Meeting: 4 April 2009
Guest Speaker: John Stern,
Editor of The Wisden Cricketer
Grace
Our Rev. David Brown said Grace.
The Menu
Smoked Duck & Orange Salad; Oven-roasted Ham Hock with creamy bacon mash, leek & white wine sauce with seasonal vegetables; English Cheeseboard; Coffee & Chocolate Mints; Argentinian Pinot Noir and a South African Chenin Blanc (produced by Dick Orders)
The Meeting
Neil Jenkinson opened the meeting, welcoming everyone and advising, as had been previously announced, he would be standing down as President and it seemed the appropriate moment to deal with the election of officers for the coming year.
Neil explained he had first heard of Douglas Miller, the nominee for President, as the author of several cricket books, such as Born to Bowl: The Life and Times of Don Shepherd; Allan Watkins: A True All Rounder and A History of Bucks County Cricket Club – to mention but a few. Neil commended Douglas to the meeting as a worthy successor.
Neil also went on to thank Penny Taylor, ‘our hard-working secretary’, Stephen Saunders, ‘our erudite treasurer’, and Dick Orders our ever-involved Steward.
Nominations
President – Douglas Miller
Treasurer – Stephen Saunders
Steward – Dick Orders
Secretary – Penny Taylor
Almost unanimous. At this point, Neil handed over the meeting to the new President, Douglas Miller who said:
“This is one of the happiest moments of my life, to be invited to be President of this club. Who am I? I have already been involved for 12-13 years, having met Ashley at a cricket dinner in London, who invited me to join in with the rebirth of the Hambledon Club 200 years on, still as the Hambledon Club, with the subscriptions as they had been in 1796/7. I have attended lunches regularly ever since and was heading for a record until the Association of Cricket Statisticians invited me to be their Chairman and their Committee Meetings clashed with the Hambledon Club lunches. I am now rid of those obligations and can resume my regular visits. Very happy to see such lovely weather and all the old familiar faces – I wish I was equally good with names – but it takes 4-5 goes to get them to stock in my head.
I am old enough for the office and glad to see the Presidency keeps moving on but would like to thank the first President, Ashley Mote, to whom we owe so much. I won’t delay any longer – enjoy your meal”.
Meeting Notices
Dave Allen has produced the Hampshire Handbook, taking over from Andrew Renshaw – copies available at £10.
Stephen Saunders – has Hambledon Club ties for sale and subscriptions to collect.
Stephen had been asked to create an album for commemorative stamps of the Centenary Match held on 13 September 2008. He had also been asked to exhibit at the Stampex Exhibition, which he had done, taking along some of the club’s assets for the display.
David Allen welcomed guests who had not attended before and explained the tradition of the six toasts made by The Hambledon Club on such occasions.
Wed 19 Aug 09 there is to be a match against a visiting team from Bowral, Australia – The Bradman Foundation XI and it is hoped that Michael Fahey, author of “The Baggy Green” will be able to speak at the dinner after the game.
Apologies for Absence
Apologies had been received by Clive Barnett, Roy Clarke, Alastair MacLennan in Bowral in a letter which was read to the meeting, the Pardoe family, Bobbie & Peter Tompkins,
Prize Draw in support of Hambledon Cricket Club
Dick Orders explained the traditional donations and draw for payment of the winner’s lunch ticket(s), made on behalf of Hambledon CC in support of their Colts and Youth Cricket.
The draw raised a magnificent £195, including £50 for the prize winner and lunch for our speaker, leaving a balance of £145.
The Speaker
Douglas Miller introduced our speaker for the lunch John Stern, Editor of the Wisden Cricketer, the world’s largest selling cricket magazine. His career started, in 1992, at the Reg Hayter’s sports-writing academy. He joined Wisden in 2001 and was deputy editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly at the time of its merger with the Cricketer, in 2003, to form TWC. John could speak to us on any number of topics, so he had left it to him to choose what to talk about.
John Stern thanked the Chairman for his introduction and for his invitation to speak on any number of subjects at what is an extraordinary time for cricket.
