2016 Season Review

The opening fixture in England, against Cokethorpe School, ended in a snow storm and I hoped it wasn’t going to be a feature of the summer! Fortunately, we were blessed with a good season generally and SOA flourished. The match managers did their job and we put out some very strong teams which also contained younger players, the future of the club. We must continue to ‘sell’ the club to the youth to ensure our survival in this cricket world. We play good cricket in lovely locations with convivial company.

Many years ago, I went on the western tour. It rained a lot and I can’t remember much more than the inside of pubs and leaving empty beer bottles in Luke List’s car, so it was a joy to tour this year with a clear head and good weather. What a great tour this is! We play at sublime grounds against good opposition, enough said. We were very good on tour, many thanks to all the members and friends who made it a success and to our blazer supplier for the outfits (see photo!).

I do appreciate that times are changing and an annual tour is a significant undertaking, but I really believe that breaking it into bite-size chunks makes it more attractive in these busy times. Players can dip in and out, staying as long as they want and it works well. 

The President’s day at Wormsley was the high point of my year. I had to pinch myself that it was actually happening! The game itself was very competitive, despite being reduced to 30 overs per side. In fact it was a miracle we played at all after precipitation of monsoon quantities had fallen all night. Simon Tremlin and his team of groundsmen performed herculean tasks with all the super soakers available to them and we inflicted a very rare defeat on a strong Sir Paul Getty XI.

I am very grateful to all the members and wags who attended the dinner in the evening, making it a super event. It’s not often one gets to listen to two Oscar winners speaking, and on a subject that we are passionate about! Many thanks to Sir Tim Rice and Sam Mendes for major contributions to a memorable evening.

Five years ago you would have got very long odds on me being asked to be President. It is you lot who have kept me sober, in your own little ways, and I thank you all. It was an enormous privilege and a massive honour. Thanks to the committee and special thanks to Steve Wilson, Andrew Moss, Russell Hayes and AJ Smith, they are the stars that make the SOA shine so very brightly.

It’s been emotional.

CHRIS HUTTON (SOA PRESIDENT 2016) 

SEASON 2016

The Club Report for 1934 - 35 carries the following announcement:

CLUB COLOURS

Supplied by Messrs. Adamsons, Ltd., 39 Sackville Street, Piccadilly; 102-104 High Street Oxford; and 23-24 Trinity Street, Cambridge. Ties 6s. 6d. Caps 7s. 6d. Blazers, £3 13s. 6d.

Each of these gents’ outfitters carried rolls, or bolts, of SOA cloth. According to David Money the entire stock was bought up in the 1940s by an Arab who liked the colours. Possibly he had some connection with camel-racing.

The ties have never been out of print, and a silk reprint has, for some more discerning members, now replaced the polyester version. The hooped cap reappeared in a limited edition in 2000, and now is in demand again. Only the blazer had become obsolete, until 2016, that is.

The 2016 Season will go down in SOA history as The Year of the Blazers, seen in massed array at the historic match and dinner which concluded the season, against Sir Paul Getty’s XI at Wormsley. Compared with that decomposing bundle of rags, the Founder’s Blazer, which is hoisted onto the shoulders of each incoming President, these are bright going on flashy. They have proved so popular that one wonders if SOA cuff-links will be the next in line revival.

There could hardly have been a finer climax to the season than the Annual Dinner at Wormsley. It was possibly the largest turnout since the Fiftieth Anniversary, when Brian Johnson was the speaker at Eynsham Hall. Members came from as far afield as Shropshire and Yorkshire. After overnight storms the ground staff were able to get the ground ready for a very belated start, and the game was well under way as the guests began arriving. The speaker was Sir Tim Rice, and he demonstrated how brevity can be the soul of wit, and how one can get by well without a question-and-answer session.

With the widely-enjoyed tour to Sri Lanka, a Western Tour entirely uninterrupted by rain, and the memorable conclusion of the season at Wormsley, everyone must be reflecting on a great season. Indeed it was so, yet all matches in Sri Lanka were lost, only six were won before the Tour, and the final figures (England only) were Won 11, Lost 16, Drawn 13, Not played/Abandoned 12. So why was it a great season?

To begin, all the Sri Lanka matches were limited-over, not a type of cricket which SOA either promotes or prefers. That was the package offered, presumably, and it seems not to have diminished anyone’s pleasure in the tour. In England match managers are sometimes bullied into agreeing to a 40-over match, and when they accede it is usually out of courtesy to the home team. The reports reveal again and again that it is traditional cricket which usually provides the best and most memorable matches, matches which, even when drawn or lost, keep everyone’s interest and enthusiasm to the very end. 

The dominance of bat over ball noted, not always with approval, in first-class cricket, is replicated at club level. There were nine centuries scored by SOA players, and only three ‘fivefers’: one by A.J. Dyer, who in his only recorded game took 5-29 against the Stragglers of Asia, as well as scoring 112. The only other five-wicket hauls were taken by Tom Goffe (who ten years ago first played for the club on the Devon Tour) and by no less a person than our Secretary, against the Gentlemen of Worcestershire. Perhaps no century was more admired than Tom Moffat’s 91, an innings of classical left-hand elegance, against the Worcestershire Gents, ended only when tiredness induced a weak shot and he played on; as the manager wrote, ‘All the players – on both sides -  and officials appeared saddened by this unfortunate end.’ He is a powerful addition to the SOA Septuagenarian Squad. Two senior members of this squad, Bedford and Lurcock made their contributions with the bat not with runs but by holding out, with fielders in touching distance, in matches (MCS and Old Waynfletes) which were drawn with SOA nine down.

