Take the ‘metro’ to an outground and don’t just keep the ticket!
Collecting Scorecards by John Winter
Today is Friday August 2nd 2024; tomorrow it will be exactly 50 years ago to the day that I made one of the best decisions in my 61-year old life: I went to watch my first ever day of professional cricket at Portsmouth. By way of a kind of celebration, I am off to watch Warwickshire in a 50 over white-ball game at Rugby School in the Metro Bank Trophy. As an outground, it is simply a stunning venue. It also helps that there is a packed crowd of over 3,000, sitting out on white plastic chairs, enjoying the beautiful and hot, late-summer sunshine. There is, though, also a hint of autumn or two, with a few leaves on the outfield; the rugby posts are already up in place on the adjacent outfield, ready for the start of the new school year early next month.
It is a school like no other in the country with its own novel and unique contribution to British sporting life. The rugby memorial on the edge of the 1st Team outfield, adjacent to one of the largest and most beautiful trees at any cricket ground in the world, is a must to visit for any visitor here. Thomas Hughes’s “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” famous 1857 novel feels now very much a book of its time and, as a result, perhaps less necessary to visit on a winter’s evening. Every outground on the county circuit retains its appeal, particularly for the first time visitor. This is now my 53rd different ground watching at least one of the eighteen first-class counties during these past fifty years. From Basingstoke to Blackpool, Beckenham to Bournemouth, Canterbury to Colwyn Bay, Cardiff to Colchester, Chesterfield to Cheltenham, the journey continues to be a complete joy. The Hundred has definitely helped me in that regard, as this 50 over competition strives to find more temporary - if sometimes more upmarket and atmospheric - homes. Never mind being persuaded to get on the Hundred band-wagon or runaway train leaving from Platform 9 and three-quarters, just jump on the ‘metro’ for Sedbergh, Scarborough, Neath, Kibworth, Gosforth, Guildford, Northwood and Nettleworth for not just this, but, hopefully, the next few summers!
Warwickshire were also one of the two teams playing back then for my first game in August 1974 in a three-day Championship game. They were a team packed full of international class cricketers. The home team also happened to have three world class legends in their line-up that day with Richards, Greenidge and Roberts. Hampshire were reigning County Champions that season, with a rich mix of outstanding county professionals and a brilliant captain, Richard Gilliat. Today’s opponents for “The Bears” of Warwickshire are Surrey. There are two former international players on show in Foakes and Sibley, but otherwise it is a question of diving into my Playfair regularly to learn more about a host of promising youngsters - fresh from their own schooldays - on both teams. The venues are also linked, fifty years apart, in that my first ever ground at Burnaby Road in Old Portsmouth remains to this day the home of United Services Rugby. For the last 25 years, Hampshire have ceased to play there. For the twenty-five before that it was home from home for me - along with Northlands Road, May’s Bounty and Dean Court.
Today I made my way to the ground from the station with a best friend; we have both travelled into Rugby on separate trains. They run on time, thankfully, because I can’t relax until I complete the most task of any day at the cricket. News overnight comes in that Hampshire are due to be bought by GMR - which has wholly or joint-owned Delhi Capitals since the creation of the IPL in 2008 - and my mind is racing about what changes that means for the future. The only thing that trumps those thoughts, however, is whether there will be a scorecard available to buy and then fill out neatly for today’s game. Before you stop reading this article immediately and condemn me for a level of disproportion, nerdiness and obsession that is mildly disturbing, please let me offer my solid and robust forward defence with my wide Ben Warsop - or better still - Jumbo bat, My truly heartfelt joy is that there are proper scorecards available - free of charge today - in the temporary Rugby School Club Shop (and catering van). It means I can now relax properly and acquaint myself with all these recent alumni from schools around the country who are just about to step onto this lush green outfield. I also have my special keepsake to archive away in a private collection, whose value only fellow avid collectors would fully appreciate.
