The Greatest Gift

My introduction to the game of cricket was through my dad.

He played the game for the local village, Purton in Wiltshire, – the oldest club in the county – and like many families we would go and watch him play. As a child I am not sure that I actually watched that much, I was too busy running here and there with the other children my age and nipping into the woods that skirted one side of the ground despite the foreboding sign “Trespassers will be Prosecuted.”

Games were played alongside the adults pitch where we would sometimes score six all run, and bat for hours rattling up huge scores alongside the unique thatched Octagonal “roundhouse;” from memory you could be caught off its high sloping roof! These games nearly always took place with bowlers bowling to one set of stumps at the pavilion end. The wicketkeeper’s job was not only to take catches and execute the odd stumping, but also to prevent any ball going into the Pavilion wall, for as soon as one did Flossy the tea lady would come out in her pinny and tell us to go play elsewhere. We would move a few feet further away, but never far.

When tea came the players would go in and sit at two long tables and enjoy Flossy’s sandwiches and cakes. I remember we too would take tea and sit with our mothers, and I would relish the cheese and salad cream sandwiches my mum made and cold sausages which always felt like a special treat only enjoyed at the cricket.

I would have been about seven or eight years old when I witnessed my dad sky a catch. The opposing fielder was positioning himself under the ball and as it neared his cupped hands I let out a loud appeal in our little game, hoping to put him off so that my dad could continue his innings. It didn’t work. As soon as he had returned to the pavilion and taken his pads off, my dad made a beeline for me and I received a severe reprimand for trying to put off the fielder.

My protestations that I was only trying to help him fell on deaf ears. I was told in no uncertain fashion that this was ‘not cricket.’ It was behaviour unbecoming the sport and those who played it.

Sent away to school and taught more about the game I became obsessed with it. I would read any book I could find on cricket, and loved reading about the players of yesteryear, WG Grace, Jack Hobbs, Fred Trueman, Harold Larwood, Douglas Jardine and Colin Cowdrey.

My Father would talk about Cowdrey, the Reverend David Sheppard, and Peter May, but it always seemed that Leslie Ames was his favourite, as he always seemed to talk about him. He was also a fan of Denis Compton and Bill Edrich, the Middlesex twins. He told of how he went to see Bradman play on ‘the Invincibles’ tour of 1948 at Lords against Middlesex, only to see the great man dismissed for just 6 runs. It was one of his greatest regrets that he never saw Bradman compile a big score.

I even read books on coaching and experimented bowling every delivery there was and mastered many.

Although that would change when one day the coach asked our wicket-keeper what I was bowling, “I am not sure,” was his reply, “It’s different every ball.” I was then taken away to the nets and made to practise with the coach and perfect one style of bowling. It would prove a key moment in my time playing the game.

It was at this school that I played against my father for the only time ever, in the annual father’s match. It could have been a memorable occasion but as fate would have it neither of us bowled at the other when they batted. I have no idea the outcome of the match, but it holds a special place in my heart as I have a photograph of me standing with my father, both of us in our whites and with caps on, it is the only photograph I have of us playing cricket together. Looking at it now it is eerie how as a 12 year old I am standing in a similar pose mirroring my fathers.

We only ever played one game in the same team together. That too was for the village team. It was a home game played on a typical English Summer’s afternoon and the bells from St Mary’s Church nearby rang a familiar peel, and told us that a wedding was taking place. Again this game holds vivid memories for me as I took three wickets in the match, and my father two. The report in the newspaper simply wrote Morrison for the wickets I took and M. Morrison for my father’s; So it looked like he took five wickets!

At my second school a family-famous conversation took place when I was 15 years old. I had my O’Levels coming up but was selected for the school first XI. On being told of my selection I went to the school payphone and called home to share the news. My father congratulated me, but I tempered my selection by explaining to him that I understood that I had only been selected as some members of the team had their A’Level exams.

His response was, “but you have exams too.”

There was a pause before I uttered the line he never forgot, “Yeah, but they don’t matter!”

He was right when he told me that this would possibly be the most expensive Cricket Club I would ever belong to!