In reviews of the season wicket keepers rarely get more than a passing mention, but the extraordinary feat of Tom Ling in securing six victims (three in each department) against North Devon is unprecedented in SOA history. The additional circumstance of four of the victims being off his brothers’ bowling may perhaps be unique in all cricket.

Our fixtures divide broadly into three categories: other wandering clubs, schools and ‘old boys’, and local clubs. Most of the first group are other ‘county’ sides, eight of them in 2016, with the Devonshire Dumplings twice, home and away. The Somerset Stragglers, a fixture which was originally a two-day match at the county ground at Taunton, has had its ups and downs in recent years, and had appeared to slip below the horizon last year. Colin Bedford deftly replaced it with Taunton Deane, where we have played some of the best Straggler matches in recent years. Against this, and the folding of the Dorset Rangers, seemingly of the Wiltshire Queries, and now of the Berkshire Gents, SOA can be seen as a strong continuer. Several of these fixtures provide some of our best cricket, with several high-scoring games, as usual. A terrible exception to this civilised tradition was the Warwickshire Imps (see match 41).

Clubs like ours, the Gipsies and the Dumplings demonstrate that there is a genuine interest in non-league cricket at least in the south. No cricket club runs itself. Most of us know, or know of, clubs where the retirement or departure of officials has left no-one to keep things going. This gives us additional cause to be grateful for our own committee; it is reassuring that the committee members and match managers are both numerous and involved, ready to take the tiller when the time comes.

A generation ago the school fixtures were against state schools. Now only one remains – Lord Williams’s, Thame. SOA actually had a sort of ambassadorial role in those days, showing how a cricket match should be conducted. This is not needed at Radley and St. Edward’s – in fact the roles have to an extent reversed. These fixtures attract good Oxfordshire players to the Club, and provide some top-class cricket on superb grounds, but it is surely a matter of regret that we have had to abandon state school cricket, sufficiently abandoned as it is already, one might feel.

Local clubs – notably the Downs, Tew, Sandford, Challow and Tiddington – are generous in making their grounds available for a wandering side, and by hosting the Club for afternoon fixtures.

A question which comes up now and again in the Club is the role of the manager on the day of the match. If he is an opening bat or bowler, should he open, or simply keep himself in reserve to give a better bit of the game to those who have loyally turned out for him? A manager can find himself in the position of the Speaker in the House of Commons: he must oversee proceedings, but cannot take part. Probably every match is a special case: an instance is Frankie Crouch’s debut against the Gloucestershire Gipsies, where he batted himself selflessly at 11, and saved the game.

This match was played at Cheltenham College, the Club’s first game on this famous ground. SOA were set to chase 293, echoing the same fixture in 1971 played at Bourton-on-the-Water on 29 July, where the Club made 293-8 to beat the Gipsies. It was described by the Scribe, Peter Frankenburg, as ’one of the most remarkable games in the history of the S.O.A. who ... won with three minutes to spare [no ‘last 20’ in those days]. But the man of the match was Roger Smith, who completed his hundred before lunch, two sixes, one five, and twelve fours, attended the Guiting Music Festival in the afternoon where he played piano concertos by Mozart and Grieg, and ended the day by taking three catches behind the stumps during S.O.A.’s innings. For S.O.A. Martin Edwards continued his recent magnificent form making his runs [97] in under two hours. Nigel Furley [74] also played very finely...’

Neil Harris scored for numerous matches, and as a result the scorebook for 2016 has been largely well-kept. In particular he gives the names of umpires and scorers, which are otherwise usually not identified, though the manager sometimes thanks them in his report. Sue Moss, Andrew (during a period of indisposition) and Sue Hayes were among those named, as was Miles Hedges – a foretaste of his promised 2017 return to his old role. Andrew Smith, John Smith, Bob Belcher, Mike Knox, Henry Morgan, and Peter Tubbs were the umpires most frequently recorded. 

SOA is well behind the cutting-edge of scoring technology, which has now left paper far behind, and makes it possible (I am told) to follow a game ball-by-ball from anywhere in the world. The paper scorebook itself is more complex than it once was. One complexity is a heading ‘Type of Match’. The conservative instinct is to write ‘Cricket’, but scorers have their own terms, among them ‘timed’, ‘forty over’, ‘no toss’, ‘negotiation’, ’declaration’, ‘tour’, and ‘friendly’ (does this imply that the other are not?) My favourite was ‘Oxford Downs Cricket Week’: obviously sui generis. [‘In a class of itself. Unique’ (Google)]

The mention of umpires brings in the name of Ron Jennings, who many members will remember umpiring SOA and other matches around Oxfordshire and Bucks. He died during the autumn aged 95, which means that he was not far short of 90 when he stood in his last game for us. He always wore a friendly cheery smile and was invariably accompanied to matches by his wife. She was too disabled to leave the car, but however long he had been standing, Ron always took her out some tea before taking his own.

A fellow SOA member has shared the following tribute he found online - 

“He was always happy and carefree, not once in all the years of knowing him did I ever see him look sad or miserable, his glass of life was always half full. He was a lovely ol’ boy who always had a permanent smile on his face, a true gentleman.”