Picture postcards, personal diaries, football programmes, love-letters, sepia family photos and cricket scorecards are all the stuff of wonderful nostalgia, where intrinsic value trumps monetary value every time. When asked by slightly nonplussed friends and family what the attraction is for collecting Test and County Cricket scorecards, it is so hard for me to express that in only a short text like this, let alone a few sentences. In the course of this article, the appeal of purchasing a scorecard as the first thing I do every time I go through a turnstile or entrance gate to watch a game of County or International cricket will be explained. It is sadly not a given, though, as a continuing pleasure going forwards. Scorecards are threatened with being consigned as much to the past as the exploits they record for posterity - especially when filled out accurately with accompanying key notes recording quirks, landmarks and boundary counts.
Just over a year ago the First Ashes Test, in this very county at Edgbaston, was capturing the imagination of the whole cricket watching public across the world. Crawley’s imperious cover drive to the first ball of the day, Brook’s freakish dismissal, Root’s majestic hundred, Stokes’ incredibly audacious declaration were just a few of the many highlights on Day One when I still felt slightly deflated watching in the Wyatt Stand. The fact Warwickshire and the ECB had decided not to issue a scorecard for that game left me with an irrational emptiness that left me feeling like football programme collectors now attending a game at the likes of Blackburn, Millwall or Reading (where they have ceased to be printed). Thankfully, someone in the know has also obviously changed that back now a year later at Edgbaston, in order that the devoted County Members are once again able to buy them at Warwickshire home games.
Even more than match tickets - which have also been collected by this writer for the past fifty years - they are a fantastic reminder of all those past games that you have been privileged enough to attend in person. Somehow they contribute to that enduring visceral feeling of knowing you were there to witness history being made. They are the tangible evidence which help archive and then revive memories of just being there at the game. Watching sport on TV is also one of my favourite past times; actually being at the game and ground in person, however, has always been a matter of taking that fun and enjoyment to a completely different level. It is like comparing a rich Italian meal on the Amalfi Coast, sitting outside a local family restaurant while bathing in beautiful sunshine under an azure sky, with fuelling in a hurry on a warmed up ciabatta in the microwave at home. In a nutshell, I was really there and have recorded that I was there.
Cricket scorecards - unlike football programmes which contain so much more information ahead of the game - have always meant so much more to me when they have been neatly completed and then filed away in the right place, long after the action on the field has finished. If duly completed with all relevant details, they serve to chronicle the factual details and personal landmarks achieved by the twenty two players in that particular game, preserved for posterity in the scribe’s memory bank. Consequently, collecting scorecards from games that I haven’t attended has never quite had the same appeal. Unsurprisingly, they also show how my handwriting has first matured and then definitely declined in terms of legibility through time!
Back in August 1974 I did something you will probably hardly see anywhere at a County Cricket match anywhere in the country this summer. I was only doing what generations of lads did before me, mind you. Aged 11, I walked twenty minutes to the local train station, caught the train to Portsmouth and Southsea station, spent 8 hours at the cricket watching Hampshire for the very first time and then caught the train home, arriving back after supper. It would almost be a Child Protection issue now, if a child of that age did likewise in 2024. Embracing that freedom, whilst sitting amongst adults and concentrating for the three two hour sessions of play, it did wonders for your powers of concentration and understanding of all the special facets of the game. Admittedly, with Barry Richards at one end and Gordon Greenidge at the other for some of that time, there could be no excuse. That 5p blue first scorecard, for a top of the table Championship game against Warwickshire at the start of Portsmouth Cricket Week, began my collection. The 121 partnership between BAR and CGG in Hampshire’s only innings on the way to an easy victory makes it a unique keepsake.
What it did mean as youngster, at that time, was you had three choices: (1) you sat and scored every ball in your own scorebook (which I preferred to do bizarrely for the JPL games on tv); (2) you completed the fall of wickets (and score at the end of each over in the limited over games) on your scorecard purchased before the start of play; (3) you did neither and nipped to play at the back of the stand when the action was less compelling. Since the scoreboard on all the grounds only gave the scores of the two batsmen at the crease, way before any mobile phone had been invented - let alone purchased - your scorecard acted as record of all that previously happened that day. When there were the full 120 overs in the day at Gillette Cup Games that was a huge amount to record and recall. In other words, for most on the ground, scorecards were an aide-mémoire. For me, they were a prized possession, just like my growing football programme and pre-decimalised coin collections. It was the age of Green Shield Stamps, Esso Cup Coins and Brooke Bond Cards after all.
