Page 7 - Bray Celebrity Cricket Programme Final

The traumatic abruptness of his appearance, heightened by the noise of breaking branches and fleeing birds, is too much for the batsman who, more often than not, is bowled while in a state of acute shock.
As I say, we only use this technique when all else fails because Old Gunn is the subject of a preservation order, and I don’t want to be the one up before the Beak who tried to explain that it died of fast bowling.
When my father was alive, I would’ve been willing to sacrifice the tree in the national interest, which is to say that if England seemed likely to get another drubbing from the Australians, I would have been willing to hand over my pitch for a Test match. The condition would be that I should be allowed to pick the England team, in which case it would have read: John William Parkinson (Grimethorpe Colliery and Yorks), capt. Michael Parkinson Snr. (Barnsley and Yorks), Andrew Parkinson (Wakefield Nursing Home and Yorks), Nicholas Parkinson and Michael Parkinson Jr (c/o Mary Parkinson, former spinster of the parish of Doncaster, Yorks), G. Boycott (Yorks), J. Hampshire (Yorks), D. Bairstow (Yorks), A. G. Nicholson (Yorks).
Just in case I stood accused of being biased in favour of one county, I would have completed the side with two outsiders, namely Close, of Somerset, and Illingworth, of Leicester. And to prove my total impartiality, Wood of Lancashire would have been my twelfth man.
Given that line-up and my pitch we could have taken on the world and
EL PARKI
re-established ourselves as champions. We might have had to change the side slightly for overseas tours (my old man would not travel to any place where they didn’t serve Yorkshire pudding as a starter), but the immediate priority was to get English cricket back to where it belonged.
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