Last in the Tin Bath

by David Lloyd

  Closer to home in Water Street you would normally find me with my best mate Alan Deakin. Alan – or Fatty, as I affectionately knew him – lived right at the top of our road. He was an unbelievably clever lad who had piano lessons and breezed through all his tests when it came to anything educational. Our families were very close, so much so that I called Alan’s mum Auntie Elsie. Of course, she wasn’t a conventional auntie, just an adopted one. We’ve all had one of those, haven’t we? Not a blood relative but someone familiar enough to earn the title by default. We spent lots of time together, both us lads and our mums and dads, and we were all part of Cambridge Street’s extended family.

  He might have been Alan to Auntie Elsie but he was Fatty to me. Not that she was particularly fond of me using his nickname. ‘He’s called Alan,’ she told me sternly, during one memorable ticking off when I knocked for him one morning and asked: ‘Is your Fatty coming out?’ It didn’t matter to me what he was called. He was my best mate. It doesn’t take a genius to deduce that he had a bit of weight on.

  Those familiar cobbles in that particular residential area, which meandered down towards the town centre, have been razed now. But they were the stepping stones to magic and mischief when I was young. We got up to some right shenanigans on and around them. If we weren’t kicking around some ball or another or hitting one with a bat or a stick, then we would be playing marbles. Walk down a street like ours and you would see boys like me on those cobbles, shooting marbles towards the targets we marked in front of garage doors. It was a big game in the 1950s and 60s but has not stood the test of time for some reason. The same can be said of another one of my old favourites which was top and whip. You would chalk the top – a wooden block with a pointed end – in all different colours and then pick up the whip – a leather shoelace – to flick it round, trying to make it stand up on end and spin to create a rainbow of moving colours.

  This was innocent enough, but like all boys we went a bit off piste at times. For example, one of our tricks was to tie the ends of a rope to two door handles from opposite sides of the street, and then bang on them alternately. Of course, try as one might, they wouldn’t open, much to the frustration of those inside. Reserved, I might have been, but when pitched together with Fatty we became a dastardly duo.

  Actually, I am not particularly proud of one of the other larks we got up to – in fact, on reflection it’s shocking, absolutely awful, but as a reformed character I feel compelled to share it with you.

  A lot of doors at that time had what we called snecks – a type of latch or catch to fasten them. You had to push the top bit down with your thumb and pull at the same time to open the door, and our prank was to force a drawing pin into the wood near the sneck and then attach a bit of dog shit to its head. When people put their thumb on the sneck they would inevitably feel the unusual substance on their fingers and thumb, causing them either to sniff it, or worse still lick it, to the considerable mirth of the two giggling onlookers stowed behind a wall or leaning on a lamp-post yards away.

  I wish I could tell you that my adolescent years were all good, clean fun. But I was brought up not to tell lies. If I did, it meant a wallop from Mum.

  Dad always liked to develop the ‘family’ theme when he played sport. Football was his love – it was through natural ability rather than an inherited interest that I fell into cricket – throughout his life. Once his playing days were over, he ran local football sides with a fair amount of success. Every now and again he would attempt to foster the team spirit with social nights round at our house. My school teams would get similar treatment. Mum would cook up a dozen or so servings of pie and peas, and everyone would natter about the game over supper.

  When Dad hung up his boots, he took on the kind of challenge he relished. One of the amateur teams in Accrington, Cedar Swifts, were hopeless when he started. They were a lost cause, if truth be told – but that very fact gave him something to work with. Winning with the best did not appeal to my dad as it might to others. Turning around perennial losers did and, with the usual Lloyd template of togetherness applied, that is what he set about doing with great success.

  Not that I took to cricket instantly, and certainly not at the age of ten. Like Dad, football has been the natural number one passion for me; cricket the slow burner that still flickers half a century later. My adolescence featured lots of links to the town’s football club rather than its cricket equivalent. In those days Stanley had a nucleus of Scottish players, scouted north of the border and sent down to ply their trade in the English lower leagues. My Auntie Edith was the housekeeper at their collective digs, providing me with another link to the place and its squad. She would cook their meals, wash their clothes and generally see to it that they were comfortable in their new environment.

  All this gave me my initial interaction with professional sport, and throughout my childhood I wanted to follow in their footsteps and become a footballer. I was pretty good at it and always encouraged at school. However, I was doing all right at cricket as well, and into my teens I was captain of the town teams in both sports.

  It would not be economical with the truth to suggest I might have had a different sporting career but for my awkward social skills as a boy. Football League clubs from around the region had their eye on me and I signed for Burnley as a schoolboy. After a spell of training with them, it was the first-team manager Harry Potts who came to our house and got me to commit to a contract. These days there are about four levels of coaches and management between the first-team boss and those in charge of age-group teams, and so it is unlikely that you’d hear of Arsène Wenger popping along the road to Camden to meet the family of a fifteen-year-old with potential. But it was common practice at that time and was still so in cricket when, as Lancashire head coach in the 1990s, I paid a similar visit to the Flintoff household in Preston. More of that later.