Ever since the enforced Covid break, the printing of cricket scorecards to buy at our county cricket grounds has become a bigger lottery: should the time-honoured tradition be respected for loyal match going supporters, or will anybody notice if we save a few hundred quid on our very tight balance sheets? Scorecards have carried adverts on the reverse in all the time I have been collecting them, but maybe that revenue stream is harder to tap into in modern times. The fact that an electronic version - as an alternative to the printed card copy - gives you the same information, but without any of the same sense of uniqueness or permanence, spells “real danger”.
We are constantly challenged in our daily lives with what we keep and what we throw away. If we do keep it, why are we keeping it and how do we store it? The pace of technological change constantly asks questions of how we adapt and embrace opportunities to save what really matters in a more accessible form for others. Do we need to retain the physical article, when there is already an electronic copy? I would argue, like the best First Day Cover or specialist mini library, they are enhanced as a collection or series by every latest similar addition or edition. They have, as previously mentioned, no monetary value worth speaking of, even with a precious few signed by the leading protagonist, but in terms of personal importance, they remain a prize collection.
As the latest Ashes series last season demonstrably showed, it is getting increasingly harder to buy a scorecard at a professional cricket match in England. Were Warwickshire for the opening Test in July 2023 at Edgbaston, making the large contingent of Australian fans feel even more at home? Could they not have seen that such a great finish deserved a fine scorecard? There is of course no tradition down under for ever issuing scorecards at Ashes games. Why would we now suddenly start - 140 years later - following suit? Either through tough economics in the county game, changing spectator habits or the need to move towards an electronic version of previously printed material, they have now become an “endangered species” over here. The Lord’s One Day Finals had previously had match programmes (as well as scorecards), even before the introduction of the John Player Programmes in the mid- 1970’s, but they just don’t quite hold the same appeal.
Last summer, my Headingley Ashes Test Scorecard for the Third Test - with England now 2-0 down in the series - took on particularly special significance. It very nearly also doesn’t exist. A couple of weeks ahead of the game, I took a phone call from a cricket watching friend. He is first and foremost an avid collector of scorecards, but he also engages in a huge amount of voluntary work at both his beloved Hampshire and at Headingley, near where he lives. While the rest of the cricketing world were debating the ifs, buts and maybes around the Carey/Bairstow incident, we had bigger fish to fry in the north. Never mind a few of the more entitled Lord’s members stepping beyond any acceptable line, our big discussion on the phone revolved around the layout and format of a homemade Ashes Scorecard for the 3rd Ashes Test to go on sale only in the Yorkshire Museum. All profits from its sales would go to the Yorkshire Cricket Foundation supporting charitable work in the wider Yorkshire area. For five times the price there would, of course, be a less than glossy, expensive match programme on sale, with over half the contents exactly the same as the match programmes on sale at all the other four Ashes Tests.
The discussion initially centered around likely line-ups for both teams, with injuries and form making it a difficult call. In the end, CR Woakes and MA Wood came into the England side with devastating effect. Australia were to make three changes with MR Marsh lighting up Day One with 118 off 118 balls. Limited by certain parameters of what could be printed, we decided against putting the counties and states next to the players' names, as they do at Lord’s with their scorecards. What we did though was add the heading THE ASHES, having been spared the need to splash the sponsor’s name for this series across the top. Each player had his full initials before the surname and his national team number after it. That of course was not always the case on either count. The distinction of amateurs and professionals was denoted at different grounds, either by the inclusion of initials or the position of those initials either before or after the surname.
