Your first test match

It’s Friday – let’s indulge in a little nostalgia. We’d like to hear about the day you fell in love with cricket. The chances are it was the first time you properly watched an England match on TV. At some point, as the overs ticked by, a pernicious little bug crept under your skin and condemned you to the lifelong psychosis of supporting the England cricket team. Who were we playing? What happened?

I was an eighties child, so you’d imagine I was seduced by the heroics of Ian Botham, the elegance of David Gower, or the counter-attacking bravado of Allan Lamb. This was an era of English Ashes dominance – epically in 1981, one-sidedly in 1985 – and our stoic but futile resistance to the awesome West Indies in 1984.

But cricket has a profound knack for inverting logic. So, quite naturally, the match which first lured me to cricket had nothing to do with the colourful and dramatic series I’ve just mentioned.  It was in fact the completely unexceptional first test v New Zealand in 1983, at the Oval.

This entirely forgotten match pitted against each other the two least glamorous sides in world cricket at that time. But to my eight-year old sensibilities, it was a revelation. And what most stands out in my memory was one particular passage of play: a second innings opening stand of 223 between- of all people – Chris Tavare and Graeme Fowler. Just writing down those names sends a little shiver through me – but also makes me wonder how on earth they enthralled me so.

I mean, come on! Those two? The sheer time they must have taken to accrue those runs doesn’t bear contemplating. Remarkably,  Tavare was the quicker scorer – his 109 came from 259 balls, Fowler’s 105 from 299. And they were the first England openers to score a century in the same Test innings for twenty three years. Not that I was aware of that fact at the time.

A funny pair, Foxy and Tav. They were selected to open together on the grounds – so I’ve always presumed – of the similarity of their moustaches. Both wore that distinctively thin early-80s style tache, low on the lip – think Midge Ure and you won’t go too far wrong. We were never told whether they actually trimmed together, in the dressing room, but spectators always guessed as much.

Looking back, I’m struggling to put my finger on what exactly it was about their partnership, and the match, which reeled me in. I think it may have been the rhythm of it, or the texture – not that I would have articulated it so precisely at the time. I probably knew that 223-0 meant England were doing very well, which I liked. Little did I know what lay ahead over the next twenty years.

For the record, we won the match by 189 runs, and the series 3-1. It’s become, probably, the least celebrated or discussed cricket series in history, perhaps because it involved New Zealand. In fairness to the Kiwis, they were a pretty strong side at the time – Hadlee was at his apogee – and in the second match they won their first ever test in England. In the fourth test, (Sir) Ian Botham made his final test century on home soil.

Somehow – I will never know exactly why – this was the match which inveigled me into cricket’s opiate grip. Which was yours? And why? We’d love to hear your stories.

Maxie Allen

10 comments

  • In my case it wasn’t actually a test match – we didn’t have television ‘when I wor a nipper’, and I didn’t get to fall in love with TMS until rather later. I grew up about half a mile from the cricket green in a fairly typical Surrey town and used to go there at every opportunity, either to play pickup games on the outfield or to watch the local side. It was a very pretty setting – it still is – and I always associate it with summer weekends, the sun dappling through the horse chestnut leaves, ice cream cones with chocolate flakes and all the good things in life.

    The pavilion used to have a quaint little scorebox built into the eves, accessed by a narow staircase from the bar. It now has an unattractive electronic scoreboard mounted in front of it, but I guess that’s progress! If we were lucky whoever was scoring would let a few of us up to watch the game from there, in return for helping out by running errands… of the ‘go and find out the bowler’s name’ variety.

    I guess the day that sealed it for me was when Surrey CCC visited for a charity match. It was a big occasion, with proper marquees and wooden benching spread around the boundary rope for the crowd to sit on…. and it really was a crowd! If you want to know when this was, the fact that the Surrey side featured John Edrich and Ken Barrington, amongst others, should give a clue. We were enthralled when Surrey – as was their right – batted first. Edrich started cautiously – it would presumably be embarrasing to get out early to a village player – but after a while opened up and started to cart the bowling into the car park behind the pavilion. We youngsters watched wide-eyed – never having seen anything like it.

    I seem to recall that it rained later in the day and the match had to be abandoned – though Surrey were naturally well in front at the time. I was playing very bad school cricket at the time but I still fell in love with the game – even though I was merely to be a spectator for the next thirty years, until persuaded back into real village cricket in my late forties….

