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BAT AND PEN WITH
THE CRICKETER
James Coyne - XL Member and Assistant Editor at The Cricketer
’ve been a member of the Forty Club for eight years now, the last ve while also been assistant editor of The Cricketer magazine. Though the last 12 months
have been strange indeed, it has given us time to research the rich history of The Cricketer, which celebrates its centenary in April.
Unlike much of the cricket media, club and schools cricket has always had an important place in
The Cricketer, and in the early days reports and scorecards of our level were very thorough indeed. (By the way, you can access all editions of The Cricketer up to 1985 with a subscription to the online database, www.cricketarchive.co.uk)
The Forty Club’s founder, Henry Grierson, was a columnist in The Cricketer, and his book Ramblings of a Rabbit was serialised in the magazine, though
I suspect his brand of whimsical tales from amateur cricket would struggle to nd a market today.
The unsung hero of the rst four decades of The Cricketer was the assistant editor Arthur Langford, who took the magazine out of Fleet Street and into his Surrey home when the Blitz threatened to at- ten the o ces. He tended to do most of the donkey work underneath the star editor Pelham Warner (who was also the Forty Club’s rst president).
The Cricketer was a weekly ‘paper’ up to paper rationing during the Second World War, but even so Langford found the freedom to slope o and play for the likes of Hampton Wick or The Jesters in midweek. Society has changed since those more genteel days, though the Forty Club have kept the midweek ame burning.
It is a very di erent job now, with The Cricketer also boasting a very impressive 24/7 website which re ects the fast-moving international and domestic cricket world. And so this assistant editor’s appearances for the Forty Club are not as frequent as Langford’s might have been.
Cricket writing is, in all honesty, richer and more varied now than in Langford’s day – something helped by a wealth of information readily-available through the internet – but on the ipside we do
I
tend to spend a lot of our time hunched over a desk ogling at a computer.
One thing that has been lost a little in the press is the connection between the elite game and the grassroots. I wouldn’t claim to have a complete handle on the recreational game nationwide myself, but I do try to stay as connected as time allows. And by playing for the Forty Club you meet some of the most fascinating people in the game.
I debuted in 2013 – before I was 30, let alone 40!
I was invited to guest for the Southern Counties
by my then-Odiham & Greywell CC club-mate Bill Edmunds, when I was living down in Hampshire. My enjoyment of the matches at Bearwood College and Hampshire Collegiate School were in inverse proportion to my binary scores: 0 and 1. So I joined up.
It was a particular privilege to take the eld with
the legendary Les Loader, who was on the cusp of turning 80, yet took the new ball and bowled useful swing. The rest of us had rather ruined his chances of in uencing the result by being bowled out for 65, in admittedly very tough early-season conditions. I learned this was just one of 3,500 cricket matches Les had played, which just shows a life well spent.
Since then I’ve moved back to Bedford, my home- town, and transferred to the Eastern Counties.
I’ve taken advantage of geographical proximity to the Bedford Modern School xture, though it’s a bit of a shame the Eastern Counties no longer play Grierson’s alma mater, Bedford School, from where so many recent rst-class cricketers have come.
Though it’s lovely to play (and dine) at plush private school grounds, spreading the net is vital, especially in an era when the social base of the game has un- deniably narrowed. Otherwise the ECB would not have felt it necessary to dream up The Hundred.
In the rush of hastily-arranged xtures last year the Eastern Counties played British Tamil CC at Ardleigh Green CC, Romford, in beautiful autumn sunshine. I even managed to score a few runs that time!
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