It’s knee bother for Tom as England come calling (From The Northern Echo)

It’s knee bother for Tom as England come calling

5:40pm Tuesday 23rd August 2011 in Backtrack By Mike Amos

THE match programme adorned with a lengthy document headed “How do you know when you’ve become a fossil”, the Over-60 cricketers of Yorkshire and Durham duly walloped their Australian contemporaries on Wednesday.

It may have been the old, old story – “What doesn’t hurt doesn’t work”, “You have all the answers but no one asks the questions”, “You sit in a rocking chair but you cannot make it go” – but it was by no means the best one.

The biggest talking point was that, four years after his bus pass and getting on three years after his knee replacement operation, our old friend Tom Stafford has been chosen to keep wicket for England.

England Over 60s, admittedly, but the thrill is no less great. “I get the impression they’re looking for new young talent,” says Tom.

“It has to be said that it’s come as a bit of a bonus. I hope it may be a spur to all those facing joint replacement operations who fear that it may be the end of their playing days.

“My knee’s great, the only problem is that the other one’s going now.”

Though his accent betrays a London childhood, though his football affiliation remains firmly and anxiously with the Arsenal, he’s a retired newsagent who moved to Teesside in 1961, is in his 50th cricket season with Yarm and also plays for the Doghouse and Yorkshire Over 50s and Over 60s, both county sides unbeaten this season.

Once, memorably, he announced that he preferred a leg stumping to sex. That may have been fossil fuel, too.

Long before the knee op he’d also suffered a neurological aneurysm, woke up after two weeks and found himself staring into the face of David Lewis, the Doghouse captain. “I thought I’d gone to hell,” said Tom.

These days he believes in close encounters, almost always stands up whatever the bowling, reckons in the last ten years to have had more stumpings than catches.

“My reflexes aren’t what they were. If a ball takes a big diversion, I’m struggling to dive for it, or at least to dive for it in time.”

He was spotted while playing for Yorkshire Over 60s at Harrogate last week.

“It turns out one of the opposition was a selector. I’d had a tidy game, claimed a stumping, but you never even dream of playing for England when you get to 64.

“I can’t bat but I love my job as a wicket keeper and want to carry on doing it as long as I can.”

Last year he played for Yorkshire Over 60s at the Kensington Oval in Barbados, sent a photograph of himself coming onto the field to the surgeon at Hartlepool hospital who’d performed the operation.

“Luckily, he was a cricket fan. It was a local anaesthetic and we talked cricket amid all the sawing and banging that was going on. It was November 7 and I’d told all my clubs that I thought my career was over. By New Year’s Eve I was jiving with my wife.

“I suggested the surgeon send the photograph to all his other knee replacement patients. I’m not sue if he ever did.”

To cap an amazing week, he was skipper for the sixwicket win against Australia at Great Ayton – the Cleveland village where his mother lived before becoming a downstairs maid in London and marrying the greengrocer who delivered to the back door.

“I thought I’d give them the Henry V speech from Agincourt,” says Tom. “They ended up throwing bats and boxes and all sorts at me. It shows the respect they had for the skipper.”

His England debut’s against Wales at the lovely Worcester ground next month. Tom promises to order extra supplies of WD40; if ever a 64-year-old was keeping canny, it’s this one.

‘I love football, me,’ says Don

DON COWAN, former Darlington goalkeeper and one of the great men of grassroots football in Co Durham, celebrated his 80th birthday on Wednesday.

“I’m like the feller on the wireless,” he says. “It’s not ‘I love carpets, me’ it’s ‘I love football, me’.”

He was born in Sherburn, began his goalkeeping career with Bowburn Juniors, signed apprentice forms for Middlesbrough but after RAF service ended up at Feethams.

He made 17 Football League appearances between 1952-54 – “and about 200 for the blinking reserves” – suffered a hairline pelvis fracture against Stockton and may never have been quite the same lad.

They were paid, he recalls, £9 a week in the stiffs and £11 in the first team. “It was good money really, a skilled man might only be getting a fiver.

“On top of that the chairman was John Neasham, who sold cars.

We’d earn a few bob by rubbing the wax off a few vehicles after training.”

Don had a spell as secretary of the Auckland and District League, has helped run the Auckland Charity Cup for the past 48 years, remains a vicepresident of Durham FA.

“They send for me when they want me,” he says. “They probably suppose I’ve done my whack.”