    Well – you did ask for nostalgia….

  • Blimey Andy, that was quite poetic. Are you Laurie Lee is disguise? Very enjoyable. My first memory of cricket was watching David Gower score a double hundred at Edgbastion on TV. England’s spin twins (Emburey and Edmonds I recall) then set about dismissing the rancid Aussies. I remember the commentators repeated saying ‘ooohhh, a bit of turn there’. I had no idea what they were talking about. My other memory of the day is that I ate a lot of biscuits.

  • My first test match day i attended was Day 1, Lords in 1991 against the West Indies (http://www.cricbuzz.com/cricket-scorecard-archives/scorecard/england-v-west-indies-20-jun-1991/6966). My main memory was England going in with a four man pace attack and getting smashed around by Hooper and Richards. I thought it was a very fast scoring day but the innings run rate was only just under 3.5 which is par for a normal day in this era.
    I realise now what a team the West Indies had in those days and how poor the modern team are by comparison.

  • I am a 43 year old German – so there is no chance in the world I could ever fall in love with cricket … any still I did. And to make things even worse, it happened last month so I don’t have to look back to the 80s – horrible haircuts anyway!
    I spent a week in Bengalore and when business was done I didn’t do too much more than watching TV. Now I could choose between 380 Bollywood movies or the ICC worldcup. First night I watched it with a lot of WTF?-moments, second night: ummm this is kinda exciting, third night I found myself getting to the hotel and asking the guy at the door: how did India play? And now I am back in Germany aka The Country where people think cricket is croquet and I got tons of cricket blogs in my RSS feeder, subscription for AllOutCricket is in the mail and on Sunday I will watch my first cricket game played at a nearby university that is lucky enough to have some indian and pakistani students. So that is surely not English nostaliga, but I a promis I will cheer for England … at least when they play Australia or SA … ! And now I need to go back to my new favorite book: Cricket for Dummies … fun read by the way

    • Thanks phaty. By the way, I wish we did prizes, as you are surely the first German to comment on this forum. Congrats! However, please don’t try to convert your countrymen into playing cricket as a national sport. You will inevitably get very good at it and kick England’s butts. We endure enough humiliation at the hands of Germany in football thanks ;-)

  • Good point – as we perform similarly in both the cricket and football world cups…struggle to beat the crap sides in the group stage but scrape though, then lose in the quarter finals.

  • Being a much younger reader (born in ’92), my formative years in cricket were in a different generation. I’d been a tiny bit of a cricket fan, but after THAT summer in 2005, I was a fully fledged fanatic. After spending much of the ensuing winter pestering my dad to get me tickets to an actual test match, he took me along to England v Pakistan at Lord’s in 2006. We went to the third day, and despite my hopes of seeing Freddie, KP and Vaughany batting, we spent all day watching Mohammad Yousuf break the English bowlers backs in an excellent double hundred. Looking back (as a slightly more mature cricket fan…) I appreciate the brilliance of the innings, but at the time I just got bored with it all and we left early. Luckily my dad enjoyed it so much that he took me back for quite a few tests over the next few years – and the rest is history!

    (And PS – I regularly read an excellent cricket blog written by an actual German! So phaty you are not alone! http://playforcountrynotforself.blogspot.com is the place to go, and coincidentally she’s been writing a lot recently about the travails of the German team, although she does cover pretty much all of international and English / Australian domestic cricket!)

  • I’m French. I discovered the very existence of cricket at age 14, when I was sent to Oxon for a one-month linguistic stay. One day I went to Oxford, and there was a game of cricket being played at the Parks. I found it fascinating even though I had no clue what was going on, and I watched for the best part of the afternoon. I went back to France wanting to know more, but it was before the Web, so I didn’t find much at the local library.

    Several years later Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse and so had transformed me into a die-hard anglophile, so I learnt much more about cricket on the Web. And finally this winter, Indian members of my online gaming guild commented a lot about the Ashes that were about to begin. I ended up following the game until the small hours on the radio, on the Guardian’s OBO and on Twitter. Then I bought the Haynes Cricket Manuel, and there was the World Cup, and the series against India. I tried to go to London for the 4th Test, but it was sold out at the Oval, so I’ve bought a LiveECB access. I hope one day I’ll be able to sit and watch an entire Test.

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