Travel, Theatre, Music, Cricket, Tennis, Writing, Life
Just ahead of the 2009 season, I wrote a piece for Middlesex Till We Die (MTWD) about other cricket on-line forums:
Just in case anything ever happens to MTWD, I have scraped the piece to Ogblog – only click the link below if the link above doesn’t work:
Middlesex till we die – Forums Galore
As a warm up to the new season I read a book and wrote the following book review for Middlesex Till We Die (MTWD):
Cricket Lovely Cricket? by Lawrence Booth – click here.
Just in case anything ever happens to MTWD, I have scraped the piece to Ogblog – only click the link below if the link above doesn’t work:
Middlesex till we die – Cricket Lovely Cricket_ by Lawrence Booth
Thirsty lot, Middlesex CCC supporters/Middlesex Till We Die (MTWD) readers. I wrote a short shout out to the faithful to help update a guide to the local hostelries around Lord’s.
You can read that piece by clicking here.
If anything ever happens to Sportnetwork/MTWD, you can read a scrape of that piece by clicking here.
Undisciplined lot at times, so we needed to review the rules at that time. I wrote a consultation note about site rules and discipline, again by way of a shout out.
Click here for the piece about discipline.
If anything ever happens to Sportnetwork/MTWD, you can read a scrape of that piece here.
I’m going to guess that we had more feedback about beer than we did about rules.
This was the second piece of mine published on King Cricket.
It supports one of King Cricket’s themes – cricket equipment in unusual places.
The centrepiece of the article is a photograph I took of a monk at Rumtek Monastery in Sikhim who was wielding a cricket bat in our direction when Janie and I visited the place in 2005.
A cricket bat at Rumtek monastery – King Cricket – click here.
Just in case anything ever happens to King Cricket, I have scraped the piece to Ogblog – only click the link below if the link above doesn’t work:
Another winter piece for the Middlesex Till We Die (MTWD) website.
This one was supposed to go up the week before, but Andrew Strauss messed up my editorial plans for that week by selfishly being appointed England captain.
Still, I’m sure the piece was just as effective on 14 January as it would have been on 7 January:
Stats The Way (Aha Aha) I Like It – click here.
Just in case anything ever happens to MTWD, I have scraped the piece to Ogblog – only click the link below if the link above doesn’t work:
Middlesex till we die – Stats The Way (Aha Aha) I Like It
I recognised Andrew Strauss’s appointment as England cricket captain with a rapid editorial piece for the Middlesex Till We Die (MTWD) website.
Andrew Strauss Of Middlesex – England Captain – click here.
Just in case anything ever happens to MTWD, I have scraped the piece to Ogblog – only click the link below if the link above doesn’t work:
Middlesex till we die – Andrew Strauss of Middlesex, England Captain
I’d forgotten about this piece until I stumbled across it while going through my MTWD articles. Patrick Kidd of The Times asked me to write the piece for their on-line thingie.
Here’s the MTWD article about it – click here.
Just in case SportNetwork lose the above piece in the meantime, I’ve uploaded it here on Ogblog, so this link will work.
The link to The Times article no longer works – perhaps because of the pay wall (although I’d expect that to at least ask you to pay) or perhaps The Times used similar techies to the SportNetwork crowd.
Anyway, here is the text I submitted – I don’t suppose Patrick edited it much.
Ged Ladd, from the Middlesex supporters’ website “Middlesex Till We Die” http://www.cricketnetwork.co.uk/boards/list/s66.htm?67 presents an Ashes Top Ten of heroes who have not only played in Ashes Tests but have also played first class cricket for Middlesex.
- Andrew Stoddart. Andrew Stoddart played 16 tests against Australia, captaining half of them, in five series between 1887/8 and 1897/8; his highlight being 173 in Melbourne in a winning 3-2 cause in 1894/5, starting a great tradition of Middlesex players captaining Ashes series victories home and away. A stupendous sportsman, he played both rugby and cricket for England; he also famously once scored 485 in 370 minutes for Hampstead against Stoics after a sleep-free night on the razz. Sadly, he found the game of middle-aged mundanity harder than elite sport; in 1915 he took his own life, perhaps due to debts and ill health.
- Sir Pelham (Plum) Warner. Plum Warner was a distinguished Middlesex and England Captain who captained England to a 3-2 series win in Australia in 1903/4. Like several of the Middlesex and England captains, his personal record in tests was less distinguished than his captaincy record, but Plum Warner did more than enough to get a stand at Lord’s named after him; the one between the Pavilion and the Grandstand.
- Patsy Hendren. Elias Henry Hendren scored over 57,000 first class runs between 1907 and 1938, including 51 tests, 28 of which were against Australia at a very respectable twixt-wars average of just under 40, including 3 tons and 10 fifties. His one test wicket was against the Aussies. An Ashes hero and a Middlesex Collosus; any man with 170 first class hundreds to his name is something special.
- Gubby Allen. George Oswald Browning Allen is another Middlsex and England captain with a Lord’s stand named after him (the small one between the Pavilion and the Tavern Stand). Genuine all-rounder Gubby Allen quietly took 21 vital wickets in the Bodyline series. He also captained England in an Ashes series, but (unusually for a Middlesex and England captain) it was the losing (2-3) tour of Australia following the Bodyline series.
- Denis Compton. The Brylcream Boy himself not only scored 39,000 first class runs and played 78 tests (phenomenal numbers for a player whose career spanned the war), but he also regularly appeared as a winger for Arsenal. He averaged just under 43 in the 28 tests he played against the Aussies (compared with an overall test average just over 50) and is the third of our Middlesex Ashes heroes to have a Lord’s stand named after him; between the Grandstand and the Edrich Stand (Bill Edrich just missed the cut for our heroes list).
