After a pretty perfect weekend of sunshine and resounding cricket victories for the teams I score for -and if you score for 'em you badly want 'em to do well -I wasn't expecting to arrive home and open a message to end Sunday on a sombre cricketing note.
But over a late dinner at home I received a text from young Cherry Tree skipper Charlie Elwood to say he'd stepped down from the captaincy after just four league games, three of them emphatically won with notable contributions from one of the most spectacular amateur strikers of the ball around, one whose hitting I'm always excited to watch at close hand (and get paid for it).
I was quite concerned and while Charlie reassured me it was no biggie, it reminded me that for every winner there has to be a loser and for every cricketer who walks off a field euphoric, there's sometimes a player who's crushingly disappointed or affected by weightier matters related to the game or otherwise.
I've often told the tale of my own worst ever day on the field for a few laughs at gatherings and dinners and even written it up in a couple of programmes and fanzines.
The summer of 1986 wasn't the best for me. I'd moved back in with my mum and dad at 27, never a good move after having a relationship go bad, committed career suicide by applying for a demotion for geographical convenience and was having a pretty average time at cricket.
My day of misery came against an Accy Seconds XI whose names will be very familiar to many of you- Hayhurst (G), Stevenson (M), Gardner, Demaine, Barnes (N), Bray, Whittle, Donnelly, Bramwell, Gallagher, Warburton.
After two decent seasons where I'd taken 50 wickets each I was finding landing my feet in the right place difficult. And everything else basically.
At Church against Accy I opened the bowling with two overs of utter junk - no balls, wides, ones that landed off the cut strip - and was promptly whipped off.
I dropped two simple catches no more difficult than a ball chucked back from the keeper round the field and puffed on my dressing room Hamlets after tea quietly, desperately hoping not to have to bat.
Now not only was it a sorry day for me, most of you will recall it more as a disastrous one for English football. At 7-30pm or so in the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City, England were due to kick off against Argentina in the last eight of the World Cup
Yes, that day. Hand of God and all that.
At about 25 past the hour I was called upon to walk to the wicket at 92 for nine with not a cat in hell's chance of getting the eighty-odd still needed. Still determined in my own mind though to bat out the overs and to hell with the football.
Now the bit that gets the laughs is me getting hit on the pads first ball only for the bowler, keeper, all nine fielders my mate the not out batsman at the other end and even the square leg umpire and the rest of my team at the front of the dressing room to appeal tumultuously. It was like the Hampden roar. Not once but next ball again. The umpire said 'not out' to anguished cries of dissent even from my convivial confreres. It was getting on to kick off time.
Mercifully for everyone I edged Duncan to Mick Donnelly at slip and bowed my head in disappointment. When I lifted it, everybody was rushing towards the bar faster than anyone had moved all day but not before I was asked to bring both sets of stumps with me on my forlorn, unaccompanied trot off.
I watched the game but couldn't really see what England had to bother about. Shilton wasn't going home to a frosty reception and getting up in the morning to issue parts to hungover gas fitters.
I was promptly dropped and packed up playing for a couple of years a week or two later. Happily I did play again from 1988 for a few years but although I often spin that yarn for a chuckle or two, I was actually a broken man with far more problems than bowling a few long hops and wides and descended into a spiral of depression it took years to get out of. At times I considered the worst possible option.
Being cast out of a dressing room I'd worked hard to feel worthy of being in was hard. No job, no girl, no home of my own and now stuck with the kids in the thirds instead of the lads I loved to be wit( all weekend.
I sincerely hope no one was so adversely affected by events this weekend but my heart did go out to the lad who bowled a solitary over for 29 runs as Accrington threatened to launch into the batting stratosphere at Alexandra Meadows on Sunday.
It was a special day for me to go to East Lancs, almost 57 years on from my first visit for the 'Lionel Cooke Derby.'. I had the pleasure of sitting with Joe Timmis scoring, the two of us having spent many hours in dear old Lionel.s company. (In the coldest shop on the ground on Sunday as now seems compulsory in scorer's universe).
Joe is league rep and general factotum for the famous old club and could give me more insight than most into the ways they are dealing with financial pressures, shifting demographics, a reduction in crowd numbers over the last three or four decades and most pressing on Sunday, weaknesses in the bowling attack among their young squad, without a pro but opting for an overseas amateur in Aussie Hudson Walshaw (a good old Lancashire name at least).
Walshaw has through some circumstance found himself now captaining the XI and possibly opted to bowl first on a hot dry day as a change as good as a rest.
