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howzat
Owzthat
By Will last year, mid-July, 1 Comment »
This is a good read from Michael Simkins, author of Fatty Batter, on Owzthat
1 Comment »Early games were between loose confederations of celebrities and TV characters, ranging from Captain Hurricane through to Jesus of Nazareth and Biffo the Bear. But it was when I decided to create my own parallel England and Australia teams that things really took off.
At first my imaginary players were taken from the world around me – namely my parents’ confectionery business – which is why my first England side comprised Trebor, Nuttall, Mintoe, plus Callard and Bowser (whose cream-line toffees were among our bestselling items).
The Aussies, too, had a sweet tooth, including Walls, Rowntree and an unlikely trio rejoicing in the names of Melchior, Barr and Kydd.
The first series I correlated for posterity in an impromptu scorebook coincided with M.J.K. Smith’s unsuccessful real-time campaign Down Under in 1965-66. Smith’s team may have failed, but up in my bedroom, England captain “Blackie” Magic led us to a 5-0 series whitewash. I even wrote a book about the tour with full-colour illustrations, entitled, with authentic lack of inspiration, “Off To Australia”.
The geek in all of us
By Will 3 years ago, at the end of August, 6 Comments »
When I was a rather pathetic geek of a teenager, I used to pass the time during advanced mathematics AS level classes, which I had somehow fluked my way into, by developing a system of calculator cricket, using the random-number generator button. Immense charts were drawn up to reckon the probability of dot-balls, run outs, even the odds of bad weather intervening. It used to take about one hour of advanced maths to play 90 overs so during the course of a term, several Test or first-class series could be completed and that meant conjuring teams to take on each other while I was pretending to be solving quadratic equations.
So says our chum Patrick Kidd in his greatest county XIs piece last week. Reminded me that we used to play Howzat using HB pencils, scratching modes of dismissal with our compasses onto each of the six sides. Simpler times. Let your inner geek out via the comments…
Fatty Batter: How Cricket Saved My Life (Then Ruined It)
By Will 3 years ago, mid-May, 4 Comments »
“Never judge a book by its cover,” my Dad (and probably most others in the world) used to say. Maybe due to the rebel in me, or youthful naivety, I thought he was speaking in tongues again. Yes yes, the contents are what’s most important, but I’ve always maintained that if the cover is good, the insides must be even better. That’s right: I am that stupid. Pillock though I am, my methods haven’t yet let me down.
This book isn’t one of them, but it might as well be. I’ve seen it lying on my boss’s desk and it’s only a matter of time before I wade through it. And Patrick’s reviewed it for the paper, in which he says:
THERE IS SOMETHING almost autistic about cricket lovers. Not those who can actually play. Nor the Barmy Army types, whose main purpose at a match, it appears, is to tell fellow spectators in a beer-soaked caterwaul that everywhere they go, people want to know who they are and so on.
The most touching scenes are of Simkins the child, playing cricket in his father’s sweet-shop in Brighton, spending his holidays at the county ground in Hove trying to get autographs or constructing an entire season’s county championship under his bed with a dice game. It brought back memories of another rather sad child who devised a complicated set of rules based on my calculator’s random number generator so that I could play cricket during maths lessons.
Ah, Howzat. Every cricket fan has been there, though I found history the best lesson in which to steal the strike. What amazed me was how devastating Wacar Yewniss (for that is how my dyslexic friend spelled his name) was. Even in fantasy land, he sent down toe-crushers. I think my worst was 2 all out. And did anyone else play table football with a 10p piece? (also available in rugby and hockey editions, depending on your inventiveness in creating goalposts with your hands). Halcyon days.
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