There’s a book specifically for cricket badgers, Linseed
Paul Molitor Womens Jersey and Fishpaste: Confessions of a Cricket Nut by Mark Bussell. In it are the words: “The people who can answer correctly the question: who is Jim Foat? This book is first and foremost for them.” Who the hell was Foat then? He played 91 first-class matches for Gloucestershire in the 70s, ostensibly as a batsman. His nickname was Photo, because the number 0 so often followed the word Foat. He made five tons (fine), but averaged just 18.6 (not fine). None of his first six seasons brought an average of more than 18 but there were two tons in each of 1978 and 1979, when he was capped, and then released. He never took a wicket but could really field, and his run-out of Tony Greig in the 1973 Gillette Cup final against Sussex could be said to have won Gloucestershire the Cup. That might just explain why he played so many games. Foat was known for his luscious barnet and massive, thick specs, as well as his practical jokes; he once wandered into a sponsor’s marquee at Scarborough, where the town’s lord mayor was sat, dressed as Groucho Marx – plastic cigar and all – shouting: “Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you pleased to see me?” Foat has turned up in spots far more obscure than Bussell’s book. As Ed Craig learned in a profile for the Wisden Cricketer in 2005, there is research conducted at the Institute of Child Health named after him – the FOAT (fat oxidation-activation transport) complex – as well as references in legal journals, too. Foat now lives and works in Exeter as a sales rep for a horticultural company and has not only a Twitter account (we can only presume it to be legit), which says he spends his days “playing the flute and dancing”, but an IMDb page, for his role in the 1997 documentary Grace and Favour: A Portrait of Gloucestershire CCC. A true club legendTwenty-five summers after he made his debut for Lancashire, Glen Chapple’s playing career has still not ended, officially at least. He is the county’s head coach, and hasn’t played for the first team since September 2015. It seems certain that, aged 43, he will end stranded
http://www.authenticmilwaukeebrewers.com/Robin-Yount-Jersey on 985 first-class wickets; if he does, the last of those will be a good’un: Alastair Cook. It is unlikely a county player will ever get as close to 1,000 again; Steven Finn has 506 and is 28, but the schedule is only slimming. Advertisement It is a shame he will fall short of four figures (sometimes batting as high as No6, he made six centuries and more than 8,000 runs, too), but much more frustrating for Lancashire fans (many of whom will also extol the cultish qualities of Jack Simmons or Ian Austin) was the lack of international recognition. He played an ODI, against Ireland in 2006, aged 32, but bowled just four wicketless overs because of an abdominal strain (even Ian Bell bowled five that day). As early as 1995 he was very nearly picked to face West Indies and in 2003 he was named in the squad to face South Africa at Trent Bridge. James Kirtley got the nod instead. Kirtley took six second-innings wickets and, remarkably given some of the seamers who have represented England in the quarter-century since he started, Chapple never played a Test. Never mind, Chapple’s is a career to be heartily celebrated. Durable, dedicated and distinctive-looking (smiley, ruddy-cheeked, and with hair fairer by the summer), Chapple has always said his Yorkshire birthplace, Skipton, was a quirk, housing, as it does, the closest hospital to Earby, in Lancashire, where he is from. Early on, he took six for 18 to bowl Essex out for 57 in the 1996 Natwest Trophy final, a magnificent achievement, but his legend lies in his longevity, his reliability and the fact that he got better with age: his best two seasons, statistically, were 2010 and 2011, in both of which he took more than 50 wickets at an average of 19.75. The second of those seasons is the other reason for the depth of affection for Chapple. After five second-placed finishes in the previous 13 years, Chapple led Lancashire to their first outright Championship title in 77 years. Due to the Old Trafford redevelopment they did not
http://www.authenticsandiegopadres.com/Tony-Gwynn-Jersey play a single game at their regular home and it was a triumph full of bum-squeaking finishes (such as when they chased 213 in under 30 overs to seal the deal at Taunton). Neatly, oddly, Chapple – his body creaking more by the day – was the only international in an overwhelmingly homegrown sideThe story, embellished a touch, surely, goes something like this. It is August 2001, and Yorkshire have just won their first title since 1968, and that decade’s all-conquering treble winners. They celebrated, as champions do. Darren Lehmann, the top scorer with 1,416 runs at 83, celebrated, as Darren Lehmann – a man who has never knowingly shirked a dart or a stubby – still does. But county cricket, as they say, is played eight days a week, so 36 hours on Yorkshire showed up at Scarborough to face Nottinghamshire in the Sunday League. Advertisement Lehmann, padding up, found some of the residual fluids of celebration lying in his batting helmet. So he guzzled it down, dropped in a couple of dusty boasts to his team-mates, then – somewhere between groggy and gazeboed – ambled out to smite 191 from 103 balls, with 20 fours and 11 sixes. He fell slogging one Kevin Pietersen, the off-spinning first draft (9-0-66-2), but it mattered not. Alone, he scored 18 more than Yorkshire’s opposition who, for what it’s worth, were chasing 353. None of Lehmann’s team-mates passed 30. So, Boof Lehmann: our overseas pro. “The great man could probably break wind in these parts and draw a standing ovation,” wrote Chris Waters, the Yorkshire Post’s cricket correspondent, when Lehmann returned to Headingley as Australia coach in 2013, seven years after he had last played for the county. Readers of Waters’ paper voted Lehmann into their all-time Yorkshire XI; this, from supporters of a county who only welcomed players born within its own borders from 1992. He was the first modern-day outsider to captain Yorkshire, the year after that championship triumph. No cricketer has more Sheffield Shield runs than Lehmann – a record he isn’t remotely happy about, because it showed he wasn’t playing enough Test cricket – but his county stats are ludicrous, too. In 88 matches he scored 8,871 runs, including 26 tons, at an average of 68.76, all with panache and power (a strike-rate of 80!). His 61 wickets came at 32, too. Ostensibly, Lehmann’s relationship with Yorkshire ended
Trevor Cahill Authentic Jersey in September 2006, when he made 339 against Durham at Headingley. He fell two shy of the 101-year-old Yorkshire record of George Hirst (who, Sir Pelham Warner once said, had a smile that “used to meet around the back of his neck”; a man after Lehmann’s heart, then), trying to hit a six. In the Guardian, the report by David Hopps, a Yorkie and a keen student of Broad Acre behaviour, began: “In a county so proud of its homegrown traditions this statement would once have been heresy, but no longer: Darren Lehmann is one of the greatest players Yorkshire has known.” The Lehmann and Yorkshire love affair, fittingly, did not end there. A decade to the month on, Lehmann’s 24-year-old son Jake – as recognisable a figure, but for his mousey moustache, rather than his girthy gut – made his first ton for the county in what, for now at least, proved to be his final game. Perhaps there’s more to come