Imagine my joy then a year on for my Hampshire Scorecard Collection: Warwickshire had started issuing proper scorecards again for Championship matches, and not just pieces of paper. In a far less rarefied atmosphere than an Ashes Test - at the end of Day Three of the Warwickshire v Hampshire County Division One clash at Edgbaston in June 2024 - my completed scorecard for the game now records that Ashes Headingley star, CR Woakes, had a tough day back in the office. Hampshire declared on 453-6 from 117 overs in which he remained wicketless. He did though bowl 19 very tidy overs on his return after a break from the game. Of far greater statistical significance is a record stand of 255 for the sixth wicket by two greats of the modern Hampshire era, JM Vince and LA Dawson. My written notes at the bottom of the scorecard document that Vince scored an unbeaten 166 off 197 balls, which was his 29th first-class century, while Dawson’s 120 from 157 balls, was his 15th. The previous record for the sixth wicket for Hampshire against Warwickshire in the County Championship had stood for 96 years. Two more Hampshire greats of the early 20th Century, Phil Mead and Jack Newman, had added 251 together at Bournemouth in a game Hampshire won by 8 wickets.
The reason why this is so significant is I have waited 50 years since I saw my only other Hampshire first class record partnership against Warwickshire. Bob Stephenson and Mike Taylor added 124 crucial runs in the first innings for the eight wicket back then at Burnaby Road in that top of the table clash. It is a record which still stands today. The record for the ninth wicket for Hampshire against Warwickshire is far older, far larger and in some ways far more famous: 101 years ago, CP Mead (222) and WR de la C Shirley (64) added 197 in Hampshire’s 511. Hampshire won the game by an innings, exactly a year after winning at Edgbaston in that legendary comeback game where they had been bowled out for just 15 in the first innings. Oh to have been lucky enough to have been there on the ground in Birmingham June 1922 and bought that scorecard!
Today’s game is a minor modern classic of its own for my scorecard collection. Surrey managed to take the game to the last ball of the day, needing four to win. That seemed highly improbable even at the start of the last over, with the traditional rabbit followed by the ferret (numbers 10 and 11 both new to the game and to the crease) still needing 20. Chasing down Warwickshire’s 311-9 in their fifty overs, Surrey amazingly only lost by 3 runs in the end. Dom Sibley’s 149 was eventually in a losing cause, but was a knock appreciated and applauded by both sets of supporters, who have seen him take far fewer risks for both their respective teams in the past.
No scorecard can, of course, reveal all the minutiae of every game, nor indeed any of the back story, intrigues or full context of any particular game in any particular competition in any particular era. However, they can serve as a wonderful reminder of that innings, catch, run-out, partnership, dismissal or spell which you can only say with absolute certainty that you were there to see when the completed evidence is always neatly filed and ready at hand.. My scorecard collection of only the games I have been there to see is a treasure trove of memories that include last ball finishes in a Lord’s final between Hampshire and Warwickshire, too many Hampshire last ball semi-final cup defeats to mention, Botham’s ballistics, Gower’s grace, Greenidge’s greatness, Anderson’s accuracy and Hampshire heroes who have given me so much pleasure for half a century. It also includes that final day at Headingley in 2019 when Leach made 1 and his mate at the other end smashed Australia to all parts of Leeds. Being in the Western Terrace that day with my cricket-loving family was priceless; my match ticket and neatly-completed scorecard are both truly great keepsakes.
What Surrey would have given for the last ball of the game to be smashed on the up through extra cover for four to win the game today! Somehow certain names and initials, certain numbers and scenarios, certain records and near misses often come to mind, either when I complete the scorecard after the game at home, or when I browse through my collection on a winter’s evening. Electronic devices may be the way forward when paying for one, but I still need my scorecard to remain a physical object to acquire wherever first-class cricket is played in this country. T20 Finals Day has been a lost cause for a number of years in this regard, but maybe someone at Edgbaston or the ECB will read this article and see the light! As a Hampshire fan, desperately willing every season to see your team win their first County Championship Title since you began watching them, you have to remain the eternal optimist! 50 years ago this week, after my first two games, they were 31 points clear as reigning Champions with five games to go. Unlike today’s beautiful weather in Rugby, the rain fell and fell and the rest is history.
The final point to add is that my scorecard collection will eventually be donated to Hampshire Cricket Heritage, which is housed in the Archive Room of the Shane Warne Stand at the Utilita Bowl.