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As you may or may not have heard, I am, with some reluctance and much sorrow, leaving the club and returning to Moddershall, owing to a change in my personal circumstances that have forced me to move back, temporarily, to Staffordshire. In the two years that I’ve been a Wollatonian, I have come to feel very much at home here and am sad to be leaving so many good friends. It is always this way when episodes that have provided such enjoyment and/or forged strong emotional attachments come to an end, but such is life.
On a more upbeat note, I would just like to take the opportunity to thank everyone associated with Wollaton Cricket Club for helping make the time I spent with you so fulfilling, so much of a giggle. It is a testament to the character of the club – by which I mean the characters in the club – that, having spent all my senior cricketing days in one place, I almost immediately felt like part of the furniture in my new surroundings (a part of the furniture that would be comfortable to crash on if you missed the last bus). I say “almost immediately”…
…Having made the difficult decision to leave Moddershall and play in my adopted home city of Nottingham, I asked a friend who played locally for a recommendation (my sole criterion being that it was a Premier League club) and he came up with Wollaton, against whom I’d played as a student. This seemed ideal, certainly in terms of geographic convenience. However, my initial email contact with the club’s unelected Overlord, Ed Savill, dented my optimism somewhat. You see, despite offering him a lengthy account (can you spot a pattern here?) of my all-round cricketing prowess, Ed still did his level best to dissuade me from joining, deftly parrying the puffed-up half-truths of my ‘CV’ with “we’ve got a guy with a first-class 99 batting at 8”. Reading between the lines, I took this none-too-subtle slash on my bonfire to mean: Don’t get your hopes up, sunshine (he later admitted that a number of years of having “village randoms” contact him had left him hard-edged, wary; he also later admitted that, when we first met face-to-face, he thought ‘Bloody hell, what have we got here?’ I didn’t later admit that I thought the exact same thing when I met him…).
Seriously though, Ed was very welcoming in that early correspondence and my attendance of winter nets only confirmed this early impression of warmth and acceptance (helped, no doubt, by Crossers remembering a slightly slimmer version of me slapping a few runs in the aforementioned Uni games). I was very quickly inducted into the Wollaton culture by the club’s two most celebrated raconteurs: Gerry, whose generous ferrying of me to and fro was accompanied by several multi-punchlined anecdotes delivered in his Lancastrian burr, and the inimitable Mr Richard Stanley, who marched straight forward – literally marched – to welcome me aboard and then regaled me with his encyclopaedic knowledge of all things Leicestershire CCC. Actually, make that all things cricket.
Karl’s presence as skipper also helped the bedding-in process, especially since he knew that, despite him being the batting kingpin for Wollaton all these years, the one and only time that we had opposed each other (in university cricket) saw him comprehensively out-batted by the steatopygious [look it up] fellow from the ‘proper’ university. Finally, mention should be made of a slightly more talented member of the 2006 intake, Mr Allcoat, who, within about five minutes of meeting me, clocking my combo of baseball cap and unkempt, semi-ginger semi-beard, was quick to baptize me “Malcolm” (as in Glazer), a nickname that stuck and a persona that I was later to embrace fully, especially in my forays onto get-notted, carrying Fighter’s torch.
The two seasons contained many, many highlights – serious and light-hearted, on field and off – as well, inevitably, as the occasional lowlight, such as not facing Linden Joseph on a wet flier at home, giving Sav out caught behind at Eastwood, a few too many NPL blobs and run-out dismissals (sometimes combined, eh Ed? Eh Chalkers?), and, of course, that day at Killamarsh. (Mind you, for a would-be revolutionary such as myself, even this was transformed into a highlight by virtue of my match report being censored, driven underground at the request of the League Chairman.)
Some of the highlights, off the top of my head, include:
There are many others. But perhaps the greatest highlight never actually came to pass: namely, being offered the 1st XI captaincy for 2007, once it was known that Karl was standing down and with Vince still unsure of his availability. Regardless of the fact that it didn’t actually materialize, it was nevertheless a tremendous honour, after just a single summer with the club, both to be asked and for the committee to approve this. Fortunately for WCC, the fact that I didn’t end up as skipper was almost certainly the clincher in enabling us to achieve a ‘three-peat’ in the much-coveted NPL Fair Play Award. On the other hand, had I have skippered the side last year, we’d probably have won the league – but I suppose you can’t have your cake and eat it…
While there’s no doubt that I shall greatly miss playing at/with Wollaton (I’d like to think this was only an interlude rather than a conclusion), it’s safe to say that the club and its characters will always be in my heart. Oh, and on Facebook, too. I will particularly miss the company of my team-mates, whose always lively banter encompassed everything from the squeamishly crude to the highly intellectual, often within the same gene pool (sorry, Ed: I know you do the jokes…)! It will not only be the seniors that I’ll miss, however, but also the youngsters, with many of whom I played in the Newark Alliance games (I hope Adrian Willan, Rob Kirkwood, and Simon Fish didn’t find me too objectionable an influence on their sons and other protégés), especially those two cheeky chappies who scored for the 1st XI, AK and Joe Fish, even though the latter’s persistent voting against me in the Dick of the Day nominations proved crucial on more than one occasion. And not only the youngsters, but some of the not-so-youngsters that offered the team good support in their various ways: (Sir) Prof and (Lady) Mummy Babs, the Kings, El Presidente Gren, as well as others that don’t possess titles. I cannot name you all (sketchy memory, innit), but you know who you are.
All that remains to be said is “best of luck” to one and all for the upcoming season. May all your snicks go for four (“We’ll tek ‘em!!”) and all your long-hops be caught at deep backward square leg.
With fondness,
Malcolm/Scott
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