Best of SPIN: ‘Viv Richards, Jimmy Anderson, Chris Cairns and me’
First published in the November 2006 issue of SPIN magazine.
“In cricket, it’s a short trip from the penthouse to the outhouse.”
If Chris Cairns has forgotten what he once told a Kiwi journalist about the tightrope walk that is his day-job, never has the adage seemed more apt than in a Pennine pea-souper on the first Sunday of September.
The Spinmobile draws up to Bacup cricket club a few minutes before Cairns’ rented black Astra. He’s greeted by a scene so bleak that the best New Zealand cricketer of his generation could be forgiven for thinking that he’s turning out for Ken Loach, not Lancashire League side Bacup. He splashes across the overgrown outfield and stops a foot from what he assumes to be the wicket for today’s fixture against Colne. He stands, arms folded, head shaking in disbelief. So this’ll be the outhouse.
Cairns isn’t the first big fish to get wet in cricket’s most homespun and romanticised goldfish bowl, the Lancashire League. When the 35-year-old was unveiled as Bacup’s new pro last December, most agreed that he was the League’s highest profile recruit since Alan Donald steamed in for Rishton in 1996. Eighty-seven wickets and 886 runs later, the veteran of 62 Tests and 215 one-day internationals is within three games of inspiring his team-mates to their fourth league title in seven years. This while admitting that “it’s been hard work on these wet wickets… even to stand up at times.”
If Cairns was mystified at first, then so are we now. Like most other cricket fans, we know that the Lancashire League has exerted a Packer-like pull on the sport’s top names since the end of World War I; Donald might just make it into an all-time Lancs League pace quartet, shoehorned in between Andy Roberts, Michael Holding and Dennis Lillee; Cairns, on the other hand, would be carrying the drinks as Kapil Dev performs the all-rounder’s duties. Plenty of international stars – South Africa’s Jacques Rudolph, say, who hit five straight tons for Lowerhouse in 2002 or Michael Bevan, who spent two years at Rawtenstall in the early’90s – would not even make the squad. Viv Richards might sneak in, though. So there must be something strange at work here, besides the come-hither scent of meat pie wafting out of the clubhouse at a quarter-past-eleven. There are also limits to how much cricketer money can buy. And to how much can be raised by the 14 member-run clubs which founded the League in 1892 and still compete today.
It’s in search of this mysterious allure that we’ve come to Bacup on what promises to be a crucial Sunday in the 2006 title race. By tonight, Bacup could be sitting on an unassailable lead at the top of the table.
Or they could have been overhauled by one of the four other teams still in contention – Ramsbottom, Lowerhouse, Burnley or Nelson.
With the match due to start in two hours– and the drizzle setting in – Cairns repairs to the members’ bar for a greasy spoon and romping love-rats in the tabloids. Around him, team-mates peer dolefully across the outfield or into mugs of milky brew. In the kitchen, the four tea-ladies whip up butties for the troops.
Bacup’s club captain, John Chapman tells us that they all live for Sunday. Cairns apart, the team all live within a couple miles of the ground or work in Bacup. Many have played for the club at every level – at under 11s, under 13s, under 15s and under 17s, before graduating to one of the three senior XIs. “You get to work on a Monday and you’re still on a high from Sunday, then you practice Tuesday and Thursday and, before you know it, it’s the weekend again,” Chapman, a local textile company manager, effuses. In his time at Bacup, he’s played alongside Roger Harper and ex-Aussie Test players Shaun Young and Adam Dale – not to mention against Donald, Shane Warne, Steve Waugh and Viv Richards – but claims he knew Cairns was special from the day the local press showed up for the pre-season photo op in spring.
“They wanted a photo of him at the front and all the boys at the back, and Chris said ‘It’s not one plus ten, it’s a golden opportunity to edge closer to the League title. News has reached the ground that every other fixture bar Burnley’s clash with Todmorden has been called off, so Lowerhouse, Nelson and Ramsbotton pick up just three points each. Another shower sends Bacup scampering for the covers, but stops in time for Colne’s openers to take guard a few minutes inside the cut-off point.
From where we’re standing, it’s bloody cold, bloody wet, and bloody miserable. For some strange reason, though, a drenched Colin Shaw, the Bacup club chairman, isbeaming at us. “So ’ow d’you like this for an
introduction to’t League, lads, eh?”. While Chris Cairns is bullying the Colne top-order off ten paces at Bacup, 22-year-old Trinidadian Lendl Simmons, playing for Todmorden against Burnley, is the other face of the Lancashire League overseas pro.
The cousin and doppelganger of former West Indies Test opener Phil Simmons, Lendl has been at Todmorden three weeks. He is the club’s fifth pro this year after the South Africans Morne Van Wyck and Jacques Rudolph – both called away on international duty, Rudolph after just 11 days in town – and Pakistanis Naved Ashraf and Imran Tahir, who played just one game each .
It often goes like this, says Jeff Rudderforth, Todmorden’s director of cricket. With Test and ODI fixtures mushrooming across the calendar, gone are the days when the stars of the global game would descend on the Pennines in March and stay ’til September.
