After 57 years watching, playing, scoring, reporting on, even umpiring cricket matches you'd think you'd have seen most things you were ever likely to see.
But Sunday at the iMEP Arena brought me at least three unique experiences.
I'm pretty sure I've never seen anyone score a double ton in league cricket before. A mismatched tour game, Aussie Peter Gardiner for Ossy Immanuel at Newton Abbott, ok, but I think Allan Border’s 179 not out for East Lancs in a 1978 Worsley Cup game at Rawtenstall was my previous highest seen.
I might have seen a batsman given out 'obstructing the field' in the dim and distant past but if I have I have virtually no recollection of it.
But the opportunity to get on the walkie talkies now provided to scorers and umpires and advise officials on a piece of protocol they'd missed on a third rare occurrence was far too much for a smartarse like me to resist. More on all three in due course.
As some of you know, I have a pretty nomadic cricketing past. I grew up in a family of East Lancs fanatics and the Meadows, now much reduced from the splendid 'Headquarters'' of old, will always be special in my heart as the place I learned to love the game from my first visits in 1968.
I played a bit of juniors and thirds there in my early teens but didn't really play as an adult until joining Church in 1981.I got no higher than the second XI. I lacked nothing except talent.
My longest and most enduring loyalties remain with the West Enders but I've always tried my hand at scoring since landing my first gig as East Lancs 2nds scorer 52 years ago. You had to have an actual interview with a fusty old secretary for the job there in those days.
I dreamed of being First team scorer at the Meadows but would have had a long wait as Larry Pearson, the man in possession in those days of Bowiemania, power cuts and the three-day week, didn't step down until earlier this century.
Since then I've scored for Church, Oswy Immanuel. Leyland Motors, Leyland and occasionally Brinscall, I'm sure I've forgot some. I’ve even guest scored an MCC Ladies game.
After Covid, the team nearest to my boyhood home, Cherry Tree (I literally lived 100 yards away from age eight to 23 but had no real connection to them), asked me to help out and I'm now in my third season as their first team scorer.
So my weekends these days are largely divided between the canal side Blackburn club and Accrington.
I actually live the far side of Preston near the Police headquarters at Hutton and have elderly parents who live not far from Cherry Tree so home games are a convenient opportunity to call on them and attend to any shopping requirements they have etc.
So my route to being associated with Accrington is roundabout to say the least. Jon Hayhurst asked me to help out with the seconds a couple of years ago and I was delighted to be asked.
This season the club have been kind enough to let me handle some first team games when available. I regard it as a great honourat a famous historical club just as I did when Jack Houldsworth asked me to help out as League assistant Secretary to Duncan for a couple of years I love the Lancashire League and everything about it.
So for the time being you’re stuck with a Church fan doing the book.
Talking of roundabout ways, before we get to the meat of Accrington's weekend, my own began with a trip to Barnoldswick to watch Cherry Tree.
Barlick is one of those places like Leyland which a good proportion of even the Lancashire population never have any sporting, business or geographical reason to visit. Out on a limb quite near main thoroughfares but an easy place to miss or avoid going to.
To complicate matters, it often involves the hazardous undertaking of journeying through Colne. Like many before me, I've spent hours in traffic after coming off the M65 waiting to get to the turn off for Earby and Barnoldswick or beyond. And also like many before, on Saturday I attempted something too-clever-by-half to find a short cut and turned left early only to find myself all over endless estates before emerging into a hitherto undiscovered (by me) but rather picturesque almost Alpine vista of glades, narrow bendy roads, gentle rolling hills and pleasant canal side pubs.
Unfortunately nowhere were signs to Barnoldswick to be found and I feared I'd be driving round till 5pm before giving up.
Eventually I did emerge onto a main road I vaguely recognised but turned towards Earby rather than my intended destination, before realising and correcting the error.
I’ll never complain about driving to Crompton again.
What a relief when I arrived at the Victory Park ground - not as simple as it sounds as you actually have to find the well-hidden park at the far end of town and remember the slightly eccentric way through its labyrinthine paths.
Luckily it was a 1pm start not 12.30 as I’d assumed, so I made the start.
It will remain one of the mysteries of modern life to me that in an era when we send pop singers to space, build bridges between Scandinavian seas, bore tunnels through mountain ranges and can travel under the channel and be through French customs in minutes, it still takes three quarters of an hour to get from Boundary Mill to the Horsfield Cricket Ground or Morris Dancers pub.
Cherry Tree lost quite heavily but I was delighted at tea-time to receive a text from Mark Taylor to inform me Accrington had despatched Rawtenstall in the Worsley Cup. A much-needed first win of the season through, I hear, outstanding bowling and catching with the runs knocked off with minimum fuss in no time.