CLEARLY it is to be something of a veterans’ column. Arthur Puckrin, a bit of a bairn at 73, at last confesses the secret of his world beating sporting prowess.

It was the British 12-hour cycling championships last weekend, a 6am start in Cheshire. “There was no breakfast to be had,” says Arthur a Middlesbrough barrister. “I had to make do with three slices of jam and bread.

“It’s full of carbohydrates, slipped down beautifully, really set me up.”

Thus fuelled, notwithstanding wind and traffic, he covered 211 miles in the allotted time, almost inevitably a new British record to add to his Guinness-bookish collection.

The amazing Arthur clearly has jam on it.

THOUGH neither the Backtrack nor the At Your Service columns were aware of it, word arrives of an unusual cricket match last weekend West Witton v neighbouring Swinnithwaite, in Wensleydale.

West Witton were all out for 55, their opponents nearmiraculously recovered from 7-8 – including seven ducks – to win by one wicket.

The unexpected bit is that it was followed by a songs of praise service, led by local vicar Sue Whitehouse, in the pavilion. “Since the game was really for the church’s benefit, the church council decided to forego evensong in favour of something different,” says Canon Whitehouse.

Sadly, she was unable to come up with hymns especially suggestive of the sward – “We finished with The Day Thou Gave Us Lord is Ended” – though There is a Green Hill Far Away might more or less describe Spout House.

Nor are we able to help.

Amid its many treasures, the usually admirable Darlington library doesn’t possess a single hymn book.

The cricketers, at any rate, scored £256 for church funds.

TUESDAY’S note on the forthcoming reunion at Ushaw Moor CC – evening of September 3, all welcome – failed to mention that it marks 50 years of the club’s Durham County league membership and 130 years of its existence. “So far as I know,” says Norman Ferguson, “we’ve played on the same ground throughout.”

THE prolific Doug Grant, 47, scored all four goals in Shildon Grey Horse’s 4-1 win over the Woodcutter of Hartlepool in the first game of the Over 40s league season. In the second he tore his hamstring.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever had a hamstring problem. I just thought I’d set the season up nicely,” he says.

It was the first time he’d hit four in a match since the Northern League days of the late 1980s when a local businessman offered a colour television to any Shildon player who registered a hattrick during the season.

Doug hit five, and may have enjoyed wrap-round telly ever since.

“They reckon I’ll be out for six weeks but I’m getting married in October so will probably wait until November before coming back” he says. “After that, I’ll be looking to fill my boots.”

ANOTHER victim of government cuts, it’s said, Deepdale – the Saturday afternoon name for the inmates’ football team at Deerbolt Young Offenders’ Institution near Barnard Castle – have resigned from the Crook and District League where the lads’ behaviour had inevitably proved exemplary.

WE wrote on July 16 of the transforming effect that football is having on the lives of thousands of homeless children forced to camp on and around the dumps in the Philippines.

Much of it is directed by Triple E, a charity spearheaded by the wholly remarkable Naomi Tomlinson, a five-foot-nowt 20-year-old from Newton Aycliffe.

Since many of the kids go barefoot, or have no suitable footwear, Naomi had appealed through the column for trainers, new or used, or for donations towards buying them.

The response has been gratifying – “several hundred pounds,” reports the Rev David Tomlinson, Naomi’s father, who’s a priest at St Johns church in Shildon.

The Northern League, ever-generous, gave £250.

Among other donors was retired teacher Keith Neal from Altrincham. “Your article was such a wonderful antidote to all the other news about the youth of today,” he writes”.

I’m donating £20 to triple E and will mention Backtrack, of course.”

Other help would, of course, would very gratefully be appreciated. Details and donation options at triplee.org.uk

And finally

TUESDAY’S column invited readers to name the football trophy of which Bristol City, Tranmere Rovers, Crewe Alexandra and Shrewsbury Town were successive winners.

As Norman Robinson in Annfield Plain knew, it was the Welsh Cup – the next three were South Liverpool, Wellington Town and Chester before a side from the Principality finally managed to get their hands on it.

Norman Robinson in turn invites readers to suggest the surnames common to a Newcastle United goalkeeper of the 1990s, a pole vaulter who represented Great Britain at the Moscow and Montreal Olympics and a West Indian cricketer with over 100 Test appearances who also played for Lancashire and Kent.

Whatever’s in a name, the column returns on Tuesday