Last in the Tin Bath Read online

  Last in the Tin Bath

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © 2015 by David Lloyd Promotions Limited

  This book is copyright under the Berne convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of David Lloyd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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  The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given. Corrections may be made to future printings.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback: 978-1-4711-5044-9

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-4711-5046-3

  Typeset in Bembo by M Rules

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

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  To all my family

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Last in the Tin Bath

  2. Accy Thump

  3. Home Sweet Dogs’ Home

  4. Red Rose Rising

  5. Educating Bumble

  6. The New Bond

  7. National Service, at the Double

  8. Felled by a Cracker at the WACA

  9. Jack of all Trades

  10. Flippin’ Heck

  11. The Engine’s Running

  12. The Kapes Crusader

  13. Climbing the Ladder

  14. Cleaning up our Act

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  I have probably qualified for the gold watch when it comes to cricket. Aside from the briefest of diversions in the early 1980s, it has provided me with my livelihood since being signed on at Old Trafford as an inky-fingered fifth former back in 1963. This year represents the fiftieth anniversary since my first full season as a professional with Lancashire. Not that I am after any kind of long-service award.

  You see, the pleasure has been all mine. Yes, it has been some journey, and like all of substantial length it has contained its highs and its lows, catching the praise and dodging the brickbats, although I am pleased to report it has never become as disconcerting as the one experienced by mate Craig ‘Donkey’ Daniels in the 2015 Wilmslow half-marathon when, having bet against half our local pub that he would finish in semi-professional time, he was overtaken by a man pushing a wheelbarrow, a full-sized Paddington Bear and a pantomime horse in quick succession. By that stage, a few miles in, dripping with sweat, he anticipated being a good few pounds lighter by the finish line. Around £500, as I recall.

  It was hellishly tough breaking into that Lancashire dressing room as a meek sixteen-year-old, but as I reflect on it from my privileged seat in the commentary box for Sky Sports, there is a recognition that it was the making of me. The testosterone-fuelled mickey-taking, the hard graft for little reward, the harsh lessons of failure coupled with the joy of victory and personal achievement held me in good stead. Life as a county cricketer was the garden of my life, but it was not always sunshine and roses, even though I yearned for the funny side of all events.

  Thankfully, where there were tears, laughter was never far behind. Most notably, when Bob ‘Knocker’ White, who went on to become a bloody good umpire, was batting for Nottinghamshire at Old Trafford in the late 1960s, when, with a half-century to his name, he suffered a twinge in his back. Visiting teams did not have physios travel with them in those days and so our man Bill Ridding ran on. Knocker, bent double, had some Fiery Jack ointment rubbed into the area to relieve the pain and reduce the stiffness. It worked a treat, although Fiery Jack was a product that really lived up to the name on the tin. After resuming batting, Knocker began moving more freely and even got a sweat on, which was the cause of his retiring hurt soon afterwards, as the stuff began running down his arse cheeks. After numerous gulps and groans, his face turning redder and redder, eyes watering, he departed to place his derriere in the bath, leaving several other men on the opposition crying for a different reason.

  Cricket is a sport that acts as a magnet for characters and I am grateful to have met many across all the roles I have held in the game – from young shaver at Lancashire, to England player, coach from grassroots to international arena, first-class umpire and latterly commentator. They have all helped fill the game’s progress with fun. And how different it was back in the sixties when Bert Flack, the groundsman at Old Trafford, declared Pakistan’s innings against Lancashire in a touring match by entering the field with the roller and telling the batsmen: ‘It’s our turn now.’ Can you imagine that these days? There would be an ICC inquiry.

  It is with a heavy heart that a cricketer gives up the comradeship of the dressing room and it might explain why I refused to pack in altogether when I came out of the county game in 1983, and even went back for another spell with my beloved Accrington Cricket Club not long before I turned pensionable age. Every April I long for the whiff of Ralgex in the nostrils and recall the hundreds of blokes I am proud to have called team-mates. There is even a thought or two for those I am not. Cricket, mirroring life, occasionally pitches you together with work colleagues you might not otherwise pass the time of day with.

  While I have always cared deeply about the fortunes of the England team, and still do – never more so than when I had the privilege of coaching it for three years – neither have I forgotten where it all began, or where I passed through to get there. It is why, in recent years, I have put my name to the Lancashire League and Professional Cricketers’ Association, serving as president of both organisations. The sport has given me plenty and this has represented a chance to give something back.

  To be frank, if you put me in a darkened room and shone a bright light in my eyes under questioning, I would tell you that my natural devotion lies elsewhere. It’s always been like that for me, really. Football has been my first love. My business has been cricket. It means I have come to like both of them equally. One of them is a real passion, something to keep me occupied on a social level, and yet it is the other one that has allowed me to make a living through expertise.

