Never forget who you are, where you came from and what you can pass to others

PAUL EDWARDS: I like it when counties return to the clubs that produce their players in the first place. I actually reckon all counties should feel a responsibility to play games at such venues

I would like you to imagine you are 16 years old. (I acknowledge this might require more imagination from some than others.) I would also like you to imagine you are a very promising left-arm spinner. It is a wet January evening. You could stay in and watch the footy; you could go out with your mates; or you could settle for an hour on the Xbox.

But you do none of these things. You go to winter nets instead.

Now I want you to imagine something else, though this is easier, and also a trifle more pleasurable. I want you to imagine you were sitting at Aigburth’s River End just after midday last Tuesday. Jack Morley was bowling to Derbyshire’s Harvey Hosein, who was 84 not out.

The ball Morley delivered was given a little air but, crucially, it was over-spun as well as side-spun. Hosein stretched down the pitch to play a forward defensive but the ball dipped, turned and took the edge on its way to the Lancashire wicketkeeper, George Lavelle, who, like Morley, was making his first-class debut.

Whenever one loses faith in the human race – a government news conference generally does the trick – it is frequently helpful to consider the skills of sportspeople: the golfer who can hit a ball 190 yards to within five feet of the pin; the gymnast whose spatial awareness allows her to twist and somersault in mid-air before making a perfectly balanced landing on her feet; and the 19-year-old bowler who can pitch a ball on say, a six-inch square patch of earth some 20 yards away while imparting precise revolutions upon it.

Yes, you are correct, this column continues the theme pursued last week when I wrote about young players making their debuts. But there will be no apology for that. It’s now clear to me that it has been a thread in quite a lot of the contributions in this space since I wrote about my old friend, David Essenhigh, back in April.

The theme has been revived now because my presence was required this week at Liverpool from where I reported on Lancashire’s game against Derbyshire. Early on the first morning it was announced that Morley and Lavelle would be making their debuts, thus bringing to six the number of Lancastrian debutants in this season’s Bob Willis Trophy.

And on an outground, too. A few people know how fond I am of venues away from the counties’ main headquarters and while Liverpool is one of the grandest of these, it is also a club ground where Lavelle and Hartley will have played for Ormskirk. Come to that, Derbyshire’s Mattie McKiernan will have played there for Leigh and Matt Critchley for Wigan.

^{Jack Morley took four second innings wickets for Lancashire against Derbyshire}

I like it when counties return to the clubs that produce their players in the first place and when professional cricketers are tested on different types of pitch. I actually reckon all counties should feel a responsibility to play games at such venues.

It is still county cricket, after all, and one of the many unexpected consequences of this dark summer is that we better understand how highly the counties – all 18 of them, please note – are valued.

Do I stray from my main point? I don’t think so. I’m not sure George Lavelle would be a county cricketer were it not for the excellence of Ormskirk CC.

And before anyone says it, I also doubt he would have such a fine chance of making it without his coaches at school or in Lancashire’s age-group squads. Lavelle conceded four byes in 184.1 overs against Derbyshire, 105 of them bowled by spinners. You don’t get to be that good without well-judged advice from people who love the game.

But neither are coaches of any help if the player is not prepared to make the sacrifices required by his trade.

There will be times when he cannot do what everyone else is doing, times when he misses big occasions, times when practising comes above watching, even when the practising is taking place in a draughty, converted shed and the bowling machine appears to want to sever his bollocks from his body.

Debuts last forever: How the last month opened the door for a new generation

It applies in other fields, too. When I was thinking about this piece I remembered a favourite poem “Me, Tarzan” by the Leeds poet, Tony Harrison. Harrison was the first member of his working-class family to go to Leeds Grammar School and thence to university.

His education, his love of classics and his books created a gulf between himself and his class which became a theme of his later poetry. Here he is recalling the schooldays, probably in the early fifties, when his mates called round for him:

Outside the whistled gang call, Twelfth Street Rag,
then a Tarzan yodel for the kid who’s bored,
whose hand’s on his liana…no, back
to Labienus and his flaming sword.

Off laikin’, then to t’fish oil all the boys,
off tartin’, off to t’flicks but on, on, on,
the foldaway card table, the green baize,
De Bello Gallico and lexicon.

A lot has been made of trust issues in sport this week. They occurred to me in a slightly different sense as I watched Morley and Lavelle present me with my favourite moment of the season so far. It seems to me that no sport can be owned by individuals, however mighty their personal empires might be.

^{George Lavelle made his first-class debut behind the stumps}

All the chairmen and groundsmen, coaches and volunteers can do is hold things in trust for the next generation, for people like McKiernan and Critchley and those who will follow them. If we do our jobs properly, the dividend is moments such as that which brought me near to tears of joy at Liverpool.

But we shouldn’t care about dividends. I doubt Neal Abberley did as he helped Ian Bell become one of the finest and most graceful batsmen of his time. Almost two years ago I saw Bell make a hundred on the first day of the match against Sussex. At the end of my piece I wrote this. (Please excuse me repeating the paragraph but I can’t think of a better way of putting it.)

“If you want to understand who Ian Bell is, then you should watch him bat for an hour. One thought of the occasion some 27 summers ago when the late Neal Abberley, then the county’s batting coach, saw the nine-year-old from Coventry for the first time and wondered what the Gods had sent him.

Batting is what Bell was put on earth to do and when he plays as he did at Hove on the first day of this game he shares his joy with others. It distracts the mind from the many recessionals of autumn; its graceful images remain when points and results are both forgotten.”

And this week Bell announced his retirement from the game and included in his thanks a moving tribute to Abberley.

A day later Graham Onions said he was done, too, and over the next four days I watched him take a succession of Lancashire cricketers over to the nets at Aigburth. We learn to play; then we enjoy our own glad seasons; and then, if we are very lucky, we get a chance to pass on what we have learned. I’m flabbergasted the Xbox gets a look in.

It is therefore ironic that in an often gloomy summer when we have been warned about the mortal danger of contagion, something far more beneficial has been transmitted to the thirty cricketers who have made their first-class county debuts.

It may only be the love of a game but it is such a love as enriches lives. So in the long run we will be delighted if people like Somerset’s Tom Lammonby or Surrey’s Dan Moriarty mix with others and pass on what they come to learn. But we cannot know they will do so.  We will have to trust them. I think we’ll be fine.

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