I tended to get strange e-mails from Barmy Kev in those days, while I was editing Middlesex Till We Die (MTWD):
“Can’t get me poll up”…
…being one that caught my eye as I tried to do forensics on my strange diary scribbles and the even stranger MTWD match reporting for some of this match.
Then I found the Barmy e-mail I was actually looking for:
We seem to be just about OK with reporting for 5 days……I will attend 1st session Thurs morning. A strange irony, luckily I realised over weekend my passport has just expired. I have arranged emergency passport re-issued at Victoria Thurs morning which takes 4 hours. While waiting I’ll be at Lords. May ask some Leics players if I can help them out while I’m there.It is very unlikely I’ll be attending another game this season.
The joke about Leicestershire players was born of the feeling at that time that a couple of counties were relying very heavily on the Kolpak ruling to import a great many players rather than grow their own. Frankly, at that time, Middlesex were not doing much better in the home grown v imports department, but at least had been sowing the seeds of a much improved youth system.
Anyway, it seems that Barmy Kev sort-of produced a report and I sort-of filled in the gaps and here is a link to that sort-of report – credited to Kev feat. Ged.
My diary suggests that I wasn’t at the ground on the Thursday but was there on the Friday… …I think I managed to rejig things a little and get to the ground for some of the day both of those days.
My main task at the tail end of that week was going through the Payroll Giving Awards; an event for which I was chairing the panel of judges at that time. Lord’s was an ideal venue for going through the thick file of applications and that match perfectly timed for the task. I just didn’t want match reporting duties as well.
Unlike the Thursday, on the Friday it seems we had an embarrassment of riches in the reporting department; Daria and Seaxe Man. It seems I had tried to relieve Seaxe Man of the duties but that he had missed the message, so I published two very different takes about the same dull day of cricket – click here.