  Sport in general makes me happy. I don’t really know either of the rugby codes, never found the time to get into them, but as the years tick by and I speak to pals who do, I find myself wishing I had. Other lads that I played with and coached at Lancashire were into rugby league, but I wasn’t born in that same M62 corridor heartland. And the red-trouser brigade who follow rugby union certainly never stopped off at Accrington. That’s far too posh and anyone that knows anything of the area knows we don’t do posh. But the bottom line is that competitive action tends to get me hooked. I can get lost watching the darts; I love watching snooker; the Do Not Disturb signs go up on our lounge door if I decide to sit down and watch a televised racing meeting. You probably know lots of folk like me. Just call me Mr Bloke.

  Through the toughest times – the back end of my playing days with Lancashire, a personal crusade against entrenched English habits while coach of the national team – I hope that bloke
was still recognisable. If he went missing temporarily, I always tried to get him back. Those whose careers took me in as both coach and co-commentator – such as Michael Atherton and Nasser Hussain – have been best placed to judge, I guess, but I retain confidence that all the friendships and loyalties developed during the late 1990s still remain intact as I sit back and put my lifetime in the sport to paper.

  As a youth, I took a while to come out of the shell. My innocence and modest upbringing, combined with having a disciplinarian of a mother, slowed my transition from childhood into adolescence. But once I began to gain confidence, the simple advice of my father, a man with a strict devotion to his Methodist beliefs, has never been far away from my thoughts. ‘Be yourself,’ he used to tell me.

  By nature, I am a positive person who likes the light-hearted side of life, and I hope that has come across in my commentary. This is not to say I refuse to be critical, merely that I try to paint players in the best possible light whenever given the chance. Of course, sometimes your judgements turn out to be severely skewed, and a player surprises you. One of the best things about sport, and forming opinions, as you have to do in my position, is being proved right. But I confess that it nearly always feels better to be proved wrong.

  Take Steve Smith. As I write, he is the world’s number one-ranked Test batsman. Yet when Australia first picked him in the 2010-11 Ashes it looked to me like they could have easily thrown in any member of the Alan Price Set, the group that sang about Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear, and been as well served. Fast forward four years and he looks a totally different player, captaining Australia successfully in Michael Clarke’s absence in a Test series against India and churning out runs across all formats. Seldom has he failed since establishing himself in the Baggy Green at the end of our 2013 summer. Opponents have struggled to stop him, although I may have missed a trick in this regard. During the 2015 World Cup, I bumped into him and his partner in a restaurant. Would you believe it? He only had his bat with him! And he would have left it behind but for my intervention. It would have been better service to queen and country to have confiscated it.

  He is not the only batsman to have made it to the top who has done me like a kipper. If I am watching a match at home it tends to be through a TV production eye rather than that of a cricket aficionado, considering things that have worked well and those that have not. But when I am at a match, doing my job, I become more interested in the skill, and similarly to Smith, the progress made by Hashim Amla since English viewers first got a sight of him back in 2004-05 has been fascinating. When he turned up on the world scene he was a walking wicket and the way he has transformed his game has been phenomenal. The best players do not always start on the international scene like world-beaters.

  The progress of some speaks volumes for their determination to succeed. The way Mitchell Johnson went from bowling from the left, bowling to the right, to bowling straight at the batsman at the speed of light was a wonder to behold. To witness Mahendra Singh Dhoni suddenly come to life in an innings is intoxicating, even though he has done it to you several times before. Players like him truly get you lost in the moment behind the microphone. Then, there are the wondrous bowlers the unpredictable Pakistan continue to churn out. Long after I vacate the commentary box for a final time, they will be unearthing them, you can be certain of that.

  The game advances in some ways and stays the same in others. There are a few of us now who watch what modern players do on a morning of a match to prepare and every single one of us would be of the opinion that the warm-ups they get through these days represent a lot of work before they get into the six or seven hours on the field. Jimmy Anderson – and clearly it is what he wants to do – will bowl something like thirty deliveries before the start of play. That’s five flippin’ overs. In the past, someone like Ken Higgs, a strapping bloke, would just get through the rhythm, nice and loose by stretching. Peter Lever was exactly the same. Then there is that anomaly that when all the prep has been done, they wander off, the captains have the toss and all the players are then sat around for half an hour back in the dressing room. I am sure a physiologist would tear me to pieces, but I feel that they have been doing too much. We had a cup of tea, did the crossword, then hit a few catches, had a hit and then had a bowl. It would all be over and done with and the only extra would be a stretch for the fast bowlers in the dressing room. I wouldn’t call that unprofessional.

  For 250 days of the year, I am assessing cricketers and watching the development of teams. In Joe Root I believe England have a player who will be spoken of as one of the best batsmen on the planet in future years and I place a quiet confidence in the new management team of Andrew Strauss, Trevor Bayliss and Paul Farbrace to deliver something special. It is early days, but the raw materials are there and the environment to progress is in place.