We contact agent, and ex-Pakistan Test player, Nadeem Abassi to find out more about the supply line of pros to the League. He reels off a few clients: “Mohammed Ashraful, Mohammed Asif, Yasir Arafat, Mohammed Sami… they big enough for ya?” He explains how, when one league season ends, he sends the CVs of players willing to play the next summer around the League clubs. “The clubs don’t need to see videos or DVDs – they can see all the career stats on the internet,” he notes.
Usually the clubs offer air fare, car, salary, lodgings – plus an escape from the 40° temperatures of the subcontinent. When Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer deemed Taufeeq Umar and his fellow opener Salman Butt surplus to the touring team’s requirements after the third Test this summer, “there was some interest in Taufeeq from league clubs, but he wasn’t originally that keen,” says Abassi. “But, just after I dropped them off at the airport for their flight back to Pakistan, I got a call from Monton in the Central Lancashire League offering Tufeeq good money. I called him
and told him to get out of the airport right now. He’d checked in but, unlike Salman, hadn’t gone through immigration. I’d got him just in time. Taufeeq went up to Monton… and Salman’s probably still looking for him.”
Colin Shaw admits that, similarly, it was more by luck than judgement that Bacup secured Cairns for an entire season. When an agent called hawking several of the New Zealand Test team last autumn, Shaw pointed out that the Kiwis would be touring for much of the ’06 summer, but enquired about Cairns. He knew the big all-rounder had bowed out of Test match cricket in 2004 and that he still had close ties in England from his time with Notts. It was good news:
Cairns was planning to spend the summer in England looking after business interests, but might fancy turning his arm over. Shaw made Cairns an offer, they tweaked some things, and pretty soon they had a deal.
While Cairns is thought to be pocketing around £20,000 for his five-and-a-half months in Lancashire, it’s fair to say that, at Todmorden, Lendl Simmons is earning more in experience than he is in cash.
He tells us that, boosted by some big knocks for the Windies “A” team this summer, he is targeting a place in the Test team in England next summer. Playing here, on the slowest, wettest pitches he’s ever encountered, should stand him in good stead. Before falling for 16 today, he’d hit 65 and 74 in his two previous outings for ‘Tod’.
Lendl says he’s relished the pressure of being his team’s talisman but finds other aspects of the League less enjoyable. He’s housed in a tiny flat behind the scorer’s hut and tackles the boredom by watching DVDs and doing 300 sit-ups a day. Having seen what he calls some “shocking indiscipline” from local players, he’s also peeved by the suggestion – recently espoused by Mike Atherton – that the flow of West Indian players into the Lancashire League has dried up because clubs consider them too volatile.“That’s rubbish,” he says. “West Indians are very emotional about their cricket, but most of the time if they’re sulking it’s because they care… It’s the players from round here whose swearing is terrible.Last week, a guy on the other team was given out and he started screaming at the umpire, telling him he was f****** this and a f****** that. I couldn’t believe it.”
For many players and spectators, the combustible nature of League matches is part of their allure. South Africans and Australians, in particular, tend to revel in the intense, century-old rivals between clubs and the weekly shoot-out with the opposing pro. “The Aussies love it – the drinking, the swearing, giving it some stick,” Colin Shaw confirms.
It’s a while since the Lancashire League saw anything like Zimbabwean Mark Vermuelen’s Cantona moment in the neighbouring Central Lancs League in September, but John Chapman admits that sledging is as much part of League culture as after-match ales. He has fond memories of one round of verbals with ex-Rishton pro Steve Elworthy a few seasons back. At the time, the South African paceman was rumoured to be on the brink of his first call-up to the Springbok national team.
Chapman takes up the story: “So Elworthy comes in to bat and one of our quicks, John Nuttall is bowling. He drives at the first ball and completely misses. Second ball, same thing. I shout out, “Ooh, John, that were
a cracker, that were: it swung in then left him.” Elworthy turns around, not ’appy, and says. “Look, mate, if he could do that he’d be playing for England, not Bacup.” So the next ball, he nicks it, I catch him behind and I tell Elworthy, “If you moved your bloody feet, you might end up playing for your bloody country.” And he goes, “I’ll have you when
you come in to bat.
“I don’t usually wear a helmet to bat, but that day I did and it was a good job, because he were after me…”
Chapman’s postscript could be a riff for the 114-year history of the League: “Sure enough, he got me in the end, but we had a drink after the game and he were superb.”
For an international cricket magazine, you’d think the highlight of our weekend would be an exclusive chat to England’s Jimmy Anderson, shortly after Burnley have seen off Todmorden by eight wickets.
Judge for yourselves.
SPIN: “Jimmy, does it ever occur to you, when you come back to play in the League, that you might never have been discovered by Lancashire and that you could still be playing for Burnley now?”
Anderson: (long pause): “Er, no, not really.”
In fairness to the former Future of English Cricket, he does offer some insight; he tells us that, on the two recent occasions when he’s turned out for his old home club, he’s felt a huge burden of expectancy, despite appearing only as a fielder and a batsman. “It’s like everyone expects me to do something special,” he puffs.
