Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

I was looking at the faces of the people crowding around and you could feel their pride, you could feel their happiness standing there looking up at us. You could feel their expectation, their hope. I thought, I can’t let these people turn away feeling bad. I had to represent the West Indies for these people. What that meant was that we couldn’t lapse and have fun. We had to be on top of it all the time. The senior guys repeated this time and again. Andy Roberts, Roy Fredericks, Deryck Murray – they were tough, hard men. I remember bowling a half-volley at Leeds, and the look I got from Andy Roberts at mid-off I’ll never forget. He said nothing but his face told me, What the hell are you doing? You can’t be bowling half-volleys for the West Indies. I had never seen such competitive discipline before. I certainly learned what Test cricket meant in 1976. You could never be off, you always had to be on – and that lesson came to me straight from those guys.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Abbreviations:

• ER: East Riding
• GM: Greater Manchester
• NR: North Riding
• NY: North Yorkshire
• SY: South Yorkshire
• WR: West Riding
• WY: West Yorkshire

Comment

Comment

The scorecard. I seem to recall my father sitting on parched grass under a tree with a radio, muttering of England, “They’re rubbish, aren’t they.”

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Original

I was looking at the faces of the people crowding around and you could feel their pride, you could feel their happiness standing there looking up at us. You could feel their expectation, their hope. I thought, I can’t let these people turn away feeling bad. I had to represent the West Indies for these people. What that meant was that we couldn’t lapse and have fun. We had to be on top of it all the time. The senior guys repeated this time and again. Andy Roberts, Roy Fredericks, Deryck Murray – they were tough, hard men. I remember bowling a half-volley at Leeds, and the look I got from Andy Roberts at mid-off I’ll never forget. He said nothing but his face told me, What the hell are you doing? You can’t be bowling half-volleys for the West Indies. I had never seen such competitive discipline before. I certainly learned what Test cricket meant in 1976. You could never be off, you always had to be on – and that lesson came to me straight from those guys.

191 words.

Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• Andy Roberts (cricketer) (1) ·
• Clive Lloyd (1) ·
• Cricket (10) ·
• Deryck Murray (1) ·
• England cricket team (1) ·
• England (12) ·
• First-class cricket (4) ·
• Headingley Cricket Ground (1) ·
• Headingley Stadium (1) ·
• Roy Fredericks (1) ·
• Test cricket (1) ·
• Tony Greig (1) ·
• Wayne Daniel (1) ·
• West Indies cricket team (1) ·
• West Indies (8) ·

All tags.

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