Nottinghamshire Cricket Annual 2020.

During these troubling times, you can still purchase this handbook from the club shop.

Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club ' : 2020 Year Book

Restricted shop opening hours are:

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday between 0930 and 1600

Nottinghamshire Cricket Annual 2020.  

Published by the Nottingham Cricket Lovers’ Society.

On sale at the Notts AGM (24^th February 2020). Price £5.

After last season’s initial publication which was a total sell-out, the second edition of the Notts Cricket Annual, returns as a larger (224 pages) and more comprehensive production. There is double the amount of colour photographs (now 32 pages) and the coverage of local league and age-group cricket has been substantially enhanced. This has been possible thanks to Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club offering to contribute towards our printing costs, together with the support of our advertisers and the co-operation from the Nottinghamshire Cricket Board and the various leagues. The editorial team has been expanded to include Andy Hunt and David Richards, who join Peter Wynne-Thomas, David Beaumont, Bill Russell and myself.

The annual has been expertly put together by Wade Print & Paper Ltd (with many thanks to Bill Taylor and Gordon Smithurst). Much of the photos in the Annual have been kindly provided by Notts CCC, many taken by Simon Trafford.  We very much appreciate the support given by the club for this independent publication.

The annual contains the following:

·          Introduction/Editorial

·          32 pages of colour photographs including individual photos all the current playing and backroom staff (ideal for gaining autographs), plus a full squad photos from last season in whites and pyjamas and action photos. Photos are also provided for all of the counties age groups squads (boys and girls), plus the Notts Senior Women’s team, all supplied by Richard Parkes.

·          Full details of 2020 playing staff

·          A comprehensive summary of first-team including averages, outstanding performances, partnerships and extensive reviews of each of the three first-team competitions

·          Full scorecards and reports for all 2019 Notts first and second team fixtures

·          Extensive 21 page record section

·          Review of Notts Women in 2019

·          Review of Notts Academy in 2019

·          Comprehensive coverage of all age-group representative cricket in Notts

·          Full coverage of the following leagues:

·         Notts Premier League

·         South Nottinghamshire Cricket League

·         Bassetlaw & District Cricket League

·         Mansfield and District Cricket League;

·         Notts Youth Cricket League

·         Newark Evening Cricket League

·         Mansfield and District Youth League

·         Bassetlaw & District Junior Cricket League

·          Full club directory

·          An array of interesting articles. Contributors include the Notts CCC Director of Cricket Mick Newell, Peter Wright and Neil Smith who explain the merger between the County Club and the Board, the Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club archivist Peter Wynne-Thomas; well-known cricket journalist Richard Hobson; Trent Bridge tour guide Alan Odell; long-term Notts supporter John Sutton; Notts CCC’s Heritage Officer Steve LeMottee; Notts Premier Cricket League President Peter Johnson, Graham Redfern and Mandy Wright (Disability Cricket in Notts) and finally former Notts spinner Jim Hindson who coaches the County Boys Under-13s squad.

The annual will be available for sale for the first time at Notts AGM at County Hall on Monday 24^th February. Peter Wynne-Thomas will have copies for sale in the TB Library and it will also be available priced £5 from the Trent Bridge club shop and ticket office.

If you want any further information on the annual please e-mail me at nclsannual@gmail.com

Mike Goulder

Annual Editor

Preview article

 REMINISCENCES FROM THE PRESS BOX

BY RICHARD HOBSON

February this year marked the 30th anniversary of my arrival at the Nottingham Evening Post. Though appointed as a general sports reporter and sub-editor on a handsome annual salary of £12,000, I always hoped to specialise in cricket, and before long the editor, Barrie Williams, took a punt on me as correspondent. In six happy years, I worked under five sports editors, helped with two relaunches of the Football Post, ghosted Derek Randall, Tommy Lawton and Chris Lewis, interviewed Garry Sobers and Harold Larwood, and sat alongside names still synonymous here with their sports: Trevor Frecknall, Duncan Hamilton, Mick Holland, Eamonn Gavigan, Ian Edwards, Mike Matthews, Dave McVay and the inimitable David Stapleton.

