The utmost respect goes out to one of the county game’s elder statesmen, who produced the performance of a lifetime this week at the Riverside by taking all ten wickets to fall in Hampshire’s first innings.

Ottis Gibson’s astonishing figures of 10-47 is the first time a bowler has taken all ten wickets in an innings in the county championship since Richard Johnson against Derbyshire in 1994, and is all the more remarkable when you consider that at 38 most fast bowlers have either hung up their boots or are bowling modest spells for their local club side.

Gibson, though, continues to improve with age. He was Leicestershire’s player of the season in 2004 and repaid Durham’s investment in him by taking 49 championship wickets in just 13 games in 2006 as well as scoring a career best 155 in the final match of the season to ensure his new county’s survival in the championship’s top flight.

No one, though - not even the man himself - could have foreseen this week’s extraordinary events. “It was unbelievable,” Gibson said. “Something I never expected to do. I had five at lunch and said to Benky (Dale Benkenstein, the Durham captain) to just let me have three or four overs after the interval as I was quite stiff from a long spell in the morning. I somehow managed to get three more wickets and then the rain came. I was getting really tired so the Gods must have been on my side.”

One might have thought Benkenstein would have had trouble getting the ball off Gibson when the sides took to the field again, but in fact the opposite was true. “I told the captain to let Plunky (Liam Plunkett) have a go as he hadn’t bowled and I thought we should just get off the park as quickly as possible and get batting,” he said. “Benky said it wasn’t everyday you get the chance of taking all ten so I kept going. Luckily three balls was all it took.”

Gibson plucked out James Bruce’s off stump with a beauty to complete the full set, before setting off, arms aloft, for a mad celebratory dash towards the covers. He was quickly mobbed by his jubilant teammates: “I didn’t know what to do with myself. The boys said they had never seen me move that fast.”

Gibson’s exhibition of how to exploit helpful conditions should serve as the very best of lessons for Durham’s promising crop of young fast bowlers. He bowled straight, pitched the ball well up and found some late swing, claiming nine of his victims either lbw, bowled or caught behind the wicket.

Gibson admits he’s come a long way as a bowler from his early days in Barbados when he was a bit of a tearaway fast bowler. He first toured England in 1995 with a West Indies squad that included Curtley Ambrose and Courtney Walsh. Despite some promising performances, most notably in one-day internationals, he was never one of the first names on the team sheet and found himself out of favour at the end of the nineties, something he believes was key to his cricketing development.

“When I got dropped from the West Indies I moved into coaching,” Gibson said. “When you coach you pass on information and motivate others. I had to research other fast bowlers and really learn about the art of bowling. I learnt a lot in the two-and-a-half years I was coaching. That time really helped me. I had to learn new skills. I now know how to bowl, how to exploit conditions. It’s not all about bowling fast and hitting batsmen on the helmet.”

Having played for seven first class sides in three different continents, Gibson, is the archetypal cricketing nomad. For now, though, he is very much at home in the North East of England. “It was the best move of my life coming here. There is a great spirit at the club, they are a good bunch of guys. I am having a good season, helping the younger bowlers and helping the club move forward. Martyn Moxon signed me for that reason and I’m pleased I’m doing that.”

Johnson recalls

Richard Johnson can remember his ten wicket haul against Derbyshire in 1994 like it was yesterday. The Middlesex and former England fast bowler recorded figures of ten for 45 from 18.5 overs, statistics remarkably similar to those produced by Gibson (10-47).

At just nineteen, Johnson was half Gibson’s age and recalls that the enormity of his feat didn’t really sink in at the time. “It didn’t really feel like a big thing,” Johnson said. “I received a lot of publicity on the back of it but I hadn’t realised what I’d done. It’s only as you get older that you look back and realise that was a special day.”

While Gibson started the day in good rhythm, Johnson remembers feeling out of sorts at the start of the Derbyshire innings. “I felt terrible to start with,” he said. “The first wicket was a long hop that got hit to cover point. Peter Willey, who was umpiring, said that it could be one of those days and that I’d end up with five for. I guess I had a lot of things go my way, although I did start to bowl well as the innings progressed.”

One of the ways professional cricketers amuse themselves when the rain tips down for hours on end is to select an eleven who all fit a certain criteria. An “ugly eleven” selected straight out of the “Who’s Who” is always a good starter, closely followed by a “ginger eleven” and a “dwarf eleven”, which was traditionally captained by my former colleague at Kent Matt Walker.

As a tribute to Ottis Gibson’s ten wicket haul I’m inviting readers to put forward their best “Old Stager eleven”, which has to comprise players, who have played county cricket to a ripe old age during the last 15 years to coincide with my own career.

My squad reads: Gooch (c), Barnett, Bowler, Hick, Maynard, Stewart (wk), DeFreitas, Gibson, Caddick, Malcolm, Hemmings, Childs.