Sheffield Cricket Lovers' Year Book 2014

35 Sheffield Cricket Lovers’ Society lifetime’s basting in the game to truly appreciate Chris Harris.” Such is the modern obsession with excitement and sensation, my book, in which I planned studiously to ignore the Indian spin kings Bedi, Prasanna, Chandrasekhar and Venkataraghavan and focus instead on the shine-on-the-new-ball-reducing efforts of Madan Lal and Roger Binny, seemed unlikely to ever to see the light of day. Luckily my publisher turned out to be a wibbly-wobbly man himself and snapped it up. In many ways The Trundlers is about a bygone era. The summer game has moved on. New competitions, styles of play and the covering of wickets have made the sort of decaf cricket offered up by RM-ers such as Hampshire icon Derek Shackleton, whose pre-match warm-up routine involved smoking a cigarette while combing his hair, a thing of the past. Terry Alderman, very much “The Prince of Trundlers” – an antipodean Mike Hendrick– has no successors down under, Matthew Hoggard and Dominic Cork have limped off, their obvious talents as medium-pacers somewhat tarnished by diverting private lives. Those that followed are different. These days fast-medium men are not content with hitting the seam in good areas, but are determined to reverse swing the cherry and all sorts of other fancy stuff. It seems a terrible pity to me, because - let’s be frank here - James Anderson is a very fine bowler, but he’s no Tony Nicholson. The Trundlers by Harry Pearson is published by Little,Brown. www.sheffieldcricketlovers.org.uk