- Jeff Thomson. One half of the “Lillian Thomson” pairing which terrorised England’s batsmen on several occasions, Thomo took 100 England scalps at just over 24 in his 21 test outings against England. Given his personal success, he was on the losing side surprisingly often for a top-ranking Aussie; the next three Middlesex and England Ashes heroes were a large part of the reason for his failures.
- Mike Brearley. A master of the art of captaincy, Brearley captained England to three Ashes series wins in the 1970s and 1980s; his only low point being a 0-3 series defeat in the “non-Ashes, aluminium bat” tour. His personal batting effort, averaging just over 22 in 19 Ashes matches, is almost beside the point in the context of that unique degree of Ashes captaincy success. Self-effacing and currently president of the MCC, it seems unlikely that a Lord’s stand will be named after him for the foreseeable future.
- Mike Gatting. Twenty-seven tests against the old enemy at an average of 37+, he scored 4 tons and 12 fifties against Australia. One of Middlesex’s finest, he will long be remembered as the victim of Shane Warne’s “ball of the 20th century” and also (hopefully not for too much longer) as the last England captain to bring the urn back from a winning Ashes tour, 1986/7.
- John Embury. A 64 test veteran, that’s a massive test haul for an English off-spinner. 25 of those tests were against Australia; he took 78 scalps in those tests at under 35s. Effectively a bowling all-rounder, he also managed a Brearley-busting average of 28 in his Ashes outings; undoubtedly a man who lifted his perforamances for the big occasions, none more so than the battles against Australia.
- Glen McGrath. England’s utter nemesis for donkey’s years (ask Atherton, for example), his 30 test outings against England yielding 157 wickets at just over 20 including 10 fivefers tells just part of the story. His ankle-busting encounter with a stray practice ball just before the start of play at Edgbaston in 2005 was probably the single most significant Ashes series-turning event in history.
If the editor were to allow me the indulgence of an eleventh man, wicket-keeper John Murray would make an excellent addition to the above ten to make up a complete team. It’s a little batsman heavy but a bit of medium pace from Gatt in his prime plus some of The Brylcream Boy’s dobblers would provide some makeshift bowling on the rare occasions it would be needed with that strong four-man attack.
I’d like to thank Seaxe Man at MTWD whose excellent three-part series of articles on Middlesex’s England Captains, “Did You Know?”, provided much inspiration for several of the above pen-portraits:
http://www.cricketnetwork.co.uk/main/s66/st89359.htm
http://www.cricketnetwork.co.uk/main/s66/st89910.htm
http://www.cricketnetwork.co.uk/main/s66/st90380.htm
This was my first Gresham Lecture and by gosh the preparation felt like hard but very interesting work.
A lot of the material from this one ended up in The Price Of Fish.
Here’s the YouTube of it so you can watch from here instead (but for the resources as well, you need to click the above link):
More observant followers of this lecture (e.g. John White) noticed that I strung some lines from songs and stuff through the slides. I made up an iTunes playlist for the lecture – back then, iTunes playlists felt like fun things to try. Here it is: 
We held a traditional Z/Yen-Gresham reception in the Headmaster’s Study after the lecture. Doubtless someone pointed out my resemblance to the Chandos Portrait of Shakespeare in that room – someone always did. As I explained on Facebook to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death:
After the reception, Michael Mainelli escorted an honoured few of us to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese for one of his traditional post lecture meals. Not sure exactly who attended but I do recall Michael, Elisabeth, Kim, Micky, Charlie, Me, Janie and a few others.
I believe this momentous day was my first ever match report for King Cricket. At the time, I was still editing the Middlesex Till We Die (MTWD) website, so I also co-wrote a match report for that one.
I had been campaigning quite hard for some time for MTWD match reports to be impressionistic and alternative, rather than traditional narrative reports of the game. In the early days of MTWD, providing narrative reports was a useful “free service” for fans as it wasn’t so easy to find match reports on-line. But by 2008, there was little need or demand for an amateur version of rapid narrative reportage on-line, although several of the reporters seemed wedded to “ball-by-ball match reports” (as Barmy Kev tended to describe them).
Meanwhile, I’d discovered the King Cricket site and loved his match report rules: “If it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. If it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.” However, King Cricket sought match reports as fillers to be used weeks or months after the event; yet would not (as a commercial site, could not) simply recycle material that had been published elsewhere first.
This pair of match reports is, therefore, probably the only example of me writing pretty much the same story in different words for both sites. From then on, I continued with occasional pieces (as well as editing) with MTWD for another couple of seasons while writing wholly different occasional stuff for King Cricket.
Here is the King Cricket version of the story, which was published in October 2008.
Just in case anything ever happens to King Cricket, I have scraped the piece to Ogblog – only click the link below if the link above doesn’t work:
Middlesex v Gloucestershire County Championship match report
Just in case anything ever happens to MTWD, I have scraped the piece to Ogblog – only click the link below if the link above doesn’t work:
Middlesex till we die – Kadeer Today, Gone Tomorrow, Day 3 Middx v Glos
If you really want to know what actually happened in the match (yes, there was sort-of a cricket match), here is a link to the on-line scorecard.
In King Cricket and MTWD match reports, Ged and Daisy are nicknames/noms de plume for me and Janie. Friends (such as Charley “The Gent” Malloy) are always referred to pseudonymously. If my diary is to be believed, Charley was a substitute as my guest for that day, as the day is marked in my diary as a stumpfmerde, which means the original idea was to visit Lord’s that day with “Timothy Tiberelli”. Something important must have come up for Timothy.
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.