Stories about David are legendary. On my first day at the Post he contrived to trap a colleague in the lift, setting a high bar in haplessness but not one that seemed to daunt him. He once submitted a Notts County report entirely in capital letters, claiming the computer had broken when all he’d done was unwittingly hit the Caps Lock key. I was the fool who had to sub that one. He never mastered ‘new’ technology and was possibly the last person to take a manual typewriter to Trent Bridge to cover the cricket. But he knew Nottingham football inside out and covered the basics as well as anyone. Old school, if you like. Listen to Colin Slater on the wireless and read David in the Post, and you were abreast of life at Meadow Lane.

He loved his cricket, David. We worked together at my first Test for the Post when England faced New Zealand in 1990. What an insight into life at the top of the reporting tree. Even before the toss on day one, the hospitality team from then sponsors Cornhill came around the seats offering trays of white wine. I could get used to that. The five days marked (I think) the final appearance in the Trent Bridge press box of EW Swanton, an imposing figure even then aged 83.  The game is probably best remembered for a very public spat between Dickie Bird and Ron Allsopp – Ron’s typically forthright description of the umpire as “a showman” gave me a very nice line – and Mike Atherton’s composed first hundred for England. Hard to imagine that two decades later I’d be working alongside Atherton at the Times.

Cricket was only one of many sports thriving in and around the city. Forest under Brian Clough were still playing the most wonderful football and turning out England internationals. Notts County boasted the best group of young players in their history such as Dean Yates, Tommy Johnson and Mark Draper. Nottingham RFC were at their pomp with Brian Moore and Gary Rees to the fore. The Panthers were always there or thereabouts at the old full-to-capacity Ice Stadium while the state-of-the-art Tennis Centre on University Boulevard was preparing to host the Federation Cup. Lisa Opie and Peter Marshall ranked among the best squash players in England and were based at The Park. With hindsight, this was our golden age.

The Post rarely wanted for a good back-page lead, and cricket had its fair share. The period embraced significant change in personnel and no little controversy. Sadly, the Sunday League win in 1991 proved the only silverware, but I covered every game of the campaign from the elation of beating the crack Lancashire one-day team by nine wickets at Old Trafford to the surprisingly comfortable home win against Derbyshire that secured the title. It was a true team effort, from the opening partnership of Chris Broad and Derek Randall all the way downwards. One memory is of the understated Kevin Evans hitting a sequence of twos in the last over at Scarborough to beat Yorkshire amid unbearable tension.

The small media enclosure at North Marine Road was packed that afternoon, but then press boxes were busy places back then. Nottinghamshire’s home games in the Championship always attracted the Daily Telegraph and almost always The Times, The Guardian and The Independent. Nick Lucy, a former Post cricket man, was the freelance in situ while the opposition would bring with them at least one travelling local newspaper correspondent. With less international cricket, leading writers such as Alan Lee – indisputably the best all-round cricket reporter in my time - Mike Selvey and Martin Johnson also found room to cover matches in their different and distinctive styles. Johnson wasn’t one to be bogged down by detail. Years later, I was with him at a World Cup game in Potchefstroom, South Africa, when he took a call from his desk. They wanted to use a head-and-shoulders photo alongside his report but were struggling to pick one because he hadn’t named a single player in his 600 words.     

The Sundays, too, were always strongly represented. The Observer, Sunday Times, Independent on Sunday and (briefly) the Sunday Correspondent all commissioned reporters while the Mail on Sunday and Sunday Express joined us as often as not. But they were a strangely mixed bunch with career hacks alongside men (and it was always men) on a day off from their Monday-to-Friday jobs. At various times we had teachers, academics, an auctioneer and a wine merchant covering a day’s play and, to the career hacks, these interlopers were denying their brethren in the freelance world a meal ticket. One, with the initials NJW, became known as Non-Journalist W*****, an unfair reflection on a very pleasant and utterly harmless guy. But they could be gullible, little used to press box tricks, and on one occasion we managed to convince a university lecturer that Mathew Dowman had been left out to allow him to open a school fete in Grantham.

