the fielding side that you deserve to be there. It is also a very nice ego massage to have the other team thinking you are a threat to them. As you normally have to do this through a barrage of sledges and barbed comments about either a) how slowly you are scoring, or b) how much of a cowboy you are to be scoring so quickly.

As ever with our form of cricket off the field image is also important. By having that sparkle of humour or being interesting to talk to, you will always be popular within the team. All cricket clubs benefit from having ‘individuals’ amongst their number, as laughter is the mainstay of cricket be it at someone dropping a catch or someone spilling their drink. This individualism can take on many forms, be it through political leanings (such as BNP activist Dean Waller) philosphical outlook on life (like Clarke Emmons, ‘uuurgghhh would you say Nihilistic or Existentialistic theory played a bigger part in your life?) or by simply growing your hair long and wearing bright colours…..