Page 20 - Demo

209 CENTURIES AND COUNTING
James Coyne writes about John Stuck, who has unfinished business at the age of 77
ast September, on a glorious afternoon late in the half-summer, I was playing for
the Forty Club Eastern Counties against
“I can still see the ball – there’s no problem with that. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have taken up umpiring! And yes, I am familiar with the old umpiring joke ‘I’m struggling to see the ball out there, so I’m taking up umpiring’...
“I’m happy to keep wicket too, but it depends if they want me to. I’d prefer to do that. I stand up to the stumps to all the bowling now. I can’t move around much standing back. I can’t really bend down anymore, but oddly I can keep wicket without bending too much. But the arthritic pelvis makes elding elsewhere very di cult.”
Doesn’t he have any other aches and pains? Wicket- keepers’ knees are supposed to go, aren’t they?
But he says: “I’ve got surprisingly good knees considering all the crouching. Around 2010 I found I could hardly walk, although there was no pain.
“I assumed my knee was the issue after all the wicketkeeping, and I was about to have keyhole surgery to remove some cartilage, but at the pre-op the specialist suspected something wasn’t right
and he X-rayed my hip. It had totally disintegrated. So I had a whole hip replacement and I’ve been ne in the 10 years since then.”
Stuck was born in Ipswich in 1943, and played for local clubs in Su olk before joining Clacton in 1963 in order to bat on a plumb pitch then used as one of Essex’s multiple outgrounds.
Though Stuck played 64 Minor Counties Champi- onship matches for Su olk between 1969 and 1979, and scored more than 43,000 runs for Clacton – including 73 hundreds, 50 of them at their Vista Road ground – he freely admits that the majority of his centuries have been scored in over-age or veterans cricket, for county over-50s, 60s or 70s sides, the Forty Club and the like.
“Oh, I wouldn’t have scored 200 hundreds just playing rst-team cricket. I have played a lot of vets cricket and that’s where I’ve scored most of them. One or two bowlers retain their pace once they get to that age, but most of them get slower and so it’s easier to bat.
“I did have to work out a new way to score runs when I rst came into vets cricket, though. Instead of just de ecting the ball down to third man as you could against quicker bowlers, I found it hard to break the in eld.
“I’ve always felt I have to count my runs up to 20 and then after that I can press on. It does have a bit of an e ect on the opposition and if they’ve seen me be- fore they tend to feel they have to get me out early.”
L
British Tamil in Romford - just about the furthest I’ve been from my home in the last 12 months.
The skipper had brought along with him an umpire. During the game, the umpire gave away no inkling of the number of runs he had scored or the catches and stumpings he had pulled o in his own playing days. If I’d known I’d have been a bit more sheepish when I went out to the crease or pulled on my keeping gear.
Luckily I stuck around afterwards for a post-match pint in the warm sun – it made sense to lap it
up before the depressingly inevitable return to lockdown – and discovered that this man, John Stuck, had no scored no fewer than 209 centuries in his life.
Last summer was the rst since 1957, when he played his rst match for Sudbury Grammar School Under-14s, that ‘Stucky’ did not play a game of cricket. Else he might well have brought up century No. 210.
After I met him, I came across an interview he did with Scott Oliver last winter in which he claimed
to have retired in 2019, at the age of 75, due to an arthritic pelvis. He didn’t have to test his abstinence last season because Essex Over-70s, his main team now, didn’t play any matches in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
It seems he’s having second thoughts though when I call him at home in Clacton-on-Sea. He may well be digging his kitbag out of the attic this spring just like the rest of us.
“I’ve still got an appetite to play. I haven’t fully retired!
“Umpiring’s ne – I did about 30 games last summer. I was in regular demand because of the rush of xtures from July onwards.
“I’ve still got the bug, so I might try to play some over-70s cricket for Essex this year. I played right at the end of 2019 in three games and Essex won the Over-70s County Championship.
22
https://thefortyclub.play-cricket.com
ARTICLES