The elderly faithful who take tickets at the Nevil Road entrance to Bristol’s
County Ground would argue a Martian had more chance of being selected to
play for England than one of their own. History suggests they are correct.
Despite its recent emergence as an international venue, Gloucestershire’s
home base remains a deeply unglamorous venue for ECB selectors – smack in
the middle of a Victorian suburb on the edge of the city proper, with
limited parking facilities and none of the more obvious charm of New Road,
Taunton or Trent Bridge.
But the flat track that has denied so many willing bowlers has played host to
some of the greatest players the world has seen. Although the club is known
these days as a haven for one-day specialists, relatively few realise that
it was one of the early giants of the county championship, winning the
inaugural eight-team tournament in 1873. Three more titles followed, all of
them, somewhat annoyingly, before the competition was formalised in 1890,
but the ghosts of that nascent glory still take tea in the shadow of our
grand old pavilion.
For me it will always be the place to watch cricket: warm, welcoming and just
ten minutes’ walk from the mid-terrace house my grandparents called home for
more than 60 years. One day I’ll move back and watch them again – and if any
of the team match this XI for quality, Geoff Miller had better be there.
1. WG Grace (Capt): How many sportsmen from the late 19th and early
20th centuries can you picture in your mind’s eye? Two, perhaps? Three if
you have an exceptional memory for detail. Only one is as recognisable as
the good doctor, father of the modern game and still quite possibly the
greatest talent in the history of cricket. More than 54,000 runs across 44
seasons, including 839 in three innings in 1876, and not far short of 3,000
wickets at less than 18 runs apiece; if the latter statistic was assisted by
the ropey pitches of Victorian England, the former most certainly was not.
2. Arthur Milton: He’s only just left us, has Arthur, and upon his
death in April the world witnessed the passing of the only remaining double
cricket and football international. He played only six Test matches for
England, despite scoring a century on debut against the 1958 New Zealand
touring side, but treated Gloucestershire supporters to more than 32,000
runs and 56 first-class centuries. He was also a brilliant short leg,
snaffling 758 catches in all, and became a postman when he retired from the
game in 1974. Can’t see Andrew Strauss doing that.
3. Wally Hammond: How good was Hammond? Put it this way, unless you
were fortunate enough to see Bradman or Hobbs in action, you have no measure
of the man. His Wisden obituary placed him in the same class as both, along
with Grace, and it is not because he had a reputation for aloofness that
there are ways in which he could be described as superior to all three. For
a start, he was one of the best slip fielders ever – his season record of 78
catches still stands, 79 years after it was set – and he also bowled
medium-fast well enough to take 732 first-class wickets at 30.58. With the
bat, he averaged 56.10 for every visit to the crease, the highest of any
player to have scored more than 50,000 runs.
4. Tom Graveney: Michael Vaughan? Carthorse. David Gower? Like an
elephant in stilettos. If you want to see true grace in a batsman, find
yourself an old clip of Graveney at his best, in the follow-through of one
of his mellifluous cover drives. Elegance incarnate, he suffered the same
criticisms as other aesthetic batsmen in that he was considered prone to
careless dismissals, but he still managed a recall to the England team – and
24 of his 79 Tests – after reaching the age of 39. With 122 first-class
centuries in all, it was clearly Gloucestershire’s loss that he moved up the
M5 to Worcestershire, halfway through his career.
5. Zaheer Abbas: Remember when England tried to get Michael Hussey out
during the Ashes? Well Zaheer was even harder to dismiss. Despite the
concentration of a buddhist monk and sticking power of a limpet, he was
another who batted with flair; so much so that many were surprised he opted
to play for Gloucestershire when so many more ‘fashionable’ counties were
keen to snap him up. He stayed with us throughout, adding one mountain of
runs to another during the 1970s and early 80s, and remains the only Asian
to have made 100 first-class centuries.
6. Mike Procter: Bowled off the wrong foot, didn’t he? No, he didn’t, but he did bowl very quickly, swinging the ball late with devastating
results, and hitting it as though it had insulted his wife. I recall
watching him in the late 1970s when he helped Gloucestershire to win the
Benson & Hedges Cup. The sight of him steaming in from the Ashley Down
Road end was enough to make grown men whimper; and then he batted, like Thor
reborn. Denied the acclaim he deserved because of South Africa’s apartheid
policy, he is surely up there with Botham, Hadlee, Imran Khan and Kapil Dev
as the greatest post-Sobers all-rounders.