“The first thing I have to say is what an absolute pleasure and a privilege it is to be here. It’s the first time I’ve been to Hambledon, something of a shocking admission really like the editor of a cricket magazine and on such glorious day as well – it really is cricket weather, the season starts properly next week and it’s a great prospect.
I do meet some interesting and extraordinary people in this job. About a year ago I was at a Lord’s Taverners’ lunch and I recognised one of the guests there, well at least I thought I did, but I wasn’t 100% sure and later on, during the lunch, I was introduced to this man by David Collier, the Chief Executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board, who giggled nervously as this man said to me, with a Texan drawl, ‘the future of 20:20 Cricket lies in the hands of the ECB, not the IPL’.
My first thought was ‘God help us!’, the second thought and this is not with the benefit of hindsight, is that this man had the polished charm and the word-perfect patter of a con man and I thought Alan Stanford was pretty dodgy as well!
Yes, you do get some extraordinary people. Someone I have yet to encounter properly and I am perhaps hoping I don’t, is Sir Ian Botham.
About a year or so ago we carried an interview with Botham, he was promoting a book, number 16 on his bibliography I think and we had him on the cover of the Wisden Cricketer in a fantastic black and white iconic shot. He was sat in the Headingley dressing room in 1981, just minutes after scoring 149, not out, against Australia. So we had this fantastic cover story interview with Botham and in my editorial, as I tend to each month, I talked about the things that are in the magazine that particular month and I talked about my ambivalence towards Botham. He was a childhood hero of mine, but as a commentator on Sky TV, I found him, as I wrote, ‘the purveyor of bluster and bombast’, which, in itself, sounds fairly bombastic! But also, that he had been the man who had led Freddie Flintoff astray in Australia during the last Ashes tour.
It didn’t occur to me for a moment that Botham would ever read these words, nor less even that he would actually be bothered by them. But, I was slightly surprised and disconcerted to get an email from Vic Marks, a former teammate of Botham’s at Somerset and all-around good egg and friend of our magazine. His email told me that he had been accosted by Botham in the Press Box in Sri Lanka and that Botham had asked him to communicate to me that he was highly displeased with what I have written in the magazine and not specifically that I’d had a go and thought he was a rubbish commentator, but the fact that I had said that he had led Freddie Flintoff astray in Australia. He disputed that and his justification for disputing that was that he had only been out with Flintoff twice during that particular tour and that on one of those occasions their wives had accompanied them. What he failed to mention was that on the other occasion was the time that Flintoff turned up drunk to a practice session when he was England Captain.
Anyway, Vic said, ‘well I am sure his anger will pass, but I thought you should know’. In normal circumstances I wouldn’t really have thought anything of it, except that I was flying to Sri Lanka the following day and, again, I thought, well, this stuff it’s all grist to the mill. When I got to Colombo and I was in the Press Box, I had barely sat down when one of my colleagues said ‘Oh I hear Beefy’s after you then!’ and it started to occur to me that this was perhaps a little bit more serious than I had first thought.
Derek Pringle, again another former teammate of Botham’s and now a distinguished writer said to me ‘well one thing I’d say Sterny about Beefy is that you don’t want to get on the wrong side of him, but I wouldn’t worry about it’. Thanks, Derek, that’s really very comforting!
Now in Colombo, it was fine, because at one end of the ground was the Press Box, where I was and at the other end was the Commentary Box, where Ian Botham was, so our paths never crossed and that wasn’t a problem. But at the next test, in Gall, the Commentary Box and the Press Box were absolutely adjacent and I realised this may possibly be a problem again, the story seemed to have gathered pace and as soon as I got into the Press Box, in Gall, David Lloyd, ‘Bumble’ again a colleague of Botham’s, friend of our magazine and general world-class mischief-maker, said to me ‘Has he found you yet, as he found you yet? A couple of days later he saw me in the Gents toilet and said ‘Still alive then, still alive?’ Anyway, this went on for five days and while everybody else was bothered about whether England was going to square the series or whether the Gall ground was up to scratch, all I concern myself with was avoiding getting into a fight with England’s living legend! And I never did run into him and so the feud is still there, it’s still unresolved.
