Issue 20

His record breaking debut was described in the match report: Rua became the youngest player to play league cricket for Carlton at 9 years, 10 months and 10 days. He strode onto the field of play, looked FB in the eye and said, ‘I’ll take the Arthurs Seat end when I come on, skip.’......... It was then that Rua marked out his run up. Stretched his hamstrings. Warmed his shoulder up. Adjusted his field. Ran up and put the ball on a length. Rua bowled 2 well controlled overs before the first ball of his third comprehensively bowled Clacks’ last batter. He thus becomes the youngest player to take a wicket in senior cricket for Carlton. ‘The beers are on me,’ he said. Rua has progressed smoothly to senior cricket and Scotland u15s. However the youngest to take the field in any senior match was Fin Thornton - as reported in NewsLetter Issue 3. Fin played in the Martin Flynn memorial match in 2013 at the age of 8. He was a wicket taker too and has gone on to greater things in Australia. Tu Ne Cede Malis Carlton members may ponder the meaning of the club’s motto. Tempting though it is to think it is an invocation of the superior powers of Cedric English, this is altogether wrong. The words come from Virgil’s Aeneid, Book VI. The epic tells of the founding of Rome by refugees from the fields of Troy. Aeneas prays to Apollo to allow the Trojans to settle in Latium. The priestess Sybil warns him that more difficulties lie ahead with the words: Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito. This translates as: Don't give up in the face of adversity, but face it more boldly. Why Carlton's founding fathers chose this as the club motto is lost in the mists of time. However in its early days Carlton did not have a home ground and was one of a number of clubs which made use of the Meadows. Early members are likely to have benefitted from the sound Victorian classical education would be able to recite reams of Vergil and Homer. No doubt the Sybil’s warning frequently came to their minds as they trudged from the wicket dismissed by yet another Meadows shooter. The youngest player to appear for Carlton in a league match is Rua McIntyre who played for the 4th XI on 19 July 2014. He was only 51 years 4 months and 17 days younger than his most senior team mate. Rua is also the youngest player to take a league wicket. Forever Young cont’d Hamish and Harrison may be young, but as 10 year-olds they are veterans.

What was your best game for Carlton? Having played something close to 200 SNCL games for Carlton there have been some highs and some lows. I would say my best game was an unbeaten 148 against Uddingston. I had dislocated a finger in my right hand which no one at the ground would reset - but I decided to bat and see how it went. There were other games (mostly the ones where we dominated Grange CC), but I think you remember the games when the team was against the wall. This happened in the 2005 or 2006 season and we needed to beat Ferguslie and Poloc to stay in the SNCL. It was probably the closest we came to relegation and I managed to make runs in both those games - the rest is history. What was your best game for Scotland? I was lucky to be part of an excellent Scottish team at the time and we had a number of great wins, but I think my three standout games all ended in not outs - our win against Durham (with Shoaib Akhtar), beating Bangladesh at the Grange chasing 16 in the last over and finally beating Bermuda to get into the 2006 WC Qualifiers.......winning the final was the cherry on the top! What was the best thing a coach ever said to you? I would say the most memorable would be Eddie Barlow's analysis on how to break sessions down into small chunks and individual units of time. This advice helped me not only bat for long periods in 4-day cricket but helped me keep a calm head and break the game down when chasing larger totals. It is advice which has stuck with me for over 25 years. Who was the best batter/bowler you played with and played against? This is a super tough question and I probably have different players for different formats. Having played in South Africa and growing up playing against Dale Benkenstein, Jacques Kallis and Herschelle Gibbs I would be hard pressed to name better players at an international level.....although bowling to Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly on a flat one was certainly memorable. The fastest spell of bowling I faced was Stephen Elworthy under lights in a day-night game - first slip was sitting just outside the 30 yard circle and the pace he generated off a hard greasy wicket was mesmerizing. The toughest spinner was Mushtaq Ahmed - I faced him once for 3-4 hours and still couldn't pick his googly. Within the SNCL we played against some great professionals in the 2000's - George Bailey was exceptional, as was Jason Arnberger, Corey Richards, Con de Lange and Damien Wright. Their game-management skills were excellent and difficult to counter. Within the Scottish game it was a pleasure playing with Bryn Lockie and Jamie Kerr (I could keep naming others, but I would be here a while). Bryn, I felt, should have played far more games for Scotland, as he played fast bowling very well and knew how to bat to win games, and JK had the best hands behind the stumps I have seen. They also loved beer which helped them get in my top players section!! Cedric English came to Carlton as pro in 1998, converted to player, became Scottish qualified, stayed until 2011 including 2 spells as skipper. He answers some questions.

