won. We bowled well first
innings and batted
hopelessly.
Australia left us 463 to
win after Rick McCosker,
right, whose jaw was
broken on the first day,
came out to bat with his
jaw wired up, which I didn’t
think was the right thing to
do. These were days before
helmets.
Then, the little man
Derek Randall playedCentenary Test
Of all the Tests I played, the
Centenary Test match at
Melbourne in March 1977
has to be the most special.
It was a shame that it came
at the end of a long tour of
India — we had been away
four months and wanted to
get home — but it was a
great occasion.
The match wasn’t too
bad to watch either. It was
a game we should have
mementoes for each tour
you went on, such as solid
silver cufflinks with your
name on the back. We were
also given a personalised
cricket “coffin” with MCC
colours and an MCC
touring blazer. They were a
bit ostentatious with their
gold braid but looked very
smart and were the same
style of blazer worn by the
great players of the past.
These things meant a lot.England tours
There wasn’t really any
money in cricket in those
days — we got around
£7,000 for the tour of India
and Australia that included
the Centenary Test — but
we just wanted to play.
Anyone who gets to the
top of their sport wants to
play for England.
MCC still ran England
tours when I started and
the club gave youbrilliantly, scoring 174. They
couldn’t bowl at him. He
was a great timer of the
ball and made it so look
easy. I couldn’t see how we
could lose.
But the leg spinner Kerry
O’Keeffe and Dennis Lillee
did for us. I remember
Lillee bowling leg cutters
and me constantly playing
and missing. Rod Marsh
shouted: “You can open
your f***ing eyes now.”28 2GS Saturday September 12 2020 | the times
ME AND MY MEDALS
John Lever, 71, a left-arm fast bowler, played
21 Tests for England and helped Essex to win
nine trophies between 1979 and 1986
One-day trophies
I played in six county finals at Lord’s
although we only won two of them. One of
those was by just one run, against
Nottinghamshire in the NatWest Trophy in- Derek Pringle bowled the last over to
Derek Randall with 18 needed — and
Randall, backing away further and further
to leg to hit through the off side, almost
managed it. But with two needed he backed
away again and clipped it straight to Paul
Prichard at mid-wicket.
Essex’s first
County
Championship
To be part of
the first Essex
side to win
trophies was
huge. Essex
have a bloody
good side at
the moment
but all the
modern players
get compared
with our side.
One time when
we won we
went to
Buckingham
Palace for a
reception and
took along our
local paper
photographer.We were all
crowded round
Prince Philip,
above, and this
guy said: “I’m
sorry Prince
Philip, would
you mind
moving a bit to
your left?” The
prince’s reply
was curt: “You
move. I don’t.”
We all collapsed
laughing.where they are
going wrong
and to see how
other people
play. I had Keith
Fletcher to tell
me, because he
had a great
memory for
everyone’s
games.Bob Willis,
Graham Barlow
and me, we
trained hard. I
don’t think I
would be any
fitter if I played
now. There are
so many aids
for players
today to seeKeeping fit
The game has
become more
professional but
I don’t think
they are any
fitter than most
of us were in
the England
side I played in.
Graham Gooch,We were allInterview
Simon Wilde
Photograph
Lawrence LustigPatrick Kidd
THE TAILENDER
Caddyshack
star’s wish is
finally granted
Boule-fight mars
petanque showpiece
A few characters in
All the Vowels XI
There was a shock in last week’s final
of the world pétanque
championships and it wasn’t that the
event in Marseilles, featuring 2,000
teams, was still held despite the
Covid spike. No, the shock was that
Marco Foyot, the greatest striker of a
cochonnet of our age, failed to win
his seventh world title.
The competition was
overshadowed by a mass brawl after
a team were accused of cheating. “It
was like a bullfight,” a Belgian player
said. Or possibly a boule-fight. The
highlight was this line in a report by
our Paris correspondent: “Pétanque
has been trying to shed its image as a
boozy pastime for paunchy men.
This has been a challenge.”My series of fantasy cricket XIs took
a sad turn when the football writer
Jonathan Wilson tweeted that he
been thinking of athletes whose
names include all five vowels (this
may be something only men do). He
suggested Douglas Jardine, Neville
Southall, Charlotte Dujardin, Ronnie
O’Sullivan and Alexander
Vinokourov. The Test Match Special
commentator Daniel Norcross added
The Nawab of Pataudi, if you include
his definite article.
Naturally, this set me off, so here is
the All the Vowels Test XI: Marcus
Trescothick, Roger Prideaux, Jardine
(capt), Pataudi (all Eng), Kurtis
Patterson (Aus), Keith Arthurton
(WI), Romesh Kaluwitharana (SL,
wk), Dougie Marillier (Zim),
Maurice Allom (Eng), Andile
Phelukwayo and Duanne Olivier
(both SA). England’s one-day
captain, Eoin Morgan, alas didn’t
quite make it despite getting 60
per cent of the way to the target
in his first three hits.Triggered by King’s
armed umpires
I’ve been reading the new
autobiography of Tom King, the
former cabinet minister, in which he
reveals that he was briefly The
Times’s skiing correspondent. When
he called in his first report from
Sestriere, the paper’s sports desk
were amused to hear that he was
filing flat on his back in bed, having
just broken his leg. His career in
journalism went downhill from there.
King also appeared in Wisden
when he was secretary of state for
Northern Ireland and had
been invited to play in a
charity cricket match in
his Somerset
constituency. There was
a problem with the
umpires, so King’s
security detail
volunteered to stand
in. Wisden reported
that this was almost
certainly the first
cricket match in which
both umpires were armed.Forty years after holing the putt that
helped Chevy Chase to win a high-
stakes round of golf, with a nudge
from some TNT planted to blow up
gophers, Danny Noonan is finally
going to the US Open.
Michael O’Keefe, who played the
fresh-faced Noonan in the 1980 film
Caddyshack, will carry the bag at
Winged Foot next week for Danny
Balin, a club professional making his
US Open debut, after asking online ifanyone would give him a go in order
to raise money for caddies who have
been out of work during the
pandemic.
O’Keefe, 65, says he lied about
being a good golfer when he
auditioned for the film but he does
have some knowledge of the course
in New York state. As a teenager he
caddied for a couple of years at
Winged Foot and his brother is a
past president. He promised that
anyone who offered him a bag would
get lots of advice, “both solicited and
unsolicited”, though he thought his
chance of being taken up would be
“as big a long shot as Carl Spackler
winning the Masters”, referring to
Bill Murray’s mentally unstable
greenskeeper in the film.
Balin, who says he has watchedCaddyshack 15 to 20 times, said it
would be fun to have O’Keefe beside
him during his practice rounds,
though it has meant a change to his
training routine. “I’m going to have
to watch it again to get the one-
liners down,” he said.