7. Gilbert Jessop: Phew - what a middle order! Jessop would have made
Andrew Flintoff look like Chris Tavare, such was his penchant for striking
the ball beyond the confines of the turn-of-the-century County Ground. He
drove, he hooked, he glanced, he cut – no shot was beyond the means of a man
who swung a bat like the Sword of Damocles, often scoring at the rate of 100
runs per HOUR. Not bad for someone who was selected to play for England
because of his talent as a fast bowler. The Croucher’s memory lives on, 52
years since his death, in the Jessop Tavern next to the old scoreboard.
8. Jack Russell (wkt): Oh, how timely. Were he playing now, it is still
unlikely Russell would be selected for England, despite his natural
brilliance behind the stumps and a more than respectable Test batting
average of 27.10 (this was once considered respectable for a wicketkeeper,
the role of whom originally was to keep wicket). Despite a paltry 54 Tests,
he was never short of supporters in his home county, which enjoyed two of
its most successful decades after Russell replaced Andy Brassington as
first-choice in the 1980s. Mesmerising – occasionally infuriating – I have
never seen a better wicketkeeper standing up.
9. Charlie Parker: And you thought Gloucestershire lacked spinners.
Well here are the statistics: in every summer from 1920 until his retirement
in 1935, Parker, a left-arm slow bowler, took more than 100 wickets. In five
of these seasons he took more than 200. In all, he managed 3,278 first-class
wickets - bettered only by Wilfred Rhodes and ‘Tich’ Freeman – at a cost of
19.46. On the uncovered squares of Mars it is fair to assume he would be
nigh well unplayable, even if he did decide to bowl over the wicket. Monty
Panesar has got a long way to go.
10. George Dennett: Another left-arm slow bowler, but with a deadliness
that would more than make up for any lack of variety, Dennett is often cited
as one of the finest county players never to have played international
cricket. Discovered by Jessop playing for a local club in Bristol, he, like
Parker, once took all ten wickets in an innings. Perhaps his most famous
achievement came in 1907, when his eight wickets for nine runs helped reduce
Northamptonshire to 12 all out, but his career figures say it all: 2151
wickets at 19.82 runs apiece. And he came from Dorset. How perfectly West
Country.
11. Courtney Walsh: Along with Curtly Ambrose, he represented the last
great dynasty of West Indies fast bowlers; in Gloucestershire he is seen as
the epitome of another dying breed, the one-club overseas signing. As
willing to share a dressing-room with Phil Bainbridge as might be with Brian
Lara, Walsh spared not one iota of effort during his 14 years at the club,
and it was his fearsome new-ball partnership with a young David ‘Syd’
Lawrence in the mid-1980s that helped Gloucestershire to finish third and
second in the Championship in successive years. The first man to reach 500
Test wickets, imagine what it must have been like to face him under
darkening skies in Bristol. Frightening. The Martians would run for cover.
My favourite XI
Who to leave out? Even when you look beyond the very best players to have
represented the county, there are many who enjoyed successful careers at the
highest level. This selection, of course, is based entirely on personal
affection; the cricketers I watched with my friends from the boundary during
John Player League matches in the 1980s. On paper it looks a match for most
teams – certainly I would expect it to occupy the upper echelons of the
championship – but I’m not sure that today’s international schedule would
have helped the cause.
1. Chris Broad
It might seem odd to open the order with a man who deserted Gloucestershire in
the prime of his career, claiming that the club’s alleged lack of ambition
was hampering his chances of an England call-up. But you have to admire
someone single-minded enough to make such an unpopular decision, especially
given that he was proved right – he was selected almost as soon as he joined
Nottinghamshire, in 1984, and would have played many more than 25 Tests if
only he hadn’t been such a stroppy so and so. Inelegant but wonderfully
stubborn, at least he returned home once his Aussie-bashing days were over.
2. Bill Athey
OK, so you’ve already deduced that this isn’t a team full of cavaliers.
