by Mayukh Ghosh
Fairfield Books was originally created by Stephen Chalke, way back in 1997, when his first book Runs in the Memory was published.
Over the next twenty-five years or so, Fairfield produced quality books. Most of them written by Chalke himself but there were other esteemed contributors who did their bit.
The result of all that is that the keen readers of cricket literature, especially in the U.K., always expect high quality books whenever it comes out of the Fairfield stable.
But, much to the dismay of these readers, after one or two wrongly landed deals, Chalke eventually sold Fairfield Books.
‘The Nightwatchman’ group took it from him, and in all honesty, there was skepticism. Will they be able to stick to the main strengths of Fairfield Books?
Not that they had to but there were high expectations.
Over the course of the last year or two, the new owners have managed to convey that a few changes aside, the tradition of producing quality books conytinues.
The latest in the list is Scott Oliver’s Sticky Dogs and Stardust, about the time some of the legends of the game spent in the leagues of English cricket.
This is Scott’s first book and, not surprisingly, his strong association with the game began rather early on in his life when he went to watch matches with his father.
“My first encounters with cricket were from tagging along with my dad, half watching him play, half playing imaginary Test matches outside the boundary (away grounds were always ranked on the amount of space they had for these games). I was born in 1973 and my first real memory of international cricket was Botham's Ashes, particularly Headingley.
It wasn't long after this that I was requisitioned for 1st XI scoring duties: a blow for the improv' cricket matches, a boost for my weekly pocket money. It was probably during this time that the deep origin of Sticky Dogs and Stardust can be located, seeing my dad's team try and deal with exotic overseas pros such as Dilip Doshi, Ravi Ratnayeke and Vanburn Holder, among those I can remember.
This was largely at Little Stoke CC, near Stone in Staffordshire, where I played my first organised cricket (carried off with a split eyebrow after an injudicious sweep shot) and whose subsequent overseas players, many years later, included Mushtaq Ahmed, Dinesh Mongia and Justin Kemp in consecutive seasons. Oh, and Shahid Afridi as a deputy pro, a story that appears in the book.
By 1988, I was starting out in the 2nd XI at Moddershall (I moved because they had an under-15s team), pretty much my only adult club, except for two enjoyable years at Wollaton in Nottingham in my 30s. I played the following season in the 1st XI, not really doing much save absorbing lessons (one of which was how quick the future England seamer Paul Taylor felt to bat against as a 15-year-old, especially when the captain refused a single after I'd run him down to third man!). The year after that, Moddershall were invited into the more prestigious and better standard North Staffs & South Cheshire League, and I played a handful of games with Dad, by then a 53-year-old wicket-keeper.
For a good portion of my time at Moddershall, I was commuting 50 miles by train each week from Nottingham, where I went to read Hispanic Studies. There was some good cricket there, with a highlight being a tour to Barbados, watching Lara and Hooper dominate SK Warne for two hours while sat among the jubilant locals (after first convincing them we weren't Aussies). The best session of cricket I've seen live, I would say.”
Scott’s foray into writing didn’t come easily. Nor was it a natural progression of what he did in his early adult life.
“Without much idea of what I wanted to do -- plus a somewhat skittish brain (long story short, probable ADD) and parents who didn't go to university and thus probably couldn't offer good "careers advice", even if I'd been amenable to it, which is doubtful -- I stumbled into a Masters and then a PhD when they offered me a studentship, a good opportunity to defer the inevitable encounter with harder realities. The PhD turned into a monumental slog, some of which is briefly touched upon in the book, specifically the chapter about Imran Tahir's three years at Moddershall.
The sum of all that was that the last few years of writing up the thesis (esoteric soixante-huitard French philosophy applied to Peronist Argentina) were miserable, particularly as I had totally ruined any chance of an academic career (not least because I was playing cricket when I ought to have been attending conferences and giving papers). So, upon finishing (my viva voce exam was early 2012), I needed something to do.
