Cricket: Villagers who will try anything to Lord it

Cricket Diary

MUCH of today's cricket will be hugely entertaining, excruciatingly tense and hungrily contested. Forget day four of the First Test at Edgbaston, this is round four of the National Village Cricket Championship. It is extremely serious potatoes.

The competition is down to its last 128 teams (the big cloud over many was lifted when Caldy, winners for the past two years, were knocked out by Port Sunlight) and a place in one of the 32 group finals is now at stake for the combatants. Four more matches after this and Lord's itself will beckon. A place in the final at headquarters, the chance to tread the most treasured greensward on the planet after walking through the Grace Gates, has always been the prize craved by the village players.

To achieve it they have sometimes got up to tricks which would have made the good doctor, himself not averse to a spot of gamesmanship, seem like a model of propriety. "They all sneak on each other," said Ben Brocklehurst, the man who founded the competition 26 years ago and who still organises it through his magazine, the Cricketer. "We don't and can't act unless we have a complaint in writing from one of the clubs affected."

There have been many attempts to conceal transgressions. One village whose population exceeded the limit said they had once met the requirement but several women had given birth. It was suggested that their best bet was recourse not to the competition organisers but to a family planning clinic. Then there was the Kent club where there were objections to the credentials of a particular player. Not only, it was said in his defence, had he started at the club and represented them admirably for many years before moving on but he had been conceived on the premises.

Brocklehurst is dedicated to the original concept of the tournament: the chance for the game's least accomplished but perhaps keenest performers to play at its traditional headquarters. The standard is high (Adrian Aymes, the Hampshire wicketkeeper, scored 56 as a 20-year-old opening the batting for Hursley Park in the 1984 final) but it is not intended that it should aspire to Test class.

The sort of team which Brocklehurst adores would not be dissimilar to the one from Oxfordshire whose boundary-side oak tree served as pavilion, changing room and toilet. Or teams like Fletching in West Sussex who play today with their usual line-up of five Horscroft brothers, one of whom, Michael, made the tournament's top score of 167no last year.

The Village, as it is known among players, needs a new sponsor. Its present backers are pulling out. "We would continue to support it out of our own pockets," said Brocklehurst, "but we're hoping a new company will come along. Cricket is part of the traditional rural landscape and now so is the competition." The appeals today will be heard the length and breadth of England.

TALKING of cricket's essential link with England's chances in the football World Cup, as this space was last week, connections with football may be equally crucial to England's potential for advancement in the cricket World Cup next year.

England have reached the final three times. Twice, Ian Botham (11 appearances in Scunthorpe's defence) was in the team and on the other occasion Mike Gatting (brother of Steve, who played 50 games for Arsenal and more than 300 for Brighton) was captain.

Never mind bits-and-pieces all-rounders, they need a football association, so to speak, quickly. Phil Neville, once of various Lancashire age-group cricket sides and surplus to requirements in France 98, may fancy a change of career.

AT six minutes past two on Thursday the great commentator Richie Benaud unfurled one of his favoured expressions for the first time this summer. "Good cricket all round," he said as a good ball was met by a firm shot, which in its turn was stopped by a solid piece of fielding.

On Friday, as Nasser Hussain was out lbw, victim of a ball from Paul Adams which was something approaching subterranean in nature, Benaud called it "a mulligrubber". This seemed an obscure Australian term but the Oxford English Dictionary defines mulligrubs as a state of depression of spirits, which doubtless summed up perfectly Hussain's feelings on receipt of the delivery.

BookMark

"By the end of the summer I was desperately worried that another county would have noted his exploits and made an approach to him. Some of our cricket committee were not wholly convinced... and I had to convince them he was the genuine article."

So wrote Basil D'Oliveira in the foreword to the autobiography, Graeme Hick: My Early Life, in which it is also revealed that the subject, who has now completed 101 first-class centuries, including the most recent four in successive innings, was taken on by the county on the strength of his off-spin bowling.

Silly Point

IT is precisely 60 years on Thursday since history was made at Trent Bridge. The record still stands as a monument both to the legendary player who created it and to England's refusal to find 'em young. On 11 June, 1938 Denis Compton (right) played in his first Test match against Australia and batting at No 6 made 102. He was 20 years and 19 days old. Nobody younger has made a century for England since, partly because hardly anybody younger has been selected. Ben Hollioake briefly had an opportunity when he was picked last summer but he passed the landmark late last November. Nobody else is imminently in sight, which is actually a backward point.