A cloudless Saturday, a stunning ground. The universities won the toss and batted and with Sylvester Clarke out of sorts, possibly hungover, and the universities two best batsmen, Andrew Miller and John Carr of Middlesex, hoisting fifties, the universities posted a creditable if not obviously defendable 193-6 in 55 overs.
By tea, Surrey were five down for not many, Alan Butcher, Duncan Pauline, Geoff Howarth, Roger Knight and Andy Needham having fallen to a succession of long hops, wide half-volleys, brilliant catches, strangles and daisy cutters. Although they had a decent tail – Jack Richards, Mark Feltham, Graham Monkhouse all scored first class hundreds, and Clarke was nothing if not mercurial – realistically Surrey’s hopes rested on the last recognised batsman, Monte Lynch, thirty or so not out and a mighty hitter. If we could only snaffle him…
With the day becoming hotter, and word filtering into the town that the universities were in line for their first one day victory since, I think, they beat Yorkshire at Headingley more than a decade earlier, during the tea interval the crowd had swelled to six-deep around the boundary.
Meanwhile, as a student unsure where his next full meal would be coming from (probably the kebab van on Carfax at midnight) but confident that, win or lose, I would be drinking many beers that night, I was tucking in. Egg sandwiches, cakes, buns, entire trays were demolished in order to line my stomach for the inevitable potential victory/valiant defeat celebrations.
So much so that I was feeling unusually slothful even by my own low standards by the time I returned to my ‘natural’ position at long on/third man under the tree outside the pavilion for the final session. The first ball after tea, bowled to Lynch by the off-spinner John Carr, was hit with immense power. It hurtled towards me three feet off the ground, neither rising nor dipping as I prayed for it to bounce before it reached me. But it didn’t.
I can still feel it hitting the base of my thumb and bouncing out, seeing the red of the ball against the green of the grass. There was a stunned silence. Everyone around the ground knew that if Lynch had gone the game would almost certainly be ours. It didn’t help that I was wearing a sweater with a light blue trim. I snatched up the ball and furiously hurled it in, as if the drop were somehow its fault rather than mine. It bounced several times before rolling to a halt yards short of Carr, who was kicking the turf in disgust. My humiliation was complete.
Or not quite. As I’d stooped to pick the ball up, barely able to contemplate the enormity of what I’d done, a single voice could be heard wafting across the ground from the opposite end at third man. It was a student, perhaps even a don, someone who probably only turned to his neighbour to register his disappointment, or disapproval of a Cambridge man, but in the sudden silence that greeted my error his words were carried across The Parks on a gentle north-westerly for all to hear. He said, “Oh no, the [censored!] has dropped it.”
He was right. Lynch scored 85 and Surrey won by one wicket in the last over. It struck me as I left the field, head bowed to avoid a thousand people’s eyes and particularly my team’s, that even in Oxford the hardest lessons aren’t always learned in the lecture halls.
A selfie I took a couple of years back in the spot where I dropped the catch
Memory added on February 11, 2021
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