2019 Season Review

PRESIDENTIAL REFLECTIONS

I am pleased to report that 2019 was a successful year for SOA cricket. Highlights included winning the Sandford Six a side competition (the first time we have fielded a six a side team ‘at home’). A brilliantly organised and well attended mini festival. A wonderful Devon tour. A superb match between Andrew Smith’s XI and the President’s XI with the 3 results possible on the last ball. We were also well served by an excellent roster of match managers so that no games had to be cancelled due to the SOA being unable to raise a team. Indeed, we were even able to put out 3 teams on the same day in early May (two XIs against Radley College and one playing the Oxfordshire Overs 50s).

On the social front, the President’s match, the Oxford Downs fixture and the Mini Festival all provided opportunities for members (playing and non-playing ) to meet up , eat and share a beer.   I was also delighted that so many could attend our Annual Dinner in November which was thoroughly enjoyed by all. Lydia Greenway spoke very engagingly and put into perspective just how far the women’s game come in a very short time. The Cotswold Lodge Hotel were a pleasure to work with and it proved to be a very good venue. 

The SOA are extremely fortunate to draw from a large membership that includes some very talented cricketers. Although I could not be at every game, I was present when hundreds were scored by Swappy, Alex Basford, James Ellwood and Junaid Aziz. There were many other fine batting performances from notable players such as Frankie Crouch, Hajii Sadiqi, Callum Russell and Matt Warner. The most notable bowling performances that spring to mind were Sam Herbert’s 6-25 v Wayfarers, Craig Foster’s five for v the Heartaches, Jake Humphrey’s 4 at Shobrooke, and great bowling spells from Matt Warner, Dave Eaton, Alex Davies and Max Mannering.  

The committee and especially AJ work tirelessly to increase our playing membership and over the years we have tried to ensure that we reach out to every corner of the Oxfordshire cricket community. So as the women’s game grows we are trying to ensure that we encourage lady cricketers to get involved in SOA cricket. I believe 6 played for us in the season.  

I estimate league clubs draw about a quarter to a third of their membership from the Asian community and it would be brilliant if the SOA could be similarly represented. Our Devon tour party benefited from Junaid Aziz and Ayyaz Mallik touring and we were especially grateful to Hajii and Saqib coming down for just one game against the very strong Devon Dumplings fixture on a Friday. 

I am hugely grateful to the committee for all the work they put in to give us a superb club with a brilliant fixture list, and for all the match managers who ensured that we had a lot of fun and played cricket in the best traditions of the SOA. I wish Frankie Crouch all the very best for 2020 and I know the club will be in excellent hands. I am aware that Swiley wants to spread some of the duties that have fallen on him and I think that it is imperative that committee members are never over worked.

TOM SCRASE (SOA PRESIDENT 2019) 

Review of 2019 Season

In this digital age, it is inevitable that all cricket scoring will be computerised in the near future. The demise of the scorebook will mean that no longer could we thumb through beautifully-scripted pages of Miles Hedges, Neil Harris, Sue Moss, Sue Hayes and others; nor would we have to decipher the scribblings of an 'illiterate and innumerate schoolboy,’ which is how my predecessor as scribe was described by an SOA match manager in the 1950s!

Happily, the SOA still uses a scorebook - hopefully for many years to come. So I have been able to spend many happy hours poring over the pages to discover what happened to the SOA in 2019, another enjoyable season.

Of the 55 games scheduled to be played our record was:

WON 15, LOST 13, DRAWN 12, CANCELLED OR ABANDONED 15

This a slight improvement on the 2018 season, when there were 15 wins and 15 losses. However, there were more cancelled or abandoned games. Eleven of these were due to the weather, while four of our opponents were unable to raise sides. Not once was this the fault of the SOA, which reflects great credit on our match managers. In early June - not so flaming! - four successive matches were washed out - a frustration for the managers who had worked hard to get 11 players onto the field.

A scorebook, however, tells only part of the story. That's why match managers' reports are so valuable in giving an overall view of the season, especially when the SOA does not publish averages, on the insistence of the founder Malcolm Elwin. So it is disappointing, in my first year as scribe, that there has been a big drop-off in the number of reports. This is something for the newly-appointed 'lead match manager' to get his teeth into for 2020.