It was the language of the medical community and if you had any aspirations to be a doctor, its mastery would enable you to hide your diagnosis and prescriptions, amongst unintelligible script, from the patient under your care. It was a secret code between the doctor, the pharmacist and other members of the club. Other than that, my assumption was, Latin would be of no practical value in any part of my life. Latin was taught by the Classics Master “Johnny” Rogan. Johnny was from Cumbria, the wilderness some 90 miles North of us. He was athletic, sported angular features and wiry red hair that he combed back, we assumed as a tribute to either a classical hero that none of us cared about or to Jerry Lee Lewis. Everyone liked Johnny, but it quickly became obvious that no-one in the class was drawn to taking the Hippocratic oath in later life as we mindlessly conjugated verbs and dissected passages of ancient text about men called Horatius defending bridges in the suburbs of Rome. One day, fatigued by our apathy, Johnny asked “what do I have to do to spark some enthusiasm?” From the back of the class, from behind a vertical textbook, lesson, he crafted a replica cricket ball from some rolled-up woollen sports socks complete with a Sellotape seam so he could show us changes in grip, wrist, and arm position. He also talked about setting the batsmen up and offered a compelling argument as to why spin bowlers were the intellectual elite of the cricket world. Most of us got about 80% of what our sage was saying, only O’Brien, Maleedy and Doherty got the full reveal, given they shared the same physical disability as Johnny, in being left-handed. I remember being transported by the joy and complexity of the masterclass. That was it, for the next two years Latin was everyone’s favourite class. A deal was cut – long periods of attentive concentration and save the mischief for Mr Drinkwater’s French (Johnny’s suggestion), and in exchange, occasional cricket Q&A’s hosted by Johnny. In the spring that followed, twenty-three of us signed up for trials to the school cricket team. On a personal level I had two things to be grateful to Johnny for, first for teaching me the difference between my amas and my amo, and second for fanning an interest in cricket into a lifetime love. Shaun Barrett, everyone’s favourite skipper of Carlton’s Famous Fives, makes the case for the place of cricket in the classical studies curriculum When I arrived at Grammar School, I was horrified to learn that I would have to study Latin for two years. came a cowardly voice “tell us something that we might be interested in”. Johnny thought for a while and said, “do you know how many different legitimate deliveries an off-spin bowler can bowl?” If you have never seen thirty eleven-year olds, elevated from boredom, and instantly derailed from the mischief they were plotting, this would have been your moment to witness it. The book at the back gently lowered to the table and a curious voice said “No”. For the next 20 minutes Johnny meticulously described each variation to us. To support his

So much for the great and good. Indulge me with a couple of family cricketing memories. On the occasion I took my younger son to his Test debut – England v Bangladesh at Chester-le-Street – it was eerily quiet outside the ground. “Is the match on, dad?” “Of course, son. This isn’t like a Hibs game, you know.” Settled, I offered the sprog a pint. “Can you really get a beer here, dad?! “Of course, son, this isn’t like a Hibs game, you know.” At which point an argument broke out between two fellow spectators sitting behind about who best knew the Bishop of Salisbury. This time my son turned to me and said: “Of course, this really ISN’T like a Hibs game, dad!” Moving on it was a red-letter day when my wife, Helen, was invited to become a Carlton tea-lady. So much so that Helen arrived home on the Monday preceding her debut with all kinds of home-baking ingredients intent on ensuring there would be “no last minute scramble.” “Very good, darling, but you do realise this isn’t like football or rugby and if it rains we could be stuck with a few dozen cup-cakes, sandwiches and sausage rolls.” All turned out well. Of course it did. I had a word with that nice Bishop of Salisbury to ask his boss to ensure the sun shone! Remembering interviews: Gary Sobers, interviewed during a visit to Merchiston Castle School with whom he had a relationship, was illuminating on the subject of his 6x6’s blitz of Malcolm Nash and Rahul Dravid as engaging an interviewee as I have ever encountered. A genuinely lovely bloke with time for everyone during his stint as Scotland hired hand. Kim Hughes I remember more for a quote by his former Watsonian captain, Brian Adair, who remarked how he and the future Aussie captain had shared in a record three figure partnership “of which I contributed two!” while George Bailey was brutally honest when I asked him how he could progress from the Grange X1 to Test status. “I have to go home and hit a century every weekend” said George “And would that get you a cap, George?” “Er, no. I’d then have to do the same every weekend during the following season!”. A high bar, indeed, and one he scaled for five Test appearances which was a fantastic achievement but considerably less than Dennis Lillee who I met while actually playing cricket. At the time the Dundee Press had a thriving cricket team and one of our fixtures was against the Scone Palace staff at exactly the time Scotland were entertaining the 1972 Australians on the North Inch. Lillee and Ian Chappell were surplus to requirement for that game and filled in their time with some fishing. It was from the river bank that the latter spotted our game and wandered over asking "any chance of a game." It wasn't every day you got the chance to be bowled a ball by an Ashes legend - we were fielding but took our chances, pads or not - and suffice to say there was an immediate rush to file some copy the moment our match ended. Continuing Bill Lothian’s Banter Lillee c Willey b Dilley All cricket fans know this famous scorecard entry which occurred during the Brisbane Ashes Test in 1979. But last Sunday’s intra-club tussle at Grange Loan gave scorecard aficionados something else to savour: Foley c Foley b Foley As Fergus was caught by Isaac off Hamish’s bowling. No YouTube footage is available - more’s the pity