Cricket Witness No 6 - His Captain's Hand on His Shoulder Smote

6 As for those who may regard this as an unseemly act of precocity, I would ask them to take some comfort from the fact that I also retained a boyish interest in The Dandy , Desperate Dan, Korky the Cat et al , In further mitigation, I must admit to still reading The Rover long after I should have put aside such childish items and concentrated more on studying Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for School Certificate. However, there was no cricket in those classics. Dandie Dinmont and Meg Merrilies are not found having a net together in the one nor do Cassius and Brutus join in a match-winning stand (‘Just Two, Brutus’..) in the other. The Rover offered cricket, most notably in its long-running series ‘It’s Runs that Count’, occasionally changed to ‘wickets’ or ‘fielding’ that counted and necessarily sharing the seasons with ‘It’s Goals that Count’, with Nick Smith of Kingsbury Rovers. The Rover , unlike most of the books and comics whose cricket stories were school-based, inventively struck out with the career of Rob Higson who rose to captain Highshire and play for England. The stories, beginning with Rob Higson’s tyro days, evolved over many years, with the protagonist – and it was the same with Nick Smith – being the autobiographical narrator. The tales certainly caught my imagination at a point where my interest in cricket was being fermented. I am not sure whether I should be ashamed or not – ‘bally swot; confounded bounder’ – to confess that it led me to create my own fictional county team of Linshire and laboriously to produce an entire season’s results, averages, club annual and all the trimmings. Again, I must plead for sympathy on the grounds that my county ended up realistically mid-table and did not soar away to the top of the County Championship like Highshire. Thus the research for this text has been ongoing, off and on, for some eight decades. I really enjoyed reading cricket stories, the huge majority of them school-based, and learned much about the manners and techniques of the game. But this is not an exercise in nostalgia, although I Introduction; It’s runs that count