  Gawthorpe Hall, where Burnley trained, was a state-of-the-art facility back then, much better than anything else on the Division One scene, and I was coached by Jimmy McIlroy, another Clarets legend, so you would have thought all this was manna from heaven for a football-loving nut like me. Unfortunately, though, my heart simply wasn’t in it, and I used to skip training. When it came to it I could play all right, make no mistake about that, but dressing room banter exploited my inherent shyness and alienated me. I certainly didn’t feel as though I fitted in either there or at Blackburn, who also called me for training-ground matches, and would tuck myself away in a quiet corner. Then, I sought excuses not to go; missed the bus, looked for other invites or purposely delayed my departure. Bungling an opportunity like that told its own story.

  As a sheltered youth, I had always been comfortable playing in my immediate environment, alongside like-minded pals, starting with the Peel Park junior school teams. No wonder, perhaps, given that in one memorable season we racked up 63 goals in 11 straight wins without conceding once. Yep, played 11, won 11, goal difference 63.

  Yet it wasn’t as if the football clubs moved heaven and earth to secure me, either. For example, I might have got a personal call from Harry Potts to offer me a Burnley B team match, but after I declined to attend a Lancashire trial in Bolton due to a clash, no one came banging on my door to persuade me that I was making a mistake. With the benefit of hindsight a life in sport has given me, I know what it’s like when you are recruiting for youth teams. There are a lot of talented young kids out there and as an organisation you don’t want to be wasting your time on one, regardless of the talent in question, if his heart is not in it. You concentrate on the hearts that are.

  Short in stature for my age and slight with it, I wanted to be someone like Johnny Haynes, one of the great inside-lefts, or Duncan Edwards, who caused me to cry my eyes out for a day as a ten-year-old when he died in the Munich air disaster. Edwards was my sporting hero and indisputably would have been one of England’s best footballers if he’d survived. I wanted to be that Manchester United No. 6. But I was never one to be thrusting
myself forward for extra recognition outside my own post code.

  In Accrington, things felt completely different because even from a young age I felt I had a presence, as though people knew me and of my achievements on the sports field. The fact that folk might sing my praises was enough to relax me. Even in my dad’s teams, when I was by far the youngest player, I was completely chilled out about being junior in elder company. Quite simply, I was one of these kids that needed familiarity to perform well. It was not a necessity later in life, but fast forward into my thirties and I still loved being transported back into that Accrington bubble playing local sport.

  As well as running Cedar Swifts, Dad started up the church football team, and the Cambridge Street Methodists were a crack outfit, I can tell you. David Hughes, with whom I went on to share a cricket dressing room at Old Trafford, hailed from Newton-le-Willows but was talked into playing centre-forward for us at weekends because he was dating a girl from Blackburn. I was fourteen when I started playing and it felt like a genuine sense of achievement when this team evolved over subsequent years, culminating in the winning of the All-England Methodist Church Cup.

  While David was a fine leader of the line – winning a healthy proportion of his aerial challenges – I was more a provider than scorer. That meant playing as the second striker – a Peter Beardsley with the looks, if you like – or on the left flank, as I did on occasion during a spell in the local non-league with Great Harwood, for whom Jack Simmons ploughed the forward furrow. Big Jack used his physicality to his advantage and would think nothing of bundling opposition goalkeepers over the goal-line in his quest to score. He did so with some success, contributing to his breaking of several league records, and unfortunately his leg on three occasions too. The final one ended his football fun for good.

  Commitments with teams across a couple of sports throughout my teens meant trekking to and fro on public transport. At that time nobody had a car; there were literally none anywhere. So I would get the bus to do a couple of hours’ training with Burnley after school – or not as the case may be – or to Old Trafford on Saturday mornings for net practice, returning from Manchester to play in a league match for the Swifts after lunch.

  As a consequence my schoolwork got neglected and my education took a back seat. Being a technical college, our school offered the chance for lads like me to pick up the skills to learn a trade – an oldstyle apprenticeship on leaving. I was never going to have an obvious path to follow as there was nothing I particularly excelled in. My three O-level passes came in English, Woodwork and Technical Drawing, much to my surprise and even more to the surprise of our master, whose assessment of my ability proved more stinging than any other I received in subsequent cricket reports across the national press.

  I was scheduled, rather bizarrely given my qualifications, to become a plumber’s hand upon leaving school. I know, I couldn’t see how that gig with the local council had been lined up, either. It mattered little, though, as instead, I took my first tentative steps as a professional cricketer that summer of 1963.

  However, even while on the Lancashire staff I liked playing local amateur football and would do so under code names to avoid drawing attention from the Old Trafford hierarchy. My contracts prohibited this of course, and goodness knows what I would have done had someone put me in A&E with one of the horror tackles that proliferated on playing fields around the county. I reduced the chances of this occurring by pulling out of 50-50 challenges and even reassessing some 60-40s if the defender I was up against looked like a prize cage fighter. Despite this, I so loved the whole event of playing with my mates – having a laugh before kick-off in the dressing room, before giving it your all on the pitch for ninety minutes and then reliving it down the pub – that it all felt worth it. That ‘When Saturday Comes’ existence was great for me. I was simply itching for the arrival of every weekend.

