Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

65 Cricket was Stuart’s stronger suit, until he developed the build for rugby: ‘I was quite a late bloomer, 16, 17, and all of a sudden I got quite big and realised I was quite good at rugby as well.’ 100 He was in the fifteen for his last two years at Edinburgh Academy, during which period he also played for Scottish Schools. 101 He played both cricket and rugby during a gap year in Sydney, before heading to Loughborough in September 1996. During the three years studying for his BSc, his rugby prowess caught the eye of the ambitious Rotherham Titans club, for whom he played as a semi-professional while still at university. Opportunities for cricket were more limited: after all, there was studying to be done as well, and Stuart was concerned to secure a good degree. With money being dangled before him from the emerging professional rugby scene, ‘rugby sort of took over because it was lucrative and the path into professional cricket wasn’t as straightforward.’ So he played only a handful of cricket matches at Loughborough, not making it into the sides that reached the finals of the BUSA Championships in 1997 and 1998, though he recalls making a score of 167* in a friendly against another university during his time there. His serious injury in April 1999, playing (to the chagrin of his father back in Edinburgh) for English Universities against Welsh Universities at Cardiff, ended his immediate ambitions in rugby. The medics suggested that his rugby days might be over, so once he was sufficiently mobile he took a year in South Africa ‘to resurrect the cricket career, because I had pretty much given up rugby at that stage’. Although playing mostly second-team cricket for Claremont in Constantia, Stuart recalls this as ‘a very worthwhile experience’, for his more general rehabilitation as well as for his cricket. Returning from South Africa, he was able to take up the postgraduate place at Cambridge that he had sought before leaving Loughborough. Two years studying economics and management at St Edmund’s College followed; and now the choice had to be made: cricket or rugby? ‘I had intended to play as much cricket as I could [at Cambridge], because I went in with the theory that if you can bat on Scottish wickets, you can go down south and bat on those wickets quite easily because they play a bit truer down there. But time slipped away from me in the first year. I was working pretty hard academically, and thought that I might struggle in the exams if I didn’t dedicate a significant amount of time to that [so I] never got involved [in cricket]. The rugby at Cambridge was fantastic fun but pretty time-consuming and it just kind of took over.’ It did so to such an extent, and with such success, that Stuart played in the Varsity matches of 2000, in his preferred position of full-back, and 2001, on the wing, 102 and in November 2001 he came very close to selection 100 ‘Quite big’: Stuart stands 6ft 3in tall, and in his professional days weighed around 15½ stone. 101 It would be remiss of me not to mention Stuart’s acknowledged debt to Garry Bowe of Edinburgh Academy, for his sporting development as a student there, and to Jim Love, then the Scotland cricket coach. 102 Cambridge lost both matches. Runs Aplenty