The first name I must mention in my review of the season is Swapnil Kulkarni, who played in a remarkable 21 games out of a possible 28 before he returned to India after the Mini-Festitval in mid-August. In those matches, he scored 911 runs with two centuries (average 56 - sorry Mr Elwin!), took a number of wickets and was even seen behind the stumps. What's more, he played the games in the best SOA spirit with a smile on his face. Swappy, we look forward to seeing you again in 2020 and beyond.

Five other centuries were scored for the SOA.  Matt Launchbury slammed 109 against Cumnor, reaching three figures in a remarkable 51 balls, while James Ellwood's 100 retired against Sidmouth took only a few balls more. Junaild Aziz also enjoyed an excellent season, highlighted by his 107 not out against Hampshire Hogs. Calum Russell made a stylish 100 not out against the Gentlemen of Worcestershire, while Alex Basford's 117 just failed to tick off a victory against the Frogs as SOA returned to the spectacular Valley of the Rocks ground at Lynmouth after more than 60 years. In the most thrilling finish of the season, the match was drawn with the scores level - a fitting end to another enjoyable Western Tour.

In what was often a wet summer, only three SOA bowlers took three wickets in an innings - and two of those were spinners. Craig Foster's off-spin gave him figures of 5-17 in the new fixture against Sir Tim Rice's Heartaches team - one of his victims was his old mucker Chris Hutton. Incidentally Sir Tim was unable to play, but joined us for a drink after the game and was delightful company.

Sam Herbert returned the season's best figures of 6-25 against Hampshire Wayfarers in another exciting draw, while seamer Damien Wiskin produced match-winning figures of 5-10 against the Gentlemen of Worcestershire. There was also a rare hat-trick, achieved by Matt Warner in the T20 double-header against the England Deaf Lions.

The SOA became more diverse in 2019. There was a strong representation from the South Asian community in Oxfordshire amongst our players. Indeed it was with an all-Asian team, that the SOA won the inaugural Sandford St Martin Six-a-sides (see report elsewhere).

It was also pleasing to see more female players turning out for the club after Rachael Potter's historic appearance in 2018. At least six women or girls played, with twins Ellie and Charley Noble taking five wickets between them in the SOA's victory over Cumnor.

Thanks to groundsmen Martin Cross, Danny English and Robbie Eason - at Queen's College, Brasenose College and University College respectively - the Mini Festival of Wandering Clubs, organised by the SOA, proved successful even though the Club did not record a victory. The Melbourne XXIX Club came with a strong side, including Melbourne Big Bash player Sam Harper, who looked like getting a big score until falling to Nick Bishop's 'sucker' first-ball full toss!

As to the tour, there was disappointment when Taunton Deane could not field a side for the first fixture. Sidmouth were weaker than normal and called in reserves from the SOA, who gave five-star displays. Junaid Aziz top-scored for Sidmouth with 88, while our President, Tom Scrase took three SOA wickets from the only four balls he delivered. Of the scheduled ten games on tour, there were two wins, two defeats, four draws and two cancellations.

Turning to the President, Tom excelled in so many ways, taking on responsibility of extra fixtures and organising a superb end-of-season dinner at which former England cricketer Lydia Greenway spoke so eloquently. To think that, until about 20 years ago, ladies were excluded from the club dinner. We have come a long way. Well done Tom; Frankie Crouch has a hard act to follow.

Finally a big thank you to the umpires and scorers, who officiated at our games. I must mention Bob Belcher, who umpired more SOA games than anybody and kept us entertained with his impish sense of humour. And at Chulmleigh on tour, Bob actually played when we discovered we were one short. Coming on to bowl with our opponents nine wickets down, he had an lbw appeal turned down by a curmudgeonly umpire first ball. Bob vented his displeasure with the decision, but was much happier a few balls later, having taken the final wicket.

All in all a most enjoyable season which shows the SOA to be in rude health.

Obituaries

IAN “DOC” MCDONALD (1923-2019)

Richard Allan writes:

Ian McDonald, a fine Australian cricketer, who was SOA’s greatest overseas advocate, died in February 2019 at the age of 95.

After playing post-war inter-state cricket for Victoria, he spent two years in the ‘50s working as a young anaesthetist at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, and was quickly recruited to a less competitive form of cricket by Pat Florey and Roger Kirk. SOA records indicate that Ian was an outstanding wicket-keeper/batsman and that both he and the future Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, were members of the 1955 Western Tour.

