Andrew Lyght so greatly enjoyed the high-life that when he was fighting cancer the local night club manager sent a cheery get well soon card because, he said, the takings were down something dreadful.

Though the amiable West Indian was cured - a miracle, he believed - it did nothing for the sales of rum and Red Stripe.

When the night was long and the pain intense, he had prