Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

117 a good man down, and nowadays he’s back playing Saturday cricket. After leaving Essex to live in Norfolk in 2007, his Forty Club contacts led to him being invited to play a few end-of-season games for Bradenham, in the hope of helping the side to win the league and gain promotion. A few eyebrows were initially raised at the idea of a 73-year-old wicketkeeper joining the club, but he quickly won over the doubters. His performances for them were described by a team-mate as ‘a master-class’, and Bob says, ‘Of course, they won the games, but not by my efforts, but by theirs. And they won promotion.’ Another Forty Club contact invited him to play Sunday cricket for the Essex club Frinton in 2009, where he played in the Sunday second eleven; for 2010 he was promoted to the Saturday second side. He still enjoys the game and the players, and their beautiful ground at Ashlyns Road, and though nowadays he says, ‘I just turn up and play’, he is happy to give coaching advice as well, without in any way forcing it on his club-mates. Since 2007 he has also been playing regularly for the Two Counties Over- 50s and Over-60s sides. 187 His continuing skill and speed are well shown by the fact that, in 79 matches to the end of the 2011 season, he had recorded over twice as many stumpings for them (57) as he had taken catches (25). Bob’s wicket-keeping style is unfussy. He likes to stand up to attack with the seamers when it is likely to be helpful to the team, but he does not do so out of bravado. When playing for Westcliff with Trevor Bailey bowling, he would start by standing back when Bailey was coming in off his full county run, but would move up to the stumps once his initial lift and snap had gone: otherwise he wouldn’t feel sufficiently under control to take the ball cleanly. He remembers some fine leg-side stumpings off Bailey’s bowling, often as a result of some pre-planning between them, after Bailey had been quick to spot some vulnerability in the batsman’s method. 188 One of his proudest claims is that he has dropped only one routine catch standing back since 1971. He dropped a head-high catch in that year and he thought: ‘I don’t do that. If ever I drop another one, I’ll hang up the gloves.’ It was 1992 before he had to reconsider that idea, when he put one down in a game ‘in September, it was raining, it was pitch dark and the ball was like a lump of soap and it went in and squiggled around and dropped out. And I’ve never dropped another one since.’ For a cricketer who has been a wicketkeeper for over 60 years, Bob’s hands are in remarkably good shape, with no significant bruises or breakages. He is pleased to claim that his hands are in far better condition than Brian Taylor’s: ‘Tonker’s broken every bone he’s got!’ In part this is of course down to his easy taking of the ball, but it is also helped by wearing exactly the right sort of gloves. He took this aspect of the game very seriously, and for five or six years in the late 1980s he designed wicketkeeping gloves 187 The ‘Two Counties’ are Essex and Suffolk. 188 Bob recalls Trevor Bailey as a good and sociable club member who, when able to turn out for Westcliff, was ‘just another team member’ who never sought to use his reputation to influence club matches, or the captain, unless asked. A Life in Cricket