Brian Cheal

Of the many people whose company I have enjoyed at cricket grounds in two hemispheres, only Brian Cheal shared my dual allegiance to Kent and Gloucestershire. Like me, he came from Kent and lived in Bristol.

I entered Brian’s name in Google the other day, to discover this:

12/04/2010

Gloucestershire County Cricket Club regret to report the death of life member Brian Cheal. Brian was a hugely popular member of the club and will be sadly missed by all those who knew him. He was also President of local football club Ashley FC.

There will be a service held on Monday 26th April at 12:30 at Canford Crematorium. Brian requested no flowers but if anyone would like to make a donation, then please do so to St Peter’s Hospice, Bristol. After the service, refreshments will be available in the Grace Room at the County Ground, Bristol.

Both Brian’s parents died at around 60, and Brian reasoned that genetics would probably account for him at about that age. He lived his life according to that expectation and it seems that he was correct to do so. This is not to say that he adopted a lavish or hedonistic lifestyle, far from it. Rather, he was determined to gain full enjoyment from simple pleasures, particularly jazz, non-league football, real ale and, above all, county cricket.

For many years, these activities took up so much of his time that he had none to spare to join the rest of us in the world of work. When his inheritance ran out, he became a postman. Brian’s round was in Ashley Down, where he lived, a short walk from the County Ground. I knew some people on his route, and they regarded him highly, an old-fashioned postie who kept an eye on those without anyone else to do so, though on days when the first ball was to be bowled at 11, they would wake to the sound of the mail falling on the mat at the crack of dawn.

Brian would return to Kent several times a summer, always to the Nevill for Tunbridge Wells week, and usually to the Mote for Maidstone week, where he would stay with Allen Hunt (it was through Allen that I got to know him).

As the years went on, Brian was more inclined than me to stay in the west when fixtures conflicted. He particularly enjoyed the Cheltenham Festival and was a leading light of the 88 Club, a group of Gloucestershire supporters united, for reasons that none of them could quite remember, by their fascination for the number eight. The second day of the Gloucestershire v Yorkshire match at Cheltenham in 1988 was to them as a total eclipse of the sun might be to an astronomer, for it took place on Monday, 8 August 1988: 8.8.88. They convened in one of the marquees lining the boundary at eight minutes past eight that auspicious morning and none could tell you the score when they left the ground some ten hours later.

Brian was a knowledgeable and fluent commentator on the Bristol hospitals radio service, which ran ball-by-ball commentaries on games at the County Ground. I made occasional appearances in the commentary box at his invitation. In 1991 we commentated together on the final overs of a NatWest Trophy game between Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire that the Bristol weather had strung out into the third evening. Eddie Hemmings scrambled a last-ball single to give Nottinghamshire the game. Whether the effect of our description on our captive audience in the Bristol Royal Infirmary, Frenchay Hospital and elsewhere was restorative or otherwise, I don’t know.

Brian was a purist. When he joined Allen Hunt for weekend jaunts to Kent away games, he and George Morrell would find a country pub for Sunday lunch followed by an afternoon stroll instead of going to the 40-over Sunday League game. Allen would go to the game, believing the most inferior form of cricket to be superior to all other forms of human activity. Though I was never able to discuss it with him, I will say with certainty that Brian scorned T20.

I had always assumed that one day I would get back to the County Ground during the cricket season and catch up with Brian. I will watch cricket from the Hammond Room roof again, and when I do I will think of the Bristolian Kentish man for whom cricket was at the centre of a happy life.

Soul for Sale

St Lawrence Ground, Canterbury

The county cricket blog on The Guardian website has become one of the best sources of writing on county cricket, but a contribution from David Hopps on Friday was alarming:

Mention of Kent's parlous financial state – and the revisited theory that they might eventually move their HQ closer to London in search of Twenty20 riches – has brought a few emails from those in the know. A few Kent captains have observed over the years that the great error of Lord Harris, the second captain of England and a man who played for Kent for 40 years, was to choose a ground in Canterbury, which is somewhat out on a limb.