I contacted a local magazine, Leftlion, who immediately installed me in the vacant Sports Editor's chair. This was unpaid, but gave me access to Trent Bridge, where I was able to do some low-level networking. I pitched a profile of Derbyshire's Danish seamer Ole Mortensen to David Hopps at Cricinfo, and have been writing for them ever since. I also covered three County Championship matches for The Guardian that year. I have no idea how it came about, but it petered out at the end of the season as the effect of the internet -- the implacable laws of the eyeballs -- began to contract budgets and thus, for latecomers without any formal journalistic training, opportunities. I've been a freelancer ever since.”
Given Scott’s background, this is a book that might well have been in his head, albeit subconsciously, for years.
“No, the book, as such, was only consciously in my thoughts from April last year, when it was already three-quarters written. The majority of the chapters were conceived as standalone freelance pieces, as a means to pay the bills, and only when I had around 20 in my pocket did it occur to me to collect them in a book.
How I came to fall into that niche was again a haphazard, serendipitous affair, which owed a great deal to the amazingly comprehensive Lancashire League website -- with which I was already familiar before moving into writing, by virtue of trying desperately to source good quality sub-pros in the late 2000s, when Imran then Rangana Herath then Mohammad Irfan were unable to discharge their duties as our professional.
Sometime in the middle of the last decade, All Out Cricket (the team that now produces Wisden Cricket Monthly) asked me to write a piece about the golden age of overseas club professionals. I went back to the Lancashire League website -- this being the league that has had the highest concentration of glamorous overseas stars -- and made a pre-spreadsheet-conversant grid with lists of each club's pros, ostensibly to find out which particular year was the starriest (it was 1981). Anyway, in the course of doing this I suddenly became aware -- or became aware again, only now as a freelancer looking for story ideas -- that Shane Warne, Allan Donald, Kapil Dev, Steve Waugh, Viv Richards and many others had played in the league. I had always enjoyed hearing these yarns in clubhouse bars after matches, and figured it would be worthwhile trying to write them up, speaking to teammates and opponents, grafting the reminiscences around the (hopefully interesting) underlying narrative provided by the events.
Viv was the first one, for Cricinfo, and I haven't looked back since -- digging around in other leagues, sniffing out and following leads (still very much an ongoing process, because a lot of this stuff isn't online), visiting archives and libraries, tracking people down. It's very enjoyable.
As I say, it only occurred to me to collect them as a book last April. I pitched Matt Thacker, who took over Fairfield from Stephen Chalke, and he accepted in 30 seconds. At that point, I had maybe another six previously unpublished stories to research and write up. And I now have a second book in the works, with around 50 candidate stories on the table (in various states of disarray). Lots of superstars in there, too: Murali, Javed Miandad, Herath,Joel Garner, Michael Holding and Andy Roberts, Abdul Qadir, Sourav Ganguly, Shoaib Akhtar, SF Barnes, Everton Weekes, Allan Border, Martin Crowe,.... “
The process of writing this kind of a book is not as easy as it might seem to many. The scorecards are hard to get, the stories are sometimes hard to cross-check.
“By and large, it was a pleasure to write. Each one is quite a laborious process -- first to track down the basic information (the foundation of the narrative, of course), then to source good anecdotes. As I say, the fact that the Lancashire League has a full archive of scorecards made those stories fairly straightforward. With one or two others, very kind people sent me scans of whole scorebooks. Beyond that, I had to contact libraries to ask what sort of coverage the games had in the local papers -- scorecards? reports? -- and, if it was worthwhile, get myself there and make copies (ideally just scanning pages as PDFs, occasionally having to photograph the monitor on a cranky old microfilm reader).
The process remained the same for the chapters written exclusively for the book, although I didn't have to worry about word limits with those (for better or for worse!).
