Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

113 to be six or eight yards further back. I managed to jump and get it in the left glove up here and came down with it thinking, “Christ, I got away with that.” And then Tonker shouted from mid wicket, “Two hands in this team.” He didn’t say “well taken” or anything; just “Two hands in this team.”’ A hard man to please was Tonker. 183 Bob was 36 years and 76 days old when he made his first-class debut on 20 August. In the twentieth century, only about a dozen players had made their Essex debuts at a greater age. But Essex were now looking to younger men to keep wicket in their second eleven. For most matches in 1970 the role was given to Richard Baker, and in 1971 it was shared between Baker and a 17-year-old named Graham Gooch. Bob was recalled for a single appearance in both 1974 and 1975, but for most of the early 1970s his cricket was for Westcliff and for the Club Cricket Conference. The latter included a prestigious tour to Australia, under the captaincy of the aforementioned David Evans, at the same time that Ray Illingworth was winning the Ashes back for England. 1975 saw a change in Bob’s life away from cricket, for after many years with Marconi he moved to work in the accounts department of James Abbott, estate agents in Leigh-on-Sea. Cricket played an important part not so much in the move itself, but in the role that Bob played for his new employer. In his words, ‘Initially I applied for, and got, a job as property negotiator [but] then I received a phone call from the company secretary who was also our Westcliff opening bowler, who advised me that my job would entail working on Saturdays (whoops) and that he could offer me a job in the accounts department instead.’ It was no contest: cricket won 183 Richards is 5ft 6in tall; Taylor was some three inches taller. But would Taylor really have been able to take such a delivery with two hands? A Life in Cricket The newly restored pavilion at Leyton, photographed in 2010. Bob Richards spent the first day of his first-class career here waiting for play to start against Jamaica in August 1970. Twenty-seven other cricketers have played their only first-class match at this ground.