  Even in my downtime I can be spotted at league cricket grounds, watching my grandchildren up at Accrington, or nipping along to see Saturday matches at Bramhall, in Cheshire, or Easingwold in North Yorkshire, clubs near to the bases I have set up in my life with Diana. There are other pursuits to be enjoyed, such as long walks with Tags our fox terrier – me on my second knee, Diana on a new hip – or a day out on my BMW F800ST motorbike. These activities, like some of the items on my bucket list, such as riding a horse or travelling about on a canal boat, provide a break from the old routine. Our great British pubs offer me further respite, and a refuge for conversation to meander onto other topics over a decent pint of ale, but it has never been a hardship to talk cricket and I will gladly natter about it at the bar if someone wishes. After all, it is, I am told, what I do best.

  CHAPTER 1

  Last in the Tin Bath

  One of the trendy buzz phrases used in English cricket circles over recent times has been ‘appointment to view’. According to the market research people, fans of the game wanted an allotted time slot in the week for their Twenty20 fix; a regular blast off, if you will. For some Friday night is music night and nothing else. For others, however, Friday night is NatWest night, that being the most popular time for our eighteen counties to conduct their family-oriented fun.

  It was a family night for us too back in the 1950s. If you had made an ‘appointment to view’ visit on a Friday to 134 Water Street, Accrington, a short while after the town had digested its fish suppers, you would have had the displeasure of seeing yours truly, a twig of a lad with slightly sticky-out ears, covered in seven days’ worth of grime being dunked and returned to my original milk-bottle-white complexion.

  Think of one of those corner-set luxury whirlpool baths with multiple speed settings, an array of gentle bath soaks, shampoos and Egyptian cotton towels . . . then erase it from your thoughts as you are getting completely the wrong idea.

  It was more like sheep dipping, if truth be told.

  Seldom did luxury come to town in Accrington. If it had it would have been run out by the mob, I reckon. A place like that offered a pretty rough-and-ready upbringing, but like most kids of my generation I made the most of the outdoors. Covered in dirt by Friday evenings, scrapes on my knees, bruises littered indiscriminately around my body, my habitual ‘treat’ was to scrub off the badges of honour during this weekly ritual. You see, Friday night was wash night.

  The appearance of the tin bath full of suds in our back parlour was a regimented affair and like all regiments had an established pecking order. This was not just my night to scrub up, it belonged to the whole family, so I had to wait my turn. The cost of producing hot water restricted us to one soak a week and naturally it was adults first. And when I say family I don’t just mean me and my parents. Oh, no. There were only three of us living on a permanent basis at 134 Water Street, but my Uncle Harry and Auntie Annie lived five blocks up with my cousins Brian and Jean. Now Auntie Annie must have been a bit of a tyrant because at various stages of my childhood, Uncle Harry, Brian and Jean came to live with us, and that meant I got knocked down a rung or two.

  M
y dad, David senior, and Harry, his brother-in-law, worked up at the foundry, which no two ways about it was a really shitty, dirty job. They would come home utterly filthy and make do with taking a soap and flannel to themselves throughout the week before their big plunge on a Friday night to get properly clean.

  I was an only child so you might have anticipated my lot not being so bad. But Uncle Harry would also have his turn to jump in before muggins here dipped a toe. Not that I could see my toe once it was in. You can no doubt imagine the colour of the water when it came to my turn and the reduction in its temperature since it had been filled. You will have heard the phrase ‘as happy as a pig in shit’? Well, I conformed to the stereotype, without the contentment.

  This once-a-week ceremony took place downstairs for the first few years of my life. Later, Dad created a DIY bathroom upstairs by partitioning part of my bedroom off with plasterboard and erecting a new floor out of pallets from the local glass factory that one of our family members used to collect for him. Establishing an upstairs bathroom was our doffing of our flat caps to modern life.

  We stuck to using the outside lavatory, though, to avoid any accusations of opulence. Sure, the cleaning of teeth could take place inside, but going to the loo was always an outdoors expedition whatever the weather. You would have to make your way outside, as icicles formed on your imponderables, to sit on the throne, and there was no toilet roll to speak of – being an exorbitant item, it never made it onto our shopping list. Instead, there were bits of old newspaper that Mum and Dad would pin to the back of the toilet door. Who said recycling was a twenty-first-century fad?

  Once read these rags would be put to a secondary use. Some people say they’re full of shit anyway, but I’ve always been an advocate of a good newspaper, and not for the kind of use we got out of the Daily Herald and the Daily Sketch.

  Kids of 2015 don’t know they’re born. We take so much for granted these days. Wake up in a morning during winter and your bedroom more often than not is like the Bahamas in holiday season. Central heating? Back then, there would be genuine frost on the windows – and I’m talking about the insides. The only chance of heat entering the house between October and March meant an Antarctic trek into the backyard to get a shovel full of coal. Even then, you would be shivering for a quarter of an hour before the fire took its full effect.