Jim Woodhouse, a former Kent chairman of cricket, suggested a move towards London 20 years ago and there was so much huffing and puffing from EW Swanton and the like that nothing was heard of it again. It could only ever happen if Kent went bankrupt and began again with a wholly different philosophy. Kent's entire ethos is based upon cricket played on beautiful, tree-lined grounds and for that perhaps cricket should be grateful.

What makes this apocalyptic vision scary is that the possibility of bankruptcy cannot be dismissed, such is the state of the county’s finances and the epic scale of the mismanagement over several decades that has brought this about (see previous post on the foray into the world of pop promotion).

However, David Hopps’ interpretation of the history is very wide of the mark. By the time of the modern county club’s formation in 1870 (when organisations centred on Canterbury and Maidstone merged) the St Lawrence Ground had been established as the county’s leading venue for several decades, through the success of Canterbury Cricket Week (which had not always included a county team). Lord Harris may be condemned for many reasons, but the choice of Canterbury as the county’s headquarters was obvious and, for more than a century, meant nothing in terms of where Kent played cricket.

As recently as the Championship season of 1970 Kent’s home championship fixtures were played on nine grounds around the county: Blackheath, Canterbury, Dartford, Dover, Folkestone, Gillingham, Gravesend, Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells (with a Sunday League game at Beckenham bringing the overall total into double figures). Canterbury had only the two games of Canterbury week, one Sunday game, and one Gillette Cup fixture (incidentally, neither Hesketh Park, Dartford, nor the Garrison Ground, Gillingham could be described as “beautiful”, nor, fond of it as I was, could Cheriton Road, Folkestone).

Quality of pitches and facilities, and the cost of transporting increasing amounts of paraphernalia from ground to ground (especially after the dreaded advertising hoardings came into fashion in the mid-seventies) meant that that Blackheath, Dover, Gillingham and Gravesend had been lost by the end of the seventies, but Folkestone and Dartford (on and off) hung on into the nineties, and Maidstone until just a few seasons ago.

The Mote, Maidstone

There is an issue here; the majority of the Kent population (and the membership) lives in the west of the county, including the south-eastern suburbs of London. It is reasonable that more cricket should be played in this area, though whether investing heavily in the Beckenham ground is the way to bring this about is questionable. I support the decision to play a home T20 game at the Oval (not a new idea, incidentally, and I have seen Kent play a home game at the Oval – any guesses?).

However, the view that the county would necessarily be better off by shifting needs to be challenged before it gains hold. Firstly, the St Lawrence Ground is not in the middle of Romney Marsh, nor on the Goodwin Sands. Neither the fording of rivers nor the transfer of bags to a team of sure-footed yaks is necessary to get to it. It is about a mile off the A2, the main route out of London to the south and east, and is easily accessible from everywhere else in the county.

People managed to get there easily enough in the seventies, when Kent had a winning, attractive team. Attendances were consistently higher than they were at the Oval or Lord’s for county games (and probably still are). And as I can testify from two decades spent watching county games in the wasteland of the County Ground, Bristol, being located in a large population centre does not guarantee crowds. Come to think of it, Gloucestershire makes a relevant case study; more money is made from the Cheltenham festival (location comparable with Canterbury) than most of the rest of the season at Bristol.

But more than that, cricket is a game with a soul. The suits who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing must never be in a majority of those in charge. County cricket, if it is to remain in existence, must respect its history and its roots as it looks ahead. If it is not prepared to do that, then we may as well adopt a franchise system, and run a combined Kent/Surrey team (the Whitbread Flat Vowlers, perhaps).

In the meantime, I hope that it won’t only be the ghost of Jim Swanton who is huffing and puffing at the possibility of for-sale notices going up along the Old Dover Road.

Kent v Loughborough University, St Lawrence Ground, Canterbury, 10, 11 and 12 April 2010

http://www.cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/262/262586.html

I’m just back from a quick visit to the UK which, surprisingly for early-to-mid-April, offered a first opportunity for eight years to watch cricket at Canterbury, even if only for a (slightly) glorified practice match.