The experience of playing for SOA made such an impression that, on his return to Melbourne, Doc helped to found the XXIX Club as an arm of the prestigious Melbourne Cricket Club (the MCC of Australia). In this he was aided by the fact that Melbourne’s social cricket had fallen into abeyance while a new MCG was built for the 1956 Olympic Games, and the MCC committee was attracted by its renewal in a form that replicated what Ian had experienced in England, including the annual dinner.

Writing in the XXIX Club’s 1993 UK tour brochure, Ian said: “I was greatly impressed and delighted by the art form known as the annual dinner – a play in which the actors dressed in black and white, and were regaled by after-dinner speakers of extraordinary wit and enthusiasm. Graced by Lindsay Hassett, the first XXIX Club annual dinner, almost course for course and speaker for speaker, was quite intentionally moulded on the 21st annual dinner of the South Oxfordshire Amateurs CC which had so enthused me in 1954. It is for this reason that I have always believed SOA to be the unwitting father of the XXIX Club (there was so much free champers that night that the father would have been none the wiser …!)." 

No wonder that Ian was invited to be one of the guest speakers at SOA’s 50th anniversary dinner at Eynsham Hall in 1983.

Ian, as a much-loved honorary life member of MCC, was a marvellous host and raconteur to those SOA members lucky enough to visit Melbourne for the Boxing Day Test match and to be entertained as his guest in the MCG pavilion. In 2002, I was one of these, and a series of coincidences resulted in us becoming close friends and subsequently corresponding regularly. He had enormous cricketing wisdom, which was evident from a reference early in our correspondence to mastering the science of reverse swing and then to a blistering reference to “sandpapering” in his final letter. His cricketing contacts were legion, and he was instrumental in procuring a number of the fixtures on the SOA tour to Australia in 2004, as well as speaking at the end-of-tour dinner held appropriately, through his influence, at the MCG.

Apart from his achievements on the cricket field, Ian, whose younger brother Colin opened the batting for Australia in 47 Tests, was an outstanding hockey player (he won Melbourne University blues at both sports) and, in later years, he was a keen golfer and fly fisherman. He had an enviable reputation of being the “perfect sportsman” on any field of play he graced, and this was mirrored in his career as an anaesthetist, where I understand he spared no effort in providing impeccable support to his patients.

And, after his best playing years were behind him, he was even able to combine business with pleasure when he was appointed as the Australian Test team’s medical officer on its tour to India and Pakistan in 1959/60. In this, as in all his travels, Doc was accompanied by Dottie, his devoted wife of over 60 years.

Ian was one of SOA’s greatest overseas friends and supporters and, as an accomplished sportsman, he did his home club, the XXIX Club, proud. In summary, as our President said in his message of condolence to that club’s President: “Ian was the greatest possible ambassador for the sport we all love, and was one of cricket’s true champions.” Aussies, and indeed cricketers of all nationalities, don’t come better than that.

PHILIP ALSTON (1936-2019)

Richard Pineo writes:

My memories of Phil start around 1980 when we began to play a lot of SOA cricket together. In his earlier life he was a senior British Airways pilot, fast bowler for the RAF and Hampshire Club and Ground and the Trojans in Southampton. He played for many teams in different parts of the world through his job, but will particularly be remembered as a successful player for the Incogs and member of Dick Hawkins Everdon Hall side.

By 1980 Phil had become a very skilful off-break bowler, as well as a fine captain with great cricket knowledge and skills. We both enjoyed the same positive outlook on SOA declaration cricket and often shared tactics through our great love of the game. Phil was a staunch late-order batsman and we enjoyed a stand on the Christ Church ground to defeat an Australian touring side, giving SOA victory!

Phil ran the SOA tour to the West of England for several years and gave great pleasure to a wide range of SOA players in Devon and Somerset. Always efficiently managed, the matches were played in the right spirit.

Through his job, he had gained a network of worldwide cricket contacts, which enabled him to inspire and manage a wonderful SOA tour to South Africa in 1997. The tour will long be remembered by those of us fortunate to represent the SOA. Phil ran an excellent trip for a large party and secured a match at the famous Newlands ground against the Western Province President's XI. His retirement from cricket came at Groot Drakenstein on a memorable occasion which was celebrated in style. Typically, Phil could not resist some SOA games the following year! We had a memorable end of Tour dinner when Phil asked me to run the tour fines - he was fined for making long speeches!!