The last time I'd checked the Play Cricket app the home side had been 61 for three so to have polished them off and knocked the runs off by four o'clock or so was some going.
Greenmount at home is a decent draw if not a traditional local cup blockbuster and we'll get a preview this Sunday when the Tottington side (I think - Bury perhaps; another journey to look forward to) visit for a league game and another battle of the unrelated Snyman's.
Their man Jacques of course holds the record for the biggest individual score in Lancashire League history, 269 against Accrington in 2023.
On Sunday Accrington acquired the unfortunate distinction of being on the end of the second highest too as Bacup pro Chirag Khurana made an astonishing 234.
With Accrington being one of the league’s bigger playing areas this innings was possibly worth more than Greenmount’s pro’s.
The diminutive Indian wizard from Lanehead isn’t as much a heavy-bat bludgeoner of huge hits (he did hit five sixes as well as 33 fours, mind) as a masterclass craftsman manipulator of typically Sub-Continental wristy strokeplay and improvisation.
Many of his strokes hadn’t been dreamed of in 1968 when I watched the likes of Clive Lloyd, Grahame Corling, Graeme Watson, Ian Brayshaw, Dik Abed and Ghulam Abbas ply their trade.
If anyone had attempted switch-hit laps or taken guard on the return crease back then they would have been roundly condemned by the like of Alf Thornton and Keith McNee and instructed to jolly well stick to the MCC coaching manual.
At times it seemed his boundaries were deliberately hit with just sufficient force to frustrate chasing fieldsmen in the final yards of a pursuit which looked frustratingly possible.
To have witnessed someone put a long-standing club record belonging to as esteemed a historical figure as Everton Weekes, revered by my dad’s generation and the cricket fraternity worldwide, firmly behind him was extraordinary.
My main job here is to talk about Accy but sometimes seeing history unfold before you the opposition unavoidably become the leading line in the story.
It was nice that a couple of old friends from Bacup, Neal Wilkinson and Peter Mulderigg, called in to share part of the landmark afternoon for their club with me.
As a bowling unit there’s not much you can do when a maestro is giving such a chanceless exhibition. Even the scoreboard connectivity couldn’t keep up at times.
What you can do to limit damage is take any opportunities offered at the other end and this we singularly, or doubly and trebly in fact, failed to do unlike 24 hours previously.
It was perhaps apposite that a Bacup bat had to practically invent a novel way of getting out
I called the Hargreaves’ dismissal for kicking the ball away as soon as I saw it from our very good angle up in the pavilion and I believe he eventually accepted the decision after some vituperations.
Our reply, always a monumental ask, was always doomed to failure once Jurie departed. There were breezy contributions from Ali Hasham and Sneds while Nathaniel and Oliver will benefit from the feeling of getting bat on ball for a while.
Biggest talking point was the “was it a six or a catch” incident when the skipper launched one in the direction of the car park which a fielder caught but stepped over before adroitly throwing it forward and catching it again back on the grass.
Did he ground his feet over the line? I don’t know, and nor could anyone else without replays which of course aren’t available so umpires Heyes and Jackson, again correctly, ruled that in the absence of absolute certainty that a legal catch had been pulled off - and credit to the Bacup lad for such a brilliant piece of improvisation - they could only rule ‘not out.;
What did delight me was to get on the walkie talkie to remind Martin he needed to signal six. My dear friend Mr Heyes is a brilliant umpire and I once sat with him at a cup final at Trent Bridge when he spotted a five-run penalty incident virtually no-one else in the ground noticed.*
It’s good to know my ageing mince pies and cricketing instincts aren’t completely jiggered even if I did mistake an incoming bat and enter Oliver Lowe down on the ipad and in the book as Mo Ali which led to a period of confusion late in our innings. Apologies to all who had runs miscredited or deducted before the error was happily corrected.
Well done to young Bacup scorer Laurie who kept a cool head as I unravelled my own confusion,
He’ll remember his afternoon watching that innings as fondly as I recall early days being excited to be part of a club set-up in the early 1970s.
As Brendan McArdle once told us in a Church selection meeting, if you play cricket you have to learn to take an absolute hammering now and again no matter who or how good you are.
Let’s all move on and enjoy next weekend. Whalley away with Cherry on Saturday - I think I can just about find that ground although there’s a hidden turn-off involved at one point - and Greenmount back at the iMEP on Sunday.
At this stage Greenmount are without a scorer for the game if anyone fancies joining me and earning a few quid You might even be better at recognising our players than me.
*The Trent Bridge incident involved the keeper chasing a ball, throwing his glove off, and another fieldsman picking it up to take the return by the stumps. Not allowed. Five runs. I spent the rest of the innings proudly telling anyone in earshot that my mate the umpire had called it .