I was apprehensive as I drove onto the St Lawrence Ground. It was like meeting an old girlfriend, many years later. Would the years have been kind to her? Had she forgiven me for leaving? Would it be awkward? Obviously, the concomitant dangers of such an encounter were absent. A cricket ground could not remark on how much weight I had put on, or ask if that wasn’t the same sweater that I used to wear in 1984.

There was no need for concern. The ground was comfortingly familiar, though the lime tree that had stood on the boundary’s edge for as long as the ground has existed is gone, its absence less obvious than could have been imagined when it was there. A replacement is in place, no more than ten feet high yet.

Neither was St Lawrence in quite the rundown state that some reports had led me to expect. The club is in dire financial straits, made worse by a disastrous foray into pop concert promotion. James Morrison broke even, but the Sugababes went down as well as a county championship game at a Metallica concert. The club chairman, apparently with a straight face, reproved members for not supporting the event, which conjured a  image of an audience consisting of stonyfaced people in jackets and club ties, eating sandwiches from Tupperware boxes during Get Sexy*.

The cricket was pleasing, but untaxing. In other circumstances I would be exercised about the granting of first-class status to a match against a university side but it was so nice watching cricket at Canterbury that I didn’t care. Remarkably for the time of year it was a nice day, as long as you stayed in the sun.

Kent won the toss and batted. I was hoping for big scores from Joe Denly and Sam Northeast, neither of whom I had seen before, but Denly went in the first over, and Northeast managed only a painstaking ten. It was Rob Key and Geraint Jones who scored the runs in the first half of the day, both completing centuries by early afternoon. Jones (to whom I was well-disposed from the start, having enjoyed an excellent bacon roll before play in the bar he runs in the indoor school; the pigs are his own, I understand) looked particularly good from the first ball he received, which he cover drove for four.

Key reached 140 before retiring, without pretending to be injured or ill, so being recorded “retired out” on the scorecard, the first time my Blean correspondent or myself had seen such a thing. It brought the first-class status of the proceedings into further disrepute, of course. This is not to say that the students did not look and act like a first-class side in many respects; there was much clapping of hands and mutual encouragement (Rose being particularly vocal from fine leg), and they could no doubt have talked about “areas” and “zones” all day, given the opportunity. It was only in that brief but crucial period that starts with the ball leaving the bowler’s hand and ends with it reaching the batsman that they looked several days’ walk away from living up to their description as a “centre of cricketing excellence”. But they did have a Tavaré, William, a nephew of the great CJ.

One thing was odd. Loughborough’s slow left-armer, Welsh, came on at the Nackington Road End, from where such bowlers rarely bowl in my experience, because of the significant slope from the hospital to the Old Dover Road sides of the ground. I doubt that I saw Derek Underwood bowl half a dozen overs from that end in twenty years. I thought that this was no more than youthful inexperience (though Graham Dilley, the Loughborough coach, should know better). However, on my brief visit to the ground on the second day, James Tredwell was bowling his off spin from the Pavilion End. A short boundary on the legside (I have never seen cricket on a pitch so far towards the southern side of the ground) made this all the more mysterious.

There was a brief glimpse of Martin van Jaarsveld later in the afternoon, enough to understand why he has scored so heavily in recent years. He has an efficient technique, and hits the bad ball where it deserves to go. He reached his century towards the end of the day, but by that time my Blean correspondent and myself had retired to the Pheonix (happily reopened after a period of closure) where we put bad records on the juke box, just as we did when we were young.

I paid a brief visit on the second day, but the sun had gone in, the nor’easter had got up and it was most unpleasant. Some of the Kent players were wearing beanies to keep warm and went about their task with all the enthusiasm of a meeting of the Kent branch of the Geoffrey Boycott Appreciation Society. Meanwhile, Loughborough were grinding away at about two an over. After a trudge around the ground I left, to return who knows when.

*I had to look that up on Wikipedia, obviously.