Won't You Dance for Virat Kohli?

Rob Harris

Description

Former Gloucestershire Media Sports Writer of the Year Rob Harris has been playing village cricket for almost 40 years. In inner cities some kids join street gangs in search of respect, but in Rob's childhood the gangs were village cricket clubs and the weapon of choice was a Gunn & Moore bat. Won't You Dance for Virat Kohli? is an honest, funny and colourful account of sporting obsession and how a childhood passion for cricket can dominate grown-up thoughts, dreams, relationships - and weekends. This is the story of one humble club cricketer's misguided search for personal respect and fulfilment in the strangest of places, foregoing holidays and family time to spend long summer days lounging around village greens with other screwed-up 'weekend warriors', whilst secretly wishing he was somewhere - anywhere - else. It is a book that will resonate with anyone who knows and loves grass-roots cricket.

Sujets

• Críquet
• Cricket

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 31 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785319440
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2021
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
© Rob Harris, 2021
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright.
Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781785317798
eBook ISBN 9781785319440
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CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
Don’t All Boys Want to be Viv Richards?
Ashes Heroes
Respect is a Curry House Runner
Barmy Armies and Hugh the Lazy Woodpecker
Being Pike in the Cast of Dad’s Army
It’s Just Not Cricket
Coming Home
Tours of Duty
Oscar’s Flipper
Some Day the Dots will Connect
Won’t You Dance for Virat Kohli?
Whatever Happened to Winston Davis?
A Sense of Belonging
Leave Peter Sleep to Me
Old Father Time
Regrets? I Have a Few
Life in the Bubble
DEDICATION
To Alex and Ruby. Thank you for much more than you realise.
FOREWORD
SOME OF the stories and accounts in this book are true and accurate, as far as I can remember them. Some are not and others are somewhere in between. It’s the same with characters; some are real people, depicted as I know and see them; some are completely fictitious and others are an amalgamation of characters, both fictitious and non-fictitious.
The point is, this book isn’t autobiographical and should not be taken as factually accurate throughout in relation to accounts of characters, events and happenings. However, the sentiments running through the book are real.
As everyone who’s ever played sport will appreciate, anecdotes and stories often start small but grow and expand over time as they are retold and adapted by people who weren’t even there, in pubs and clubs and tearooms. Eventually, these stories take on lives of their own so reputations are enhanced and legends born!
INTRODUCTION
THE IDEAS for this book gathered speed during the spring of 2020. When the whole world had ground to a halt because of a potent and deadly threat; not Broad and Anderson nor even Steyn and Rabada, but Covid-19.
Firstly, I finally had some extra time on my hands to tackle a project such as this. And secondly, more importantly, with no sport whatsoever to watch or play or even talk about, I realised that a lot of people, mostly men, were walking around a bit lost and dazed, like zombies, stripped of the thing that occupied such huge expanses of their everyday lives; the nuts and bolts of their very existences.
Cricket, like any other sport, is just a game. However, having my fix removed without warning by this bloody awful coronavirus felt a bit like walking straight into a Jofra Archer bouncer.
The best cricket matches (and, you might argue, most interesting people) have unspoken conflicts and hidden layers and twists going on beneath the surface that lift the standard of the overall spectacle for those sitting in the stands. Cricket is an important subplot of my own life because wherever I look it’s there, lurking in the bushes of relationships, marriages, dreams and aspirations, grief and fatherhood. I love it and hate it at different times, sometimes on the same day. It’s a curse and a blessing; a friend and a foe. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels like this.
Outside the sun is shining, it’s the weekend and I would normally be on a cricket pitch but my wife is stood in the doorway telling me about the friend of a friend who has a lung disease and has now contracted coronavirus. His chances are slim and it’s desperate for the family and, of course, her friend. But Despicable Me is not listening to my wife’s fulsome and detailed account of the tragedy because my attention stopped at the headline. Her lips are moving but I have put her on mute. What she is saying is too gruesome and real to comprehend or think about so I run for the hills, metaphorically, as fast as my tiny mind will take me. I do not want to contemplate that I might become the friend of a friend in someone else’s dark conversation.