Back at Bacup, the banter is flowing faster than the runs off the Colne bats as news of Anderson’s inclusion in the Burnley side crackles through via BBC Radio Lancashire. The benefit to Queen and Country of the Burnley Express honing his match fitness by playing piano in the League appears lost on the Bacup faithful.
“I feel sorry for t’ bloody lad whose place he’s taken,” pipes up one member from under his flat cap. “Anderson? He’s no ruddy good, anyway,” ventures his friend. They’re off-the-cuff remarks but they tell us a lot about where League fans’ cricketing loyalties lie. Most of Bacup’s 300-odd members will rarely – if ever – make the 20-mile journey to Old Trafford to watch Lancashire play a higher standard of cricket. Peter Mulderrig, a Bacup follower, tells me why: “I was a member of Lancashire for a long time, but they’re so aloof, I couldn’t be bothered any more. And this is paradise, isn’t it? A fantastic view, as close as you can get to the action, friendly faces, some of the best pros in the world…”
His feelings about Lancashire don’t preclude him from airing some forthright views on his county’s current plight: “’Ere y’are, I’ll give a quote: Mike Watkinson has been coach of Lancashire for nine years – NINE bloody years and they haven’t won a thing! And now they’ve renewed his contract. ‘Ow can that bloody ’appen, eh?!”
We’re left mulling this over as, out in the middle, Colne chip and charge their way to a competitive total of 144-6 off their reduced allocation of 27 overs. Cairns has bowled through for figures of one for 49 off 14. He’s so miffed at one wide call in his final over that he’s still grilling the guilty umpire minutes after the Colne innings has ended.
The weather’s perked up and spectators now form a broken ring around the boundary rope. A large chunk of the Rawtenstall team has decided that their wash-out is the perfect excuse to catch up with Bacup’s title push over a few jars. Colin Shaw says that crowds here sometimes top 500. Income from gate receipts and membership fees is supplemented by what they take at the bar and in the new function room. “They do a cracking funeral,” one elderly member assures us.
Anyone who’s paid the £3.50 entry fee today will see a real cracker. Unforgivably, we were on the other side of the valley chasing soundbites from Jimmy Anderson – when Bacup clinched a stunning last-ball victory.
That win had looked assured when Cairns went for 74 to leave Bacup needing just 24 from four overs with seven wickets to spare. The equation became twelve from two before Colne pro Adnam Malik’s extraordinary final over cost Bacup four wickets – three clean bowled and one run out – for the addition of just one run. Enter 18-year-old Scott Thompson, scorer of 26 runs in ten matches this season to date. Thompson conjures ten off the last five balls – including two off the final delivery – to see Bacup past the post and give them an eight-point lead over Burnley with two games to play.
The consensus in East Lancs is that it ranks alongside England’s fourth against Germany and the Edgbaston Ashes Test in the list of all-time great sporting finales. And we’ve missed it for Jimmy Anderson…
A week later, we’re in Birmingham watching England beat Pakistan when Burnley dramatically pip Bacup to the 2006
Lancashire League title. With Anderson now bowling, the Burnley attack runs through Haslingden’s batting to set up an easy six-wicket win. Meanwhile, at Enfield, Chris Cairns pulls up with a groin injury as the home side posts a total 187 which Bacup never threaten. It’s a big upset, but the bigger surprise comes at Edgbaston: there we are, sunning ourselves with the prawn-sandwich brigade, watching a tight ODI, wishing we were freezing our backsides off 100-miles or so further north.
We can only conclude that Peter Mulderrig was right – once you’ve acquired a taste for this, watching the world’s best cricketers glissading across pristine fields loses its appeal. Give us a sloping wicket, a couple of gnarly Antipodeans, pie and chips and change from a fiver any day. The League’s future looks bright. Even before cricket became fashionable again last summer, the 14 Lancashire League clubs were sending out junior teams at four different age groups. Many budding Flintoffs also attend cricket camps in the school holidays. The League clubs are embracing change, too, with a 20/20 tournament now a money-spinning highlight of their season.
Yes, there are challenges, say those running the clubs. There will always, for example, be someone droning on about falling standards of play. Most people we speak to, though, say that any decline is marginal and the result of other changes.“Twenty years ago not many people went abroad on holiday, and if you were away with the family in Torquay, you’d be expected to come back to play at the weekend. We can’t enforce that any more,”shrugs Jeff Rudderforth at Todmorden.
Yes, clubs with successful pros will always be branded one-man teams – the charge laid at Bacup’s door this year – but that’s part of the fun. Every game is like two heavyweights queuing up for the fairground bell-ring. And the punters love it. So when the agent Nadeem Abassi says that League matches are “basically pro versus pro”, it’s not an insult – just one reason why the Lancashire League earns its place in cricketing legend.
And ask any of the middle-managers who take the field with one of the world’s great all-rounders what they think of the pros’ input. Ask John Chapman about the stumping he took off Chris Cairns earlier this season. He’ll tell you: “Chris wasn’t sure whether to be happy or not, because no-one had ever taken a stumping off him before.” And as John says, “that’s definitely one to tell the grandchildren.”
