Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

109 Chapter Seven A Life in Cricket For the players whose lives in cricket have been recorded in the preceding pages, cricket was never a full-time career. None was ever taken on to a county’s staff, or played as a pro in a League team. The majority were amateurs for whom cricket was only a diversion in lives that led them down much more varied paths. But it is appropriate that we should end with a man for whom cricket has been a dominant factor affecting his whole life, and for whom for many years it was his career as well as a diversion. Like all the others in this book, Bob Richards played only a single first-class match; on the face of it the high point of a playing career 177 that began in his early teens and continues today when he is nearer to 80 years of age than to 70, though you’d never believe that to see or talk to him. But when a few years after this game the opportunity unexpectedly arose to make cricket his profession, then, fittingly for a wicketkeeper, he seized it with both hands, and it remained his livelihood until retirement. Truly Bob’s has been, and continues to be, a ‘life in cricket’. Yet you wouldn’t have predicted that from his beginnings. Born into an RAF family at Winchester on 5 June 1934 and with no family background in sport, Bob must be one of very few first-class cricketers to get into the game via, of all things, baseball. His family had no particular Hampshire connections; he says that his parents must have just stopped off there for a few weeks on one of his father’s postings. His early years were mostly spent at Pitsea in Essex, 178 but between the ages of nine and eleven Bob lived in Canada, where his father was posted during the War. The family was fortunate to survive the Atlantic crossing; the sister ship to the one they were on was sunk. Through playing a little baseball, Bob discovered that he had one special skill; he could catch pretty much anything that was thrown at him. So when he returned to Pitsea after the War, knowing next to nothing of either cricket or football, his catching ability meant that at school he was placed in goal in the soccer side, and in the slips in the cricket team. Bob’s wicketkeeping career began at Craylands County Secondary School in Basildon, at the age of 13, purely by chance. During a practice session on the outfield a couple of days before a school match, he bowled a ball that reared up and hit the regular keeper on the nose, putting him out of action. So, because he could catch, Bob took over the gloves: and he has never relinquished them from that day on. 177 But only on the face of it: see pages 111 and 112. 178 Pitsea was then a village quite separate from the later New Town of Basildon, with which it has now merged.