  As with all things, the Cambridge Street team eventually ran its course and was consigned to history, and its folding meant it was time for me to move on too. Even into my twenties I was clearly a sought-after property on the local scene, as evidenced by a couple of blokes who would have passed for nightclub bouncers, Tony Noonan and John Starkey, turning up at my house not long after word had got out about the demise.

  These two hulks, captain and player-manager respectively, literally filled the front room of my marital home in Ascot Way. It was only local league football but having a couple of heavies like that turn up made it feel like you were being recruited into a mafia family. Here they were asking me to sign up for their clan. It was a bit like being taken into the local militia. They wanted me to fight alongside them, all ten stone of me; a lightweight left-winger to add a different kind of punch. Their opening gambit was: ‘Come and join us, we need some credibility.’

  During the first eight matches of the season they had been at their consistent best: they’d had a man sent off every week and owed that much in fines they felt they needed some reforming. Signing up a Goody Two-Shoes like me was the answer. I was pretty proud of being the Gary Lineker of my day, not once having had my name taken by the referee.

  The fact they wanted to sign a wet-paper-bagger to dilute their reputation should have told me what they were all about, although to be fair I had a good idea because a few mates were already playing for Willow Mount, the club in question. Not that the name of the club meant anything at all, really. You see, we had to keep changing what we were called on an annual basis because of our notoriety. Willow Mount we might have been, but we also went by Baxenden Football Club and Park Inn in other seasons. At one stage it felt like we were called something different every month. There were some terrific players – the goalkeeper Rubber Thompson, a postman whose parents hadn’t delivered him a proper Christian name as far as I could tell, saved everything; then there were the two Daves, Pitt and Kay, Alec Mackereth and Phil Howarth, a terrific lad who later in life became the partner of my first wife Susan.

  Suffice to say that whatever name we sported, we could handle ourselves in the rough and tumble of the Accrington leagues. Of course, as a good church-going lad I wasn’t one of the main protagonists when it came to problems, but as a collective I have to admit we were bloody reprobates. In that day and age it was anything goes on a football field and our tackling left nothing to the imagination. But could we play football? Boy, could we ever. We were a fantastic team, but the bottom line was that we would win by whatever means necessary. These were brilliant times for me, playing alongside blokes who promoted a real sense of ‘us and them’. At times it could get really tasty on the field, but this was strictly social for me. For by now the seriously competitive stuff was already happening over in Manchester with Lancashire.

  CHAPTER 2

  Accy Thump

  During his time on the international stage, ably grinding out innings over several hours, Paul Collingwood earned the name Brigadier Block. It was my old mate and long-term Sky Sports colleague Bob Willis who wonderfully dubbed him Double B. But I have news for Bob and you lot out there: when it came to defensive batting I was the original. Been there, yawn the T-shirt.

  There are some other similarities between myself and Colly, whose redoubtable qualities have made him stick out in the modern era. Like me, he has no body piercings or tattoos. Not on public display, at least. And the way in which he put up the barricades against the odds to save Tests for England against the might of South Africa and Australia in the space of eight months in 2009-10 showed admirable depth of resolve. There was a real thou-shalt-not-pass attitude about him during the last rites of matches in Cardiff, Centurion and Cape Town. He proved himself master of the dead-bat.

  Of course, you were made to wait until the end of matches for Colly’s quality to out. But with me you could see it from the start of an innings. Because in my youth, I barely played a shot in anger; not that it bothered those who were developing me up at Accrington. I was never discouraged from placing a high price on my wicket and staying in as long as pos
sible, repelling whatever the opposition bowlers threw at me.

  Playing Lancashire League cricket was a bit of a baptism of fire for a teenage wannabe, especially with a few international bowlers littered around the other clubs, not to mention the wily old pros alongside them who had graced the league for several years. Between these two groups they gave you little to hit and tested your technique and concentration.

  During summer months, the church institute where I hung out with like-minded pals closed down temporarily, and so I found my entertainment elsewhere. Naturally enough, that meant virtually every evening in the school holidays involving a trek up to Accrington Cricket Club. My dad allowed my mum to run the house and he was content with his lot, his escapism coming when he played or managed football matches at weekends, while my escape route was proving to be up the stoney thoroughfare that was Thorneyholme Road.

  Cricket was certainly not Dad’s thing, but he was very supportive in all of my activities and so backed me in whatever I chose to take up. It was actually one of the blokes from his football team that started me off at Accrington Cricket Club by paying my initial annual membership fee. Peter Westwell was the goalkeeper from Cedar Swifts and it was probably as much of a thank you to my dad for his devoted duties as any thought of doing a good turn for a young lad.

  Hours were spent grooving my bowling action or tinkering with my batting technique in the nets with other young players, either at official club practice or the Under-18s equivalent. If a midweek match took place I would be up there watching, taking the opportunity to have a knock-up in between innings on the outfield, as kids have tended to up and down the country through the generations; on some occasions the club groundsman Frank Nash would even let us use a pitch on the edge of the square for an impromptu practice match during quieter periods of the six weeks’ school holidays and at weekends.