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ays his final test i would have liked to play more tests but i can understand why they did not pick me again his self praise tends to be pretty faint any blowing of his own trumpet muted his 5 20 against new zealand a record at the time was thanks to the sluggishness of the surface and their yearning to accelerate plus the fact that the off breaks were landing in the right place on taking 9 28 in australian grade cricket it must have turned a bit i suppose and i did not bowl much rubbish even so it s hard to imagine how this ever came about on taking his career best 8 17 on a worn pitch at bath the ball spun a lot and i must have bowled well so a modest man with much to be modest about not at all his estimate of his test career may be accurate rather than merely self deprecating but his one day bowling which he rather underplays entitled him to respect both his average and economy rates were superior to his england contemporaries emburey miller and hemmings his contribution to somerset s successes went far beyond his skills as a conciliator his word and he was memorably and unusually for an englishman part of a sheffield shield winning side the secret of his success as a journalist is similar to that of his bowling in that it is based on relentless accuracy not a bad attribute for a cricket correspondent combined with the ability to impart an unexpected spin on to an apparently straightforward delivery he gives the impression of being a rather reluctant author apart from emphasising the 32 year gap between books he writes of chairing the cricket society book of the year award for nine years the company and erudition of the judges were always a delight so too were some of the books but not all of them and i m increasingly conscious that i m now adding to the pile in the same way that he has no pretensions to being a verity or laker as a bowler he does not attempt to compete with his predecessors robinson glasgow and ross as a writer and there are few attempts at virtuoso literary effects when he does employ a simile describing phil edmonds who had temporarily lost his run up as shuffling one step like a nervous duckling on a riverbank it makes you realise how rarely he uses them perhaps taking to heart the advice of one of his editors his techniques for imparting his spin are harder to detect when reading a single article than they are over the length of a book one as paul edwards noted in his review for cricinfo is that he is a master of the paragraph that recounts an event only for the final sentence to offer a pleasing contrast or dry observation on all that has gone before another is that when he wants to make a point or even just a joke he tends to conceal it in parentheses geoffrey boycott in particular comes in from some quite pointed parentheses his mastery of these contrapuntal techniques is also one of the qualities that make him perfectly suited to his role as a radio summariser he admits characteristically that he was less successful as a commentator so a likeable book by a likeable man this may sound like damning with faint praise but in a time when his virtues modesty fairness subtlety good humour and reticence are not only often underrated but even regarded as defects i intend it as a strong recommendation the ending of the book does not have a precisely valedictory tone he is not intending to say goodbye quite yet but he is aware that the invitations to appear on tms may not be quite so frequent now and that i may be regarded as something of a throwback at the guardian and in the press box we should make sure to enjoy his company while we still can fifty years on may 31 2020 backwatersman 4 comments i have never been much of a collector but i am something of an accumulator collector implies to me that building the collection with its implication of organisation and completeness is the primary point of an acquisition whereas we accumulators acquire objects for their use value and build a collection as a by product simply because we have not discarded them in the world of cricket i d say wisden though far from useless of course is attractive to collectors whereas the playfair cricket annual attracts accumulators of whom i am one i have recently acquired this season s playfair online with some regret if i can wait i prefer to buy it from the friends of grace road shop but i have regretfully concluded the season will be almost over before i see that again if i ever do it occurred to me that it is now fifty years since i possessed my first copy of the annual bought for me by my father partly i now realise though i did not at the time to distract me while he attended to his own father who was seriously ill fifty years is a considerable period of time an observation which may seem a statement of the obvious to anyone who has not lived that long although 1970 and 2020 seem to me to be part of the same era in the world of cricket if we take it back another fifty we are in the immediate aftermath of the first war and fifty years before that we are at the dawn of the modern age in cricket grace s first year with gloucestershire before test matches or a formal county championship and not long after the legalisation of overarm bowling so i find that i have been watching cricket for at least a third of the time that the game has existed in its current form i can trace the history of my relationship with cricket by looking through my accumulation of playfair s i originally owned the editions from 1970 to i think 1975 by which time it had been superseded as my most browsed reference book of choice by the nme book of rock which shared its suggestive gnomic abbreviations bs vcl rather than lhb rfm and ability to make artists or cricketers whom i had never seen or heard appear more interesting than they probably were i don t think that i ever saw billy blenkiron bowl but i could have once given you a potted resume of his life and career he played football for spennymoor united you know in the same way that i could have named all of the albums by grand funk railroad though i had never heard their music and would not have liked it much if i had after that my interest waned and all the editions between 1976 and 2001 the year he died were inherited from my dad i had bought the 1988 and 1990 editions in a period when there had been a twitch on the thread and i was being drawn back to cricket but then nothing until 2002 the year i became a member at leicestershire since then the fluctuations in my preoccupation with cricket can be gauged by the tattiness of the playfair the tattiest of the lot being 2015 the last year i was at work the result of my carrying it with me in the overstuffed bag i lugged around on my commute i very much did not want to be on that train or in that office and lost myself in thumbing through the fixture list plotting my periodic escapes to radlett or finedon the essence of playfair is that being genuinely pocket sized it is designed to accompany a day at the cricket and specifically a day of championship cricket as opposed to wisden which i imagine is best read on a winter s evening in an overstuffed armchair accompanied by a glass or two of port although it does contain scorecards of the previous year s tests international averages and records the heart of it is the county register which gives the details of all players contracted to a county and the fixtures including those of the 2 nd xis and the minor counties