Cricket

Guardian : Sport

Notes from the touchline

Frank Keating
Friday September 24, 2004

Season of missed sitters and mellow ruefulness

This time next week it will be October, which shows how cricket has outstayed its welcome, and even a hooraying hullabaloo at The Oval's ICC Champions Trophy final tomorrow will not reprieve an ill-considered and generally grey and pointless tournament. Wind-racked King Lear autumns provide no setting for the monarchs of world cricket.

Mind you, whatever the weather, season's end is particularly melancholy for those dragging themselves contemplatively back to the pavilion for the very last time after so many golden summers of bonny boyhood in the sun. Valete Gloucester's neat, impervious Mike Smith, 800 wickets in all cricket but just a solitary cap for England in 1997 at Leeds, when Thorpe at slip missed a dolly which would have had Australia 55 for five. They went on to make 501 and Mike was never asked again.

Likewise, no more around the county fields will the nickname "Tom" (of course) resound to call up that stalwart batsman Peter Bowler, who might well have played for England or Australia but was given a chance by neither.

A dozen years ago a magazine hired a few of us to nominate a youngster bound to be a force in Tests. I took a confident punt on Glamorgan's fresh-faced Chepstow all-rounder Adrian Dale - and that summer of '93 this ageing prophet smugly watched the young man not only share a breathtaking unbroken partnership of 425 with Viv Richards against Middlesex (Angus, Tuffers, Embers and all) but, in the next match in Cardiff, skittle Warwickshire with six for 18. It won him an England A tour; he did OK, then vanished from the bigtime radar. He's off it for ever now.

So is a cocksure colt of that same summer - and Adam Hollioake went on to become a domestic force who might have led England more times than Nasser Hussain. You cannot think of Adam without grieving for brother Ben; where might that kid brother be now in England's new bright prosperity? Such a heavy-hearted question will be posed more than a few times, I fancy, at Kennington tomorrow.

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