Someone I’ve had more civilised dealings with, but still slightly peculiar, is Geoffrey Boycott.
In 2004, in the Wisden Cricketer, we asked an expert panel to select their greatest post-war England test side and Boycott was on this panel and he was obviously also a strong candidate to be included in the team. I wrote to him and he accepted but then he ‘phoned me up. It was the first time I’d ever spoken to him. ‘John Stern please,’ ‘Speaking.’ ‘Geoffrey Boycott here. Now, this eleven, this panel that you’re after. You say attacking and entertaining cricket.’ We’d asked the selectors to place a premium on attacking and entertaining cricket and obviously, Geoffrey was slightly bemused by this concept. ‘Do you want winning cricket, or do you want attacking cricket, do you want entertainment?’
Obviously as far as he was concerned, the two were mutually exclusive, so I said ‘Geoffrey, you pick your team, I’m sure it will be tremendous.’ So we left that conversation slightly unresolved. He told me to go and meet him at the test match at Lords’ and he would give me his selection of this team. So I went to Lords’, met up with him and he gave me his team list and I noticed, slightly surprisingly to me, that he’d got Ted Dexter opening the batting with Graham Gooch. I said ‘that’s interesting Geoff, you’ve got Ted Dexter opening’ and he sort of squinted and said, ‘Well, I’ve thought about my very good friend John (talking about Edrich), my very good friend Dennis (talking about Amiss),’ and he sort of waffled a bit and said he thought that Dexter was a good opening batsman. Now, I’m too young to remember Dexter, but I didn’t recall him being necessarily an opening batsman, which bemused me. So I said to Geoffrey, ‘You should have picked yourself,’ and he looked at me and you could tell he was thinking, ‘What do I say now?’ ‘Well that wouldn’t be right’ is what he said but you could tell that really deep down he thought that he should have picked himself. And when he gave me the team list and I saw that inked in was Dexter and Gooch, and then next to the names were pencilled initials of people that he’d thought about, so we had JE, for John Edrich, DA for Dennis Amiss and then there was GB in there as well, so just to show that actually deep down he should be in the side.
David Green, the old Lancashire, Gloucestershire, Oxford University opening batsman, and Daily Telegraph writer, tells a story about playing against Boycott at Headingly, 1964 Roses Match, August Bank Holiday weekend. Boycott was a young man, about 23. Saturday night, Boycott had got 56 and there was an appeal for caught behind, which wasn’t given, and as the players walked off the field one of the umpires said to the Lancashire Captain, Ken Grieves, did that young man do me and Ken said, ‘well, we thought he’d hit it, we wouldn’t have appealed otherwise’, so the umpire said, ‘come Monday morning, don’t be shy, will you?’
Come Monday morning, Boycott, who has added 6 to his overnight total, he’s got 62, facing Sonny Ramadhin playing for Lancashire, turning in a mile, so not much chance of getting an LBW. Boycott goes forward, appeal, hits the pad, not out; next ball, big stride, big turn, howzat again – out given! Boycott absolutely dumbfounded, can’t believe it all and as he trudges off, up the steps into the Pavilion, he walks past the Lancashire 12th man and says, ‘you can’t believe it at all, it’s not me that I feel sorry for, it’s the 20,000 that have come to watch me’.
David Green says that it was at this point that they realised that Boycott was not like other men.
Another current player, who I feel is not like other men, is Kevin Peitersen. I think actually he and Boycott have quite a lot in common. Not in their style of play, as such obviously, but in their mentality, their single-mindedness. Boycott was a man who overcame considerable personal adversity as a child and a young man and he became one of England’s great batsmen, but obviously had a number of interesting, intriguing qualities. Pietersen didn’t have to overcome such personal adversities, but he was a guy that couldn’t get into the Natal team; he was an off-spinner who batted a bit, came to England, and is now one of the great batsmen of the world.