these last were omitted one year in a rare misjudgement but hastily restored at any county ground you can observe the regulars consulting it enabling them to inform their neighbours that so and so s 37 means that he only needs another 23 for his highest first class score or that snooks and bloggs are only five away from equalling the record for their county s eighth wicket if you hear an outbreak of apparently random applause playfair will probably be at the root of it both prefaces found the editors in apprehensive mood gordon ross s preface to the 1970 annual is entitled this difficult summer the cause of the difficulty being the then still imminent tour by the south africans pen pictures of the tourists are provided and the threat of its disruption by protestors as he put it we face one of the gravest situations in the history of the noble game few watchers of the first class game are counting the days before the first ball is bowled with the relish of summers gone by in his foreword to the 2020 edition dated 16th march editor ian marshall writes that things are expected to get worse before they get any better so i fear that the fixture list at the back of the book could prove to be a case of wishful thinking in the event 1970 turned into one of the best summers of sport i can remember even allowing for the aurifying distortions of memory the south african tour was of course called off by order of the government to be replaced by a five match series against a rest of the world xi under the captaincy of gary sobers this allowed english audiences to see the south african stars and enabled them to demonstrate that they were happy to play in a multi racial team there may have been better bowling sides in test cricket but i can think of fewer stronger batting line ups than barlow richards kanhai pollock r g mushtaq mohammed sobers lloyd procter murray intikhab alam mckenzie even they though were in the shade of the mexico world cup which is generally thought to have featured the best side brazil and the best game italy v west germany in footballing history if only there were a chance that this summer might turn out to be as difficult a part of playfair s appeal is that its format is unchanging conveying a sense of continuity players appear in the register when they are awaiting first xi debut the length of their entry swells as they reach their prime before they shuffle off into the ranks of the released retired in the addendum to their county s listings to be replaced by a new generation in their turn awaiting first xi debut the great cycle of existence unfolds before your eyes with full career records fifty years is enough for time s tide to wash away a generation there is no one who appears in both the 1970 and 2020 editions the oldest umpire to have played first class cricket jeremy lloyds born november 1954 did not make his debut until 1979 ian gould though slightly younger first played in 1975 the oldest player in 1970 was derek shackleton born 1924 and the youngest richard lumb 1950 the oldest now is darren stevens born 1976 the youngest blake cullen of middlesex born 2002 there is nothing logically surprising in this of course but it acquires significance if viewed from the fixed perspective of one born in 1960 having the illusion of standing still while the cavalcade passes by in 1970 the oldest umpire lofty herman born 1907 was two years younger than my grandfather now leicestershire have ten players younger than my daughter in 1970 the youngest player was ten years older than me now there are only six umpires older and so it goes the game has not of course stood still in the course of fifty years and playfair has gamely strained to accommodate those changes the 1970 edition was 224 pages long now stretched to 351 if it carries on expanding like this it will be shaped like a cube and fit only for the pockets of a poacher the county register alone has grown from 83 to 121 pages it is true that there is now an extra county durham the details of the irish men s team are provided as are those of the england women s squad who last appeared in the large format version in the 1950s the county squads have grown in 1970 yorkshire made do with 18 contracted players they now have 31 as have their lists of officials in 1970 a secretary and captain seemed enough in 2020 surrey have a chief executive a director of cricket a head coach two assistant coaches and two captains in 1970 there was no need to specify how many twitter followers a county s account had i m not entirely convinced there is now the biggest change that has had to be accommodated is of course the proliferation of limited overs cricket 1970 playfair reported on the previous year s gillette cup and the first season of the john player league which in games affected by the weather reduced cricket to an absurdity but did not include any statistics or records relating to limited overs games in 2020 there are two sets of career averages for county players and international cricket and each player s details are swollen by their best performances in three types of cricket as if recognising that a line has to be drawn somewhere only england s t20 averages are included and only the bare figures for the players best performances in t20 rather than against whom they were achieved and spying where madness lies the editor notes that for both men s and women s it20 records sections i have taken the decision to limit the records listed to those games that feature at least one side that has appeared in an official loi while i welcome the icc s efforts to broaden the game s profile when uganda s women can beat mali s by 304 runs after scoring 314 2 including a run out you wonder who really benefits here or when turkey s men set the three lowest scores on record on successive days do they deserve to be shamed three times over space has also had to be found for the the hundred register though not as much as you might think as the editor notes all but eleven of the players are already contracted to one of the counties and can be dealt with by a cross reference it does though contain the unlovely details of how much they are being paid we shall have to see whether this register becomes a recurring feature or whether its presence makes 2020 a collector s item not much has been dispensed with to make room for all these statistics the university match has gone as have the minor counties and 2 nd xi tables there are no advertisements as there is no room even for the little box adverts that sometimes provided an inadvertent commentary on the text such as one offering to cure your inferiority complex next to england s record against australia or this from the 1969 edition who could have foreseen that outcome in the register the players details have boiled down into data with any hint of subjectivity embroidery or narrative eliminated which is rather a pity in the old large format playfair the editors had room to convey some idea of the players styles in the 1954 edition denis compton is described as at his best a genius still and alec bedser as the greatest rfm in the world today the most common terms are sound defensive or forcing attacking rhb but sometimes a more vivid description slips in fred ridgway of kent is a bucolic rhb reg perks worcestershire is an antagonistic lhb and eric hollies an unambitious rhb occasionally there is a hint of julian and sandy haydn davies glamorgan is a virile rhb tom hall somerset has a splendid physique doug wright ...