Athey’s appeal was not that he could take an attack apart in an hour, more
that he could deny one with limitless patience and a repertoire that
consisted mainly of a stubborn, straight bat. Gloucestershire were a better
side from the moment he arrived, after which his form throughout the 1985
and ’86 seasons earned him a deserved recall to the England team. He opened
the batting with Broad during the 1986-87 Ashes series, but his performances
at Test level never matched his achievements on the county circuit.
3. Phil Bainbridge
Bains was once considered a potential Test player, but his form always seemed
to fall away at the wrong moment. Named one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of
the Year after scoring more than 1600 runs in the 1985 season, he was
another player crucial to Gloucestershire’s mid-1980s resurgence;
conversely, when he failed to score heavily, the county’s fortunes also
dipped. A good medium-paced bowler too, there is reason to think he would
have done at least as well at international level as, say, Derek Pringle,
but then he wasn’t playing for a club with quite the cache of Essex.
4. Paul Romaines
To be fair, his record suggests that he would struggle to get into any of
today’s championship teams, but if nothing else Romaines deserves selection
for having the best nickname: Human. Just 8,000 runs at 28 doesn’t tell the
true story of a courageous middle-order batsman, who earned a permanent
place in my heart with a succession of invaluable innings during the 1984
season (when English cricket was going through something of a depressed
phase). And I’ve got his autograph.
5. Zaheer Abbas
The first spectacle-wearing batsman I saw (I was a bit young to be watching
David Steele at the height of his fame) but there was nothing myopic about
his range of shots – all full-flowing drives and delicately timed glances.
He was loyal, too.
6. Mike Procter
It is impossible to overstate quite what a coup for Gloucestershire was
Procter’s arrival in Bristol. He was a true star of the cricket world, with
a talent to match his natural flamboyance, and although I’m not quite old
enough to recall the Gillette Cup victory of 1973, his contributions towards
the Benson & Hedges triumph four years later remain forever etched in the
memory. He’d be the best all-rounder in the world today.
7. Jack Russell
The subject of only my second feature interview as a journalist (the first was
Mike d’Abo, a terrific performer with Manfred Mann but not, as far as I
know, a top-class wicketkeeper). I distinctly remember him telling me that
the job was the most important thing in his life, which as a Gloucestershire
supporter was just about all I wanted to hear. He certainly played as though
it was; 23 years at the County Ground, every one of them under that battered
old hat. Towards the end, England’s loss was our gain.
8. John Shepherd
Here is someone whose skills as a nagging swing bowler, hard-hitting
late-order batsman and superb fielder would guarantee admission into today’s
West Indies team. As it is, this much-underestimated Bajan played only five
Test matches, all of them more than a decade before he joined
Gloucestershire from Kent in 1982, aged 38. My favourite memory is of him
bowling Ian Botham in a championship match, much to the disappointment of
visiting Somerset supporters, and he played with verve and distinction for
six years before going off to coach youngsters in Eastbourne.
9. David Graveney
Boo. Hiss. Bit Establishment, isn’t it, picking the chairman of selectors for
your favourite county team? Well, I admit that defection to Taunton almost
did for Graveney’s chances, but he spent 19 seasons with Gloucestershire
before moving to Somerset, so on this occasion I’ll forgive. Although he
lacked the natural talent of the Middlesex Phils – Edmonds and Tufnell – he
must have felt unlucky on occasions in the 1980s when overlooked for the
England left-arm spinner’s job in favour of John Childs and Richard
Illingworth. Graveney once let me sit next to him for tea when, as a
14-year-old, I had a job in the scoreboard by the Jessop Tavern. That pretty
much etches his name onto the team sheet.
10. David Lawrence
He would undoubtedly have played more Tests had it not been for an horrific
injury, suffered while running into bowl for England in only his fifth Test
match, in 1992. But it’s not just sympathy that gets ‘Syd’ his place in the
team. In tandem with Courtney Walsh, he gave Gloucestershire a truly
fearsome attack in the second half of the 1980s, arms and legs pumping like
pistons as he ran in with the force of an express train. Lawrence was brave,
too, returning to first-class cricket for a short while after his setback –
the sort that would have killed most careers stone dead.
11. Courtney Walsh
It is impossible to leave Walsh out. More lithe than Lawrence, but with a
heart just as big and several hundred wickets more, he was one of the
world’s leading bowlers for more than a decade - but still he played for
Gloucestershire. Quite right too.