These guys are extraordinary; they are individuals; they’re the people who really drive this great game forward; they’re the innovators; the ‘Graces’, the ‘Ranjits’…
Peitersen, with his switch-hitting and all that kind of thing, to me he’s in that category, and what has happened to him in the last few months, is that he has been made Captain, which wasn’t everybody’s choice. For the ECB then to be slightly surprised when they asked him his ideas about the future of English cricket it isn’t a case of ‘as you were chaps’ it actually involves sacking the coach, sacking the assistant coach, and so on and so forth.
Now that’s pretty stupid, on one level, but the fact is that he was asked his opinion and he gave it and then he gets sacked for his troubles and what’s happened is that the ECB has actually alienated their best player and that, to me, is crazy, appalling mismanagement. If you are going to have this guy around at all then you have to acknowledge the way he is. Pietersen is an odd character, his extraordinary sort of ego-mania, celebrity wife, etc., it’s bizarre, it’s nonsensical, but the fact is that he is a great player, he is also driven and determined, ambitious and very talented and England need him on board and on side, and it concerns me that they have alienated a very talented individual.
So, we’ve got Andrew Strauss as Captain and it looks like we’re going to get Andy Flower as the full-time coach, which I think is, on balance, probably a pretty good thing. Flower is a man of great integrity, great intelligence, and great experience in the game. He doesn’t have a huge amount of experience as a coach, but he has great experience in the game and he has been through the mill.
As Nasser Hussain is writing in our magazine next month, he has taken on bigger characters than a bunch of England cricketers. In 2003, his black armband protest, with Henry Olonga, in the South Africa World Cup about the death of democracy in Zimbabwe was an astonishing act of courage and political awareness as well.
My only dealings with Flower have been very, very impressive, very interesting, he is absolutely honest and upfront, and the results, obviously in the time he has been associated with the England team have been pretty ordinary, although after last night’s victory at least they finished on a high and it looks to me as though they will give him the job.
There are a couple of other candidates in the frame, Micky Arthur, from South Africa, and John Wright, the former New Zealand batsman, and India coach and Kent coach. My understanding is that Micky Arthur, who I’m in touch with fairly frequently, has spoken to the head hunters the ECB has hired, quite why they need to do that I don’t know, but I think Flower is going to get the job.
So you have a team now, a management team of Flower and Strauss, who are obviously getting on well and while the team has not been performing fantastically well I sense that we are getting back to a little bit of stability in the England team and I think after the last 6 months that is a great plus.
I was just commissioning a writer, Richard Hobson from the Times, to interview Paul Collingwood in the West Indies, which happened a couple of days ago and I was giving him a brief for what I wanted him to ask Collingwood about and I just realised, within just typing just a few words, that there is an endless, endless number of topics I wanted to ask Collingwood about. Starting off with his own personal form, he was dropped in the summer, against South Africa; suddenly now he is scoring hundred after a hundred; you’ve got Stanford; you’ve got the IPL; you’ve got Pietersen versus Moores; you’ve got the Lahore attack.
It’s been an extraordinary period for cricket and it’s always tempting to think that these are worrying times; that the game is going down the plughole, but I always feel optimistic, I always feel that the game that we love is stronger than we perhaps give it credit for. The fact that we’re sitting here in such surroundings I think indicates how resilient and adaptable this game is.
You can look back through the history of the game and you can find parallels for absolutely everything. The extraordinary money of Stanford and the IPL and whatever, that does echo some of the early beginnings of cricket and the money matches and the gambling and the professionalism. These things are not new.
We have just done an article in the magazine about the quality of pitches around now, in terms of the pitches being too batsmen friendly, particularly in the West Indies and also Karachi recently where there were horrendous batsmen’s paradises and I found a letter from the Cricketer magazine, from I think 1938, basically saying exactly what I have just said, the pitches are too batsmen friendly, runs don’t count anymore, etc., something must be done. This just shows what goes around, comes around.
