Readers concerned that the seemingly imperious march of Bazball across the cricket firmament has blotted out the more, er, traditional virtues of the game need fret no more. Matches in the ninth division of the Derbyshire League don’t normally make headlines from Australia to Qatar but a needle relegation tussle between Mickleover Third XI and Darley Abbey’s Fourth team was no ordinary game. Mickleover piled up a chunky 271-4 declared in a mere 35 overs, thanks largely to a teenager called Max Thompson who belted 186 from 128 balls, with a feast of fours and sixes.
If you have to call up J.K. Rowling’s bespectacled wizard, you really are in a spot of bother
In fairness to the Darley boys, it can’t have been fun flogging round the outfield chasing after boundaries, but they decided to go about their reply in a spectacularly dour way. Even for Derbyshire. The opener Ian Bestwick set out not to score a single run and duly ended on nought not out from 137 balls. Eventually Darley reached a studious 21-4 from 45 overs. Pity the spectators, and it can’t have been particularly jolly in the pub afterwards. Though Bestwick did say: ‘The atmosphere in our dressing room was second to none. It was brilliant.’ I guess that’s Derbyshire for you.
The performance will have given huge heart to many has-beens who can barely hit it off the square these days. But hope springs eternal. Especially after the other great cricketing highlight – not Gus Atkinson’s fantastic century at Lord’s, but 62-year-old Marten Gadd, who hadn’t played for a decade and scored a century when his club Thackley in the Bradford League were a man short and called him up.
Why do these stories give us so much pleasure? Because they show that cricket, like all sport, can infuriate and delight in equal measure, especially when played by you and me. And they are more fun to think about than the understandably deserted Lord’s stands on Sunday, the last day of the Test against a strangely ineffectual Sri Lanka.
Lord’s is expensive, always has been, and the pricing on what was never going to be a competitive day was clearly dotty (the cheapest seats were £95). The problem is the sheer lack of competitive Test cricket outside the top three teams India, Australia and England. The others don’t have the resources and, seemingly, the interest for the five-day game. It has been a disappointing summer for competitive Test cricket, though great for the sublime Joe Root and Atkinson of course. Atkinson’s remarkable story has taken yet another turn, with the welcome news that the jobbing actor responsible for the shocking death of his mother Caroline in a car crash in 2020 has been tracked down and jailed. Caroline worked tirelessly for Gus and is described by those who knew her as a force of nature. It was a terrible tragedy, though some form of justice might now have been done.
Poor Erik ten Hag has just had the dreaded expression of support from the boss, in his case the senior football chiefs at Manchester United put in place by new owner Jim Ratcliffe. ‘Erik has our full backing. We think he is the right coach for us,’ said the CEO Omar Berrada and the sporting director Dan Ashworth. That sounds pretty much like curtains for Ten Hag, and after their floundering performance against Liverpool it’s not that surprising. Ratcliffe could be seen with his head in his hands throughout the game, while nearby Sir Alex Ferguson was turning increasingly puce and shaking his head lugubriously.
The beleaguered manager was forced to admit that he wasn’t Harry Potter and it would take a bit of time to fix matters. If you have to call up J.K. Rowling’s bespectacled wizard, you really are in a spot of bother. I doubt whether United’s problems will be sorted while these grands fromages from the club’s past stay ever present.
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