The Blackburn side have struggled to contain defending totals so perhaps a change seemed a good idea. A former East Lancs pro, Bob Cowper (who -good quiz question - played in a Worsley Cup winning side along with Wales , Rovers and Spurs legend Mike England in 1966) who once made 300 in an Ashes Test on home soil, a feat which eluded Bradman, passed away last week.
Cowper, whose Meadows stay earned a league and cup double, might have advised young Walshaw, a trainee teacher, that playing the stock exchanges of the world is an easier living than trying to make sense of cricket. He packed up the sport incredibly young despite being rather good at it and lived in Monaco doing so for many years.
Hudson might have wished he'd taken the traditional Aussie cricketer's midweek trip to the south of France and got stuck there as Jurie and Nathaniel added a mammoth third wicket stand of 197 in just 21 overs; even after the youngster, sparring with Walshaw in a battle of the luxuriant 80s Kajagoogoo hairdos, departed for an excellent maiden senior 50 there were another 20 overs left.
It looked far from beyond's the bounds of possibility that Snyman would convert his second ton of the season into a Kharuna-like double. He really does look to have one in his locker. As at Crompton, a 380 with interest total looked eminently possible.
That it wasn't was credit to East Lancs opener Ahmad who took five good wickets across two spells, some determined and spirited fielding and some late reward for persisting with spin.
Three different amateurs notching fifties so soon in Accy's season (Jacob went close to his second here) and other men in the 40s augurs well for what I'm convinced is a much-improved batting line up. There was even a whisper from the home camp of Accy having 'two pros' a flattering tribute to the returning in-form Clarke.
Despite regularly hearing down the decades that 'such and such team are paying five of these, you know,' I've only ever met two amateur cricketers who claimed to be paid. One was so daft and drunk I'd doubt it, the other was totally unaware I knew anything about local cricket and went white as a ghost on hearing I was a former member of the Lancs League exec. He never engaged me in conversation again and avoided me on the corridors of the school we both worked in. Eddie Slinger will be smiling wryly from the great beyond.
The East Lancs reply was inevitably something of an anti-climax with even batting bonus points a distant and unlikely prospect, and for a time two bowling points for the visitors seemed as fanciful. The fourth wicket didn't go down until the 40th over.
But that was reckoning without the entrance to the attack of number seven bowling option Mohammed Yousuf Ali.
The pocket battleship charged in for a couple of unremarkable overs before claiming a wicket apiece in the 36th and 38th overs.
Jon Hayhurst was the unlikely claimant of the next man to fall but in the final over Ali bowled Ahmad, trapped Rahman leg before next ball and completed the remarkable 12-pointer with a ball to spare by splaying last man Hotiana's woodwork neck and crop.
Remarkable stuff. I keep saying there's a team busting out here and hopefully they'll take the momentum into the league and cup double header this week.
🏏it's a busy period with T20 starting in the NWCL last Friday. Cherry Tree breezily disposed of Barrowford who had a familiar face, Crompton's Mo Jamal, as sub pro. Their interpretation of 'providing a scorer' was interesting.
It was good to see another familiar face, Church's Craig Fergusson, following his dad into the umpiring ranks. I recently heard author Mark Ellen say that being younger than the new pope was a landmark in the ageing process. So is seeing one of your oldest cricket pal's kid umpiring.
On Saturday Cherry Tree entertained Brinscall whose scorer Bryn Huddart is always enjoyable company. Bryn had brought an old boyhood autograph book to show me. Not only had he collected the autographs of pros and first XI amateurs as a Haslingden supporting boy, just as I did, unthinkable now, but the second XIs as well. A couple of my old school mates were on the East Lancs twos page.
Prize one though was Peter Swart's signature, former pro at Accrington, Haslingden and, in Cowperesque double-winning glory, East Lancs. Pound for pound among the very best all-rounders seen in the league.
As Joe and I looked out against the background of the Corporation Park heights on the dying embers of the game at the Meadows bathed in early evening 'golden hour' sunshine, we reflected that for all the 21st century changes, and the unlikelihood of league or cup glory won under pros of old 'HQ' remains a special place to watch cricket, even for someone who's been coming almost 60 years and seen every seat taken with standing room only and the bar drunk dry. I hope the famous old club is around for decades to come.
I sincerely hope too that the guys who had a bad cricketing day though have a better one next time out.
However well you or your team does this weekend, share a thought, a consoling arm round the shoulder and a reflective drink with the guy who's pride has taken a blow. We men don't really talk about it and certainly didn't in 1986 but there may be more than cricket hurting inside.