So, I’m optimistic. I’m not a big fan of Giles Clarke at the ECB, I see people’s eyes rolling as…. I think there is an obsession with money and I think that where sport becomes not a sport but becomes more about money then you have a problem, where the money becomes the overriding factor, then you have a problem. That’s really my major issue with the Stanford scenario that actually it was all about money, it was only about money and there was nothing to be gained in a sporting context. I do think that West Indies cricket actually benefited from Stanford’s involvement and it’s a crying shame what’s happened now that actually, West Indies may suffer because of that. But in terms of England, what on earth is going on in terms of the England team effectively being sold to this guy who came and landed his helicopter at Lords’ and so on and so forth.
I am generally optimistic and wanted to finish by reading something to you that I came across in the Cricketer magazine from 1933:
R.C. Robertson-Glasgow, one of the great cricket writers of all time, he’d be up there with Cardus. England has just won the bodyline series and Robertson-Glasgow is writing about the angst, the horrible feeling of taking the game too seriously, of getting so emotionally involved with being desperate for England to win and then you rein back from this and say this is utterly absurd.
‘They say they that Mr. Warner couldn’t bear to watch what he could have seen. What about those who were only just daring to hear what they couldn’t see? It is our own fault, of course, we needn’t listen, we should sleep on and wake at 8 o’clock and then have three mental rounds to decide whether to shave in ignorance and bathe in supine indifference or take the beastly thing into the bathroom and soak the frame and lean back and imbibe Mr. Kippax at 815. We should really pull ourselves together, after all my dear fellow it’s only a game of cricket. A game do you hear? Ah, but is it? Isn’t it to some of us part of ourselves flowing in the veins, beating with the heart, hammering with the brain? I said to myself last summer when in the midst of some abandoned orgy, masquerading under the name of cricket, I said to my soul, this you goof is the thing, this is right fun. This is what they did at Hambledon. Thus did Lumpy Stevens, Perkin, and such wise as Richard Nyren did, John Small in the costals and lead him aside to ask him whether he had heard, etc. I resolved at that same moment when the tests came round again I would treat them as they deserved; important of course, great stuff, famous names, endless sieges, headlines, but only cricket.’
But then, later on in the article, he realises that he is fighting a losing battle.
‘The news hits us a tremendous blow we reel and stagger and sense is recovered either dance a roundelay of delight or send to the tailor for the deepest mourning. It is the man who is there that tells us ‘he’s out’, comes the deadly thrust, ‘Sutcliffe is out’, and not all our incredulity can keep him in. Sent for the crepe, next morning, we cannot with decency keep that fellow waiting for the bath any longer. But, oh wicket, fall, fall, curse and damn those boundaries. Where are the fielders? Are we playing with only five men? Stop bowling half volleys, you wretched man. He’s out, Bradman is out – he tried to.. oh well, never mind what he tried, he’s out, out oh Larwood, incomparable thunder king, raining just now, nonsense, the sun is shining. Work a fig for work, a public holiday for me.
The reason I came across this is that we are researching a story of the Ashes that we are going to put together through the pages of the old archives of the Cricketer and Wisden Cricket Monthly and so on.
But it just seems to me that that encapsulates everything, that of course it’s just a game but in an Ashes year as we are embarking on now you can’t help but get more emotionally involved in it than perhaps you should and that’s why it endures and why we are still here and we care and argue and debate and so on and so forth.
I just wanted to finish on that and hope for a very memorable summer and thank you very much indeed for inviting me.”
Note from the Secretary: apologies for any errors or omissions in the reading from R. C. Robertson-Glasgow, but some of the words were difficult to distinguish on the taped recording.
Douglas gave a vote of thanks
“John thank you very much indeed, I didn’t know what you were going to talk about but I just felt confident that you would have words of interest and wisdom for all of us and so it has proved. Thank you very much indeed. By the way, in introducing him I forgot to add the most important thing is that he is an opening batsman for Wendover”.
Next Meetings
The next lunch will be on Saturday, 3 or 10 October 2009 depending on when Christopher Martin-Jenkins will be able to attend.
Thanks
Dave Allen thanked Jason and the staff of the Bat & Ball for a lovely lunch and said how good it was to see the pub back in such obviously capable hands.