When my aspirations of breaking into the first class game were dashed as the coaching staff at Hampshire told me that they were looking to bring through Hampshire born players – I was born in the neighbouring county of Wiltshire – unbeknown to me until many years later I was advised that my father called the coach Peter Sainsbury and advised him that I may not have been born in the county, but I was conceived in Hampshire! It did not change their decision, but I appreciated the gesture.

He always encouraged me in my playing of the game as he felt that Cricket taught you so much about life. There would be days you were given out when you hadn’t nicked the ball, and other days when you were given not out when you should have been. That was how life was, sometimes unfair but sometimes luck was on your side. He believed it was a competitive, strategic game, that was a battle of wits but essentially was just a game, to be enjoyed by all.

He was never a fan of the changes that started to come into the game as players began to be rewarded for their work. He had no time for some of the histrionics or the sledging. As for those involved in ball tampering, his view was they should be banned for life for damaging the integrity of one of the greatest games there was.

He tried several times when I was young to take me to a live game, but I must have been a jinx, as on the first three occasions we never saw a ball bowled, as rain washed out the day. The first time we went to the Oval in 1977 for an Ashes test we appeared on television two lonely figures sat under an umbrella in the temporary Vauxhall Stand, hoping the rain would stop and play would start.

In 2006 we did something neither of us had done. We attended every session of every day of a test match. Again it was an Ashes Test, this time at the WACA, where rain was unlikely to stop play. In this match he watched in awe Adam Gilchrist’s 57 ball hundred. This was a century scored in a style he would never forget, and so different from those he had witnessed his heroes score in his youth.

I never liked him watching me play. I don’t know why. As a boy he would always say before every game the same four words, “remember, line and length.” Maybe that was why I always preferred bowling to batting? Maybe I did not like him there watching because it gave us something to talk about after the game had been played, that I could tell him how the game had gone?

There was a secret that both of us never shared right to the very end. One day I was playing for Wiltshire, He knew that I did not like him watching me play, and yet he came to watch. He parked his car outside of the ground as he knew I would recognise it. I happened to be walking to third man after bowling, and saw him come through the gate of the ground. He stayed out of sight, and when the day’s play finished he quietly slipped away. He never told me that he was there, and I never let on that I had seen him. It was a special moment, for here he was wanting to respect my wishes but at the same time wanting to see me play. It is a treasured memory that I will always have.

Just as he did that day in the past month he quietly slipped away 12 days short of his 96th birthday. As I like to look at it run out going for a quick single.

It was one of my heroes the great cricket commentator and writer John Arlott, who famously said, “we take sport too seriously and life too lightly.” It is a sentiment worth remembering.

It was something that clearly my father agreed with, as he wrote in a piece entitled “My Last Word” which was handed out at his funeral which contained the following:

“Sport exemplifies life as it should be lived. Individuals come together willingly to compete against each other according to an agreed set of rules. The principle of sport is ‘fair play’. Indeed, cricket gave birth to the phrase that to cheat, or behave badly, was just “not cricket”.

There are forces afoot that would undermine the foundations of sport; these are mainly connected with the amounts of money involved in professional sport, but the ‘culture’ is filtering down into the amateur game. The ‘professional foul’ (a prostitution of the English language!) is becoming acceptable, as is the ethos of ‘win at all costs’. Sometimes it appears as though sport is becoming a substitute for war, rather than a game for recreation! Again, we should resist such forces and be prepared to defend, and fight for, what we hold dear – the principle of ‘fair play’ in sport, and in all other aspects of life.”

I will always be indebted to him for passing on the love of cricket, and the time spent playing, watching and discussing this great game. In fact our last ‘robust discussion’ as he liked to call them, happened to be about Cricket, which with hindsight seems fitting. However, the greatest gifts he gave me by passing on that love of the game are the lessons the game has taught me, and the friendships and enjoyment it has given me as a player and a spectator. Things upon which one can never place a value.

Thank you Dad.

(For those who have found this piece self-indulgent I apologise. Please just put it down as being part of the greiving process).