SPECTATOR SPORT
Country batters
Frank Keating
WHILE the West Indian cricketers were ominously limbering up for the Test match we got to musing on their lovely names. They could be English villages. Surely there's a Curtly Ambrose tucked away somewhere in Dorset? Or a hamlet with a cove in Cornwall called Hamish Anthony? Vivian Richards is, appropriately, nicely Somerset. Courtney Walsh must be in Norfolk, and Clayton Lambert most de- finitely in Home Counties' Herts. Though, Brian Lara could only be Connemara.
There are a handful of English towns just as evocative for cricket. Especially at this time of year, for the festival flags are out, and the bands and the bunting. The guy-ropes are taut at Canterbury, Chel- tenham, Eastbourne, and Weston-super- Mare. Bournemouth's coming up. Lanes will soon be at Lytham, and there is not long to wait for seagull-squealing Scarbor- ough. Other honeyed places too.
Timeless festival cricket at the seaside or in the shires is under threat. A revised, four-day Championship — as Derek Pring- le, the England bowler, warned in his sometimes unmissable Monday column in the Telegraph — would allow the game's grey, book-balancing, admin oiks to cave in to the big sponsors and stage all games at the counties' permanent city HQs. To blazes with romance.
So to Edgbaston, and there was a parti- cularly determined screech to the tyre- treads as we turned off to grab at least an afternoon at Cheltenham. Come what may, I've tried not to miss an hour or two there for over 40 midsummers. A pound of plums to munch, and the ghosts of God- dard and Graveney, doughty Crapp and dancing Emmett; the fishmonger Barnett, the postman Milton, and the plumber Cook . . . only a few of our lot who played for England too. How can they ever drop Cheltenham from the fixture list? Or Weston? A toffee-apple at Weston. Half a dozen years ago — Somerset v Northants — Botham strolled in and reeled off ten glorious sixers between me buying the sticky thing and finishing it. The bold Baron Beefy goes back to Weston this Wednesday with Worcester. I'll be there. You bet. Yet Somerset contemplate giving up Weston Week at every A.G.M. Sixty years ago next week, Surrey were the visitors. Soon after they had booked into the Royal Hotel, the spruce London captain, P.G.H. Fender took the lift to reception and summoned the manager. 'My good man, there's not enough room in my bedroom to swing a cat'. Mine host looked The Oval's city gent up, and then down, the full length of his pinstriped trousers. 'I didn't realise, sir', he said, very Somerset, `that you had come down to Weston for the cat-swingin' festival'.
Strawberries at the Saffrons. Yet the Suits want to do away with them both. When Eastbourne's pitch was reported for being unsuitable in 1982, the Guardian's Matthew Engel — best cricket writer of his generation — reckoned, 'To report the Saffrons to Lord's is akin to questioning a Mother Superior's chastity'. Days num- bered now, nevertheless.
Cherries, of course, at Canterbury. The quintessential and, from 1847, founder of the feasts. Best of the fests. The marquees — from the Mayor's to the Men of Kents and the Kentish Mens' (reconciled for the Week under one tarpaulin roof ) — are spicker, the white paint more span. The Band of the Buffs. Becket's cathedral over long-off. A Cowdrey in the covers. Or at slip. And Jim Swanton, between decrees, nibbling pendulous cherries, like Roman Emperors used to do.
Olde Englande. But for how long?
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