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.