So instead of listening intently to my wife I just nod, hopefully in all the right places, as I sit with laptop on knees and eyes focused on the 1987 Benson and Hedges Cup Final between Yorkshire and Northants, 55 overs per side, where Kevin Sharp has just patted one back to the bustling David Capel and Richie Benaud can think of nothing worth saying to describe the moment. I shall probably sit here all day as if I am watching a live match, whilst my wife graciously provides me with cups of coffee, bacon sandwiches and extensive rolling news updates on the friend of a friend and how her friend is coping with potentially losing a friend. I wonder fleetingly, if he will live to see tomorrow? Or if my wife will lose interest in either the story itself or her efforts to share it with me? Mostly though, I wonder whether Jim Love can really guide Yorkshire through to an improbable victory.
That, I’m afraid, is this book and much of my life in a nutshell.
DON’T ALL BOYS WANT TO BE VIV RICHARDS?
‘It’s not fair, why do I always have to be England? Just cos you can hit it into the cabbages, it don’t make you West Indian.’
WHAT QUALIFIES me to write a book about cricket? On the face of it, absolutely zilch. Zero. Zip.
Am I a decent player? No, distinctly average – though I have been known to talk a good game. What about captaincy skills? Sorry, I’m far too selfish to think about anyone else’s on-field problems besides my own. Can I coach? Does teaching my daughter the lyrics to ‘Living on a Prayer’ count? A statistician then? Or maybe a historian? This is starting to get a bit embarrassing.
But wait a minute, cricket is essentially a game of disappointments and failings played by failures. Am I a failure? Proudly, I can hold my bat high in the air and take my rightful applause. ‘Yes sir, I am that man.’
My claim to understanding cricket is that I know what it is like to be bowled by a nine-year-old girl in a club match and face the long walk of shame back to the pavilion, past smirking opponents and bystanders. And I know what it’s like to be dropped from a team that has only ten available players. I understand too, that feeling of guilt after spilling the simplest of dolly catches, attempting to spare my blushes with the most outlandish of excuses – I wasn’t ready, the sun was in my eyes, a low-flying peregrine falcon distracted me – only to better that achievement by grounding an easier chance the very next ball. I even know what it feels like to collide with my batting partner whilst attempting a run, losing my trousers, dignity and wicket in one fell swoop.
‘But unless you’ve played at the top level, you can’t really know the game.’
The above is an oft-used phrase, usually repeated by retired Test match greats, who have walked straight from the middle into the commentary box (with little journalistic experience) in order to criticise umpires, administrators and occasionally know-it-all supporters like me. I’ve always felt some sympathy for those in their firing line because I’m not convinced the greats in any walk of life are always finely in tune with reality. I’m guessing, for instance, that neither Steve Smith nor AB de Villiers has ever eaten so many doughnuts at tea that they cannot physically bend down to pick up a ball in the field afterwards. Nor drunk three pints of gin and tonic whilst waiting to bat next. I am not proud of that particular innings on tour (more of which comes later) – I was old and foolish. And yes, I failed to score a run although, in my defence, the ball seemed like it was jagging around all over the place that afternoon, unlike my eyes.
Since the age of 12, cricket has consumed me and my life and I don’t really understand why. From that age, I’ve consistently played this silly game of bat and ball pretty much every summer, from April through to September. For at least half of those years, probably more, I barely missed a Saturday or Sunday game. Consequently, I rarely attended family parties or weddings and generally shunned holidays and steady girlfriends. I missed out on so much real life. Over those four decades, I must have forfeited at least 1,600 spring and summer days to sneak off with this domineering cricketing mistress I both love and despise. That’s more than four years if you add it all up, 38,400 hours, 2,304,000 minutes, 138,240,000 seconds and counting.
It’s not just the playing time, either. Oh, the hours, days and weekends I’ve given to pretending to work on the club’s ground whilst idly standing about doing nothing, or messing around at net practice, or driving to away matches, or sitting in the dressing room after games, reflecting quietly on the afternoon’s play with pint and jockstrap or something else in hand, or reliving matches all over again with team-mates, for better or for worse, in bars and pubs, into the small wee hours of the morning. The stuff of dreams; celebrating successes and drowning sorrows. But it’s much worse than even that. For every hour I’ve spent playing or preparing for cricket, I’ve wasted at least two or three in ‘cricket contemplation’. That’s a further eight to 12 years of my life lost to ‘mental dribbling’, usually whilst lying on my bed listening to Madness, Bruce Springsteen or The Boomtown Rats.
Imagine what I might have accom