23 NOVEMBER 1991, Page 69

SPECTATOR SPORT

Roseate summers

Frank Keating

THE INVESTMENT group, Whittingdale, Is sponsoring the fitness of the England cricket team to the tune of a million pounds over the next four years. The old maestro, Tom Graveney, was among those of us wincing in civvies on the sidelines as Eng- land's prospective tourists were being put through the first of their exhausting rou- tines of callisthenics at the Lilleshall national sports centre last week. I don't know about cricket, if they will keep out the Yorkers or bowl line and length, but this will be the fittest bunch of cricketers ever to leave these shores when they set off for New Zealand and the World Cup after Christmas. THE INVESTMENT group, Whittingdale, Is sponsoring the fitness of the England cricket team to the tune of a million pounds over the next four years. The old maestro, Tom Graveney, was among those of us wincing in civvies on the sidelines as Eng- land's prospective tourists were being put through the first of their exhausting rou- tines of callisthenics at the Lilleshall national sports centre last week. I don't know about cricket, if they will keep out the Yorkers or bowl line and length, but this will be the fittest bunch of cricketers ever to leave these shores when they set off for New Zealand and the World Cup after Christmas.

As usual, Tom and I got to musing over Gloucestershire's roseate summers when my yokel boyhood coincided with his resplendent, coltish, thoroughbred prime. He told me they had buried George Lam- bert the week before. I had been jinking hither and yon with the rugby boys, so hadn't heard. George was our fast bowler. He began in 1938 and finished in 1957, just a season short of 1,000 first-class wickets. The war confiscated six years of his twen- ties, when he would have been at his most hostile full pelt.

Us oiks would spend hours attempting to emulate George's gathering, spring-heeled run-up and sudden, uncorked crescendo at the crease — it was as well oiled as the Sil- vikrined gloss of his jet-black hair and sign- writer-straight parting. Uncles and dads all agreed that handsome George deserved at least one chance for England. Lambert came west from the Lord's ground staff and remained a cockney to the end. He would holler 'Star, News 'n' Stan- dard!' whenever something crucial seemed about to happen on the field, and his pro- nunciation of `lye-siz', for the tapes that tied his battered old boots, never failed to draw a soft Wessex chuckle from Arthur Milton's corner of the dressing-room.

As we watched the cream of England's present players being put through their gymnastics last week, Graveney mused that old George might even have started crick- et's fitness freak-out. In the war, Lambert had been a PT instructor. When he left Gloucester, he became coach for a while at Somerset, and on his first day we recalled how the Bristol Evening World had front- paged a picture of Lambert putting his Taunton charges through a new-fangled springtime routine. George had borrowed a crate of surplus Lee-Enfield rifles, and here he was putting such eminent, portly and fuming figures as Harold Gimblett and Horace Hazell through — Hup-two-three! — routine Home Guard drill. Cricket's fit- ness revolution had begun.

Everyone else said Lambert should have gone with Freddie Brown's MCC team to Australia in 1950. But the county knew he hadn't a hope once he had ferociously bumped Gubby Allen, his autocratic old boss at Lord's, in the Middlesex match at Cheltenham that summer. Frantically de- fending the target between his eyes, a squir- ming chairman of selectors dropped his hat, as he humiliatingly gloved a sitter to slip mid much Gloucestershire mirth. Mr Allen picked up his bat, marched off seething, and we all knew George would never have an England cap to hang in his hall.

Sam Cook, the Tetbury plumber and slow left-armer, did at least get just one game for England. Sam was George's drinking buddy. Once, when George went in as night-watchman to get a dose of his own medicine from Frank Tyson at Northampton, he survived somehow but came back pallid and quivering. Sam was waiting at the pavilion gate with a pint and double-scotch chaser: 'Get this down you, George — he'll be twice as quick in the morning.' Another time, when Cook cut his cheek trying to hold on to a fizzer in the gully and blood began to flow, George con- soled his pal, 'Don't worry, Sam, it's not blood, it's Worthington E.' Lambert had five sons and a daughter (14 grandchildren were at his funeral). A win bonus of an extra two pounds meant a lot to a family man; after any victory George would come in, flop down with a pint, and announce, `Well, boys, one more hundredweight of coal for the winter.'