Get a Hundred

Two posts by The Old batsman, another blogger and a finer writer left me a little dazed in July;  The first was about an equally deluded ‘quester’  called Pete; a club cricketer who spent his life trying to smash a six of the first ball of his innings. The second  post was about  Getahundred’s target: the fifty ball ton.  In the Id of Vikram Solanki, dont do Freud but ‘OB’ opens with this awakening quote: ‘recalling that innings now is like a dream. Somehow I managed to sustain for a complete day the sort of form that usually materialises only in short, glorious moments’. This was ghost written for Bad Baz Richards innings of 325 in a day for South Australia  in Perth in 1970. That day, Bad Baz  faced Lillee , Mackenzie and Lock .

OB added “I thought of those words when I was watching Vikram Solanki make 100 from 47 balls for Worcestershire against Glamorgan in the T20 Cup the other night. Richards made those runs way before an expression like ‘in the zone’ was foisted upon us, but that was where he was, more or less. He’d entered a rarified place where his natural ability was unobstructed by his own mind. It never happened to him again.”  

Restrain your sniggering if you can because I think I’ve been been to this Shangri La; not at the level of Bad Baz or Vikram but if only briefly, I’ve been there and know that it’s not a place of  bat swinging abandon; not a place of masterly control either but a space, a fragment in time where there is you and only the ball. It never happened to Richards again; so there’s feck all chance of it happening again to me or at even at all.

There was no fifty ball wonderland v the Gypsies. I batted 9. The captain- ma’self -stuck me there but later in the bar of a hotel, there was a little recompense. Kevin Emery, ex Hants and Glos Gypsy,  after a little pestering held court and recounted bowling with Malcolm Marshall but I wanted  only to know how fast  Sylvester Clarke  , another bowler of that era was.

Men telling stories about other men in a pub- what fun hey- but I’ll suffer anything to pick up a cherished anecdote about the great Sylvester. The photo caption from his Times Obit: ‘Probably the meanest fast bowler ever’ ( might have been ‘possibly the meanest fast bowler that ever lived’) was I think the only thing I read as an undergrad. If it wasn’t, it was certainly the best.  Has there been a finer epitaph for a bowler, for a man?

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 Btw: In future all typos and spelling errors are to be left for posterity since spellcheck is evil and editing your own work  marmite.  Production values on vids are still low but the audio is not as scratchy as it was. Watch with sound off. I recommend it.