Final memories include him arriving cheerfully at matches in his open sports car with his wife Louise beside him to lend her full support. About 15 years ago Phil and Louise moved to Australia, where he enjoyed his golf and friends, as well as watching his beloved cricket.

We will all have our personal memories of Phil. I treasure his great character, fine cricket skills and his stories. He was a cricketer who played SOA cricket properly and managed a fantastic South African tour for the club. A man with amazing contacts in the cricket world, with whom I enjoyed many enjoyable hours on and off the field. Happy memories.

BOB HAWKE (1929-2019)

The former Australian Prime Minister, who died in May at the age of 89, played a number of games for the SOA while attending University College, Oxford, from 1953-55. There are reports of him playing for the SOA against the Douai Society and Oxford City in 1954, and of going on the 1955 Western Tour with his fellow countryman Ian McDonald. A top-order batsman, there are no reports of him making a major score for the SOA. He headed the Labour government in Australia from 1983-91.

GEORGE CAWKWELL (1920-2019)

Tony Lurcock writes:

George Cawkwell, who died last year six months short of his hundredth birthday, was almost certainly the only surviving SOA player from the 1940s. He came to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar from Auckland in 1946, and twice got his ‘blue’ playing rugby against Cambridge, and subsequently played - once - for Scotland against France. ‘What he would really have liked to excel in,’ wrote his obituarist, ‘was cricket: “I hit some big sixes” he once said’.

In 1949 he was appointed Ancient History Fellow at University College, and became a central figure of the college for nearly seventy years. He first played for SOA in 1949: two-day matches (those were the days!) against the Gentlemen of Suffolk (3 & 47*; 19.1-3-62-6 & 15.3-2-50-4) – promising debut – and against the Wiltshire Queries at Chippenham. The next day at Street he played in the first match of the Western Tour. He played six matches in 1950, nine in 1951, and six in 1952. He was on the Executive Committee in 1953, but I don’t have a record for that or for the following years. He certainly did not become a long-term member, unlike many of those he played with. Many years later I mentioned SOA to him in conversation, and he showed no interest at all in talking about it, or of reminiscing. I found this rather strange.

I met him when I was at Univ in the early sixties, and saw him on and off over the years in and out of college. After he retired I sometimes chatted with him in Summertown, where he did his shopping, on the last couple of occasions with the aid of a walking frame.

In 1950 and 1951 he went on the Western Tour, and subsequently managed several games in Oxford. He reported that ‘We were feeble v Keble’, and after the game entertained many of the players at his home in Staverton Road. He managed two games against Univ, making a duck on each occasion, with bowling figures in 1949 of 17-0-57-1. He did not quite fulfil the promise he showed in that first game, against the Gentlemen of Suffolk.

Cawkwell’s best contribution to cricket history is perhaps the following anecdote, told to The Revd Richard Smail by his father.

The Roman historian Tacitus summed up the short but disastrous reign of the emperor Galba with the words: “omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset”, which might be paraphrased, “Everyone thought he’d make an excellent emperor until he actually tried to do it.”

In the 1950s George ran the Emeriti, the Oxford dons’ cricket team, and my father ran the Cambridge equivalent. At one of their annual fixtures, Cambridge arrived with an umpire who was a scientist of international repute and known to be a great lover of cricket. He proceeded to give a string of hopeless decisions which resulted in a Cambridge victory.

George left the field in high dudgeon, muttering in a stage whisper to a colleague,

“omnium consensu capax umpirii nisi umpirasset.”

While an undergraduate he also won two rugby blues, the first only two months after his arrival. In the dressing room at Twickenham he was asked which nation he would like to be considered for: he said “Scotland”, and on New Year’s Day 1947 he duly played against France in Paris. France won 8–3, and all those playing south of the Border were immediately dropped. “I suppose,” he later wrote, “I was a moderately good player, but the truth is that my heart was never really in it and I can remember reciting Greek verbs as I jogged around the field.” What he would really have liked to excel in was cricket: “I hit some big sixes”.