Yorkshire boasted the largest press contingent. As a group they were clannish and forbidding, argumentative and abrasive. But alone, they were far more placid and helpful. Martin Searby epitomised this, engagingly boisterous company but best not provoked after a third pint. Northamptonshire had the reputation as being the jolliest bunch, while the Derby quartet of Neil Hallam, Mike Carey, Gerald Mortimer and Nigel Gardner split opinion. It was Carey, a fine wordsmith, who defined a Yorkshireman as “someone born within the sound of Bill Bowes.” Hallam was a natural story-teller and a brilliant journalist, Mortimer a learned, acerbic wit who could also be a raging misogynist. As a Long Eaton boy from a family of Derby County supporters I was well aware of his authority as a veteran chronicler of sport in his area. In that sense, and that sense only, he was the Derbyshire Stapleton.

It took a while to grow accustomed to the Derby box. If you sat and watched quietly, they had you down as an ear-wigger. Speak up, and you were a know-all. There were journalists who cowered at the prospect of going to Derby, but I’m with Michael Henderson who described their box as the funniest place in the world. It was just a matter of earning respect, and the easiest way was to come prepared and know your own side. The freeloaders and idlers received the shortest shift, such as the radio man who rang the box before a bulletin masquerading as a supporter merely wanting the score. “Hard to say,” Hallam told him. “A fight has broken out and they’ve had to stop play.”

The circuit featured characters a-plenty. Dick Streeton, of The Times, was well known here for ringing Richard Hadlee over the internal system for a comment on one of his great bowling feats. “What did he say, Dick?” a colleague asked. “I couldn’t tell,” Streeton replied. “I accidentally had the phone to my deaf ear.” By all accounts, that left the box speechless. So, too, did Ivo Tennant, another Times man, when he was planning the journey from Nottingham to his next fixture. “How long will it take to get to Darlington?” he asked. “About 20 minutes?” Tennant, by the way, is still renowned among the press corps as the man who accidentally recorded Bergerac over Streeton’s highly-prized videotape of the second Tied Test.

But that was nothing compared to the faux pas committed by Joe Minkley, a warm-hearted old gent who was given a pass because he worked on a farming programme for Radio Lincolnshire. He had a habit of arriving just as lunch was being served and taking his place at the head of the queue, unencumbered by actual work. We called him the Lincolnshire Poacher after the pub on Mansfield Road. His claim to fame arrived at the 1999 World Cup when India were facing New Zealand. The press box at Trent Bridge is barely sightscreen level so we have strict guidelines on sitting still when the bowling is from the Radcliffe Road End. Dion Nash was running in to Sachin Tendulkar and just in his delivery stride when the door sprung open at the back of the box. In blustered Minkley, distracting Tendulkar for just a split second to delay his defence. As the stumps splattered, the Little Master stared angrily towards us before turning on his heels. The scorecard says ‘Tendulkar b Nash 16’, but I think of it as Minkley’s one and only international wicket.

I won’t ignore a moment of my own shame. In those days the Post updated reports up to Lunch, after which a paper seller would come to the ground with the last edition. Unfortunately for the sake of profit margins, the old lady on the patch wasn’t exactly the Lord Sugar type of entrepreneur. Instead of tempting readers to buy, she simply held up the broadsheet back page, allowing them to read my pearls of wisdom free of charge. Finally, I’d had enough.  But far from showing contrition at my bellowed order to do her job properly, she thrust a finger at the paper and screamed back: “Why don’t you do yours for a change instead of writing this rubbish.” I’d like to think the crowd rounded on her. Not so. They just looked up to a very red-faced reporter and laughed – along with everyone in the box.

Richard Hobson is currently a freelance sports writer. He was previously the Deputy Cricket Correspondent for The Times. He was a Sports Writer and Sub-Editor on the Nottingham Evening Post between 1990-1996.