One thing I should add is that each story is always and inevitably a work-in-progress, even when appearing in published form. Cricket is a vast Amazon of stories, and a writer is only able to visit parts of it, particularly when you're dealing with the lesser explored regions. There will be dozens and dozens of people out there who played against some of the legends covered in the book who no doubt has great yarns to spin, yarns that would improve the chapters. Finding these people -- which can be a bit needle/haystack -- is always such a joy: the sort of people with good memories and a colourful turn of phrase. There was one chap who played with Courtney Walsh who spoke continuously for about 25 minutes, one story after the other, no prompting needed. This is the gold.”
One of the things that was crucial was to get access to the subjects themselves. That, whenever possible, made things a bit easier.
“I was able to speak extensively with VVS Laxman, Shane Bond and Mark Waugh for those stories. Also, with Wasim Akram, for around 10 minutes. And AB de Villiers kindly sent me some thoughts via email. I tried a couple of the others without success, but the pieces don't stand or fall on this. It depends how interesting what they have to say is (and there are always autobiographies to consult). I'm not particularly good at badgering people. After one reminder, I usually start to cool on the idea, which is perhaps why I'm not a particularly good 'journalist'.
VVS remembered lots of details about his time -- working as a cashier in a 24-hour petrol station, netting with Matthew Hoggard and his dog -- and Shane Bond was really good to talk to, very open and with a cheeky sense of humour.
Researching the stories and talking to teammates and opponents of the stars did throw up plenty of surprises and a lot of new stories, or perhaps sub-stories that could be grafted into the appropriate chapter. For example, writing about Gordon Greenidge and Malcolm Marshall, pro at the same club in back-to-back seasons, I discovered that Stuart MacGill had played in the league during Malcolm's year and received a life ban from the league, the week after being head-butted at tea by an opponent who'd had enough of his chirp. He also absconded with the club car, which was never to be seen again.
There are a few similar cameos in the longest chapter -- the one in which I feature as a player -- with the likes of Nathan Astle, Tino Best and Chris Lewis putting in appearances. It's always interesting when you stumble across two world-class players locking horns in a club match, imagining the buzz it must have been for the other 20 players. The Steve Waugh encounter with Viv Richards is pretty cool. And that 1981 season in the Lancashire League features five players from the World Cup final a couple of years later.
The second book is likely to feature a few more of what you might call B-listers -- not all-time legends of the game but very fine cricketers and exceptional club pros. Guys like Phil Simmons or Franklyn Stephenson, say, whose clubs almost always won league titles or cups. I will probably open up these stories a little bit and touch on other overseas legends of the leagues -- from different seasons or eras -- that the main subject has played in, players who probably wouldn't quite merit their own chapter on the basis of 'name recognition' but who absolutely dominated the league. A really good example of this would be Clayton Lambert, the former West Indies and USA player, who scored something like 69 league hundreds in 14 seasons in the North Yorkshire & South Durham League. Or perhaps Wasim Jaffer, who played a lot of club cricket in many different leagues and quite often averaged 90, 100 or more.”
Already in the process of bringing out the sequel, I asked Scott if he would do anything differently next time.
“I don't think I would approach it too differently. The sequencing was a happy accident, once we'd decided -- with time running out -- that 22 stories was enough and realised they could be placed in a sort of batting order for two imaginary teams. I'm not sure that will be viable for the second book, and certainly won't be selecting which stories to include on that basis.
I suppose the one thing I may do more of in the second book will be to include the odd vignette about colourful characters connected with a specific club (or perhaps even opponents) and, as previously mentioned, including the occasional digression on other noteworthy pros in a given league or at a given club who otherwise might not merit a full chapter. It's all about the colour! These digressions, I suppose, become more important if the underlying story isn't especially compelling: i.e. the superstar played only part of a season and/or the team didn't threaten to win anything. Everything depends on what material I'm able to pull in.”
The books is available directly for the publisher: https://www.thenightwatchman.net/buy/sticky-dogs-and-stardust
Other than that, the usual physical and online stores have copies in their stocks.