Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

64 Scotsman, Stuart Moffat , or in full, John Stuart David Moffat. Born in Edinburgh in August 1977 into a cricket- and rugby-playing family, his upward progression in both sports was swift, and he reached national age-group sides in both sports while still at Edinburgh Academy. Rugby began to dominate when he went to study economics at Loughborough University, and while there he enjoyed a period as a semi-professional in English club rugby. A career-threatening injury in April 1999 – he broke both the tibia and fibula of his left leg – put him out of the game for a year, but he returned to rugby during postgraduate studies at Cambridge, playing in the Varsity matches of 2000 and 2001. Shortly before the end of his two years at Cambridge he signed full-time professional terms with Glasgow Rugby – at the time, one of Scotland’s two top professional sides. His brief first-class cricket career followed before he finally left Cambridge in 2002, but so successful was he at Glasgow that by November of that year he was playing the first of his four full rugby internationals for Scotland. Over the years, club rugby took him from Glasgow to The Borders (later Border Reivers), then to France with Castres, back to the Reivers, and finally to Italy with Viadana, before he retired from the professional game after the 2007/08 season. Now married to Emma, a former England lacrosse international who he met at Loughborough, and looking to find a new career outside sport, he has been able to return to playing cricket for Grange CC in the summer months, but as time moves on he no longer turns out regularly in amateur rugby in the winter. From that brief narrative, we may draw two themes – two choices – that go to the heart of Stuart’s life in cricket, or better, his life in sport. The first concerns the competing claims for his time and affection of cricket and rugby; while the second concerns the competing claims of sport and what, for want of a better word, we may call real life. Cricket or rugby? Stuart was a cricketer before he started to make his mark at rugby. His days as a cricketer began, as with so many sons of cricketing families, with summer weekends spent watching older members of the family playing the game. Early progress was rapid. He was in the Edinburgh Academy first eleven at the age of 14, getting his name into Wisden for the first time in 1993. By the age of 16 he was batting at No.3 for Scotland’s Under- 19s against India Under-17s – not a happy start, though, as he was lbw second ball – and within a year he was an automatic choice at that level. In July 1995, still only 17, he made 106 against Wales SCA Under-19s at Abergavenny, and in 1996 he captained the Under-19s, leading from the front with innings of 112* against ESCA Under-19s at Jesmond, and later 79 against England Under-17s at Scarborough. Both scores were made against a bowling attack that included a 17-year-old Graeme Swann, who Stuart today remembers as being, even at that age, ‘very very sure of himself’. 99 99 Throughout this section, unattributed quotes from Stuart are taken from my meetings with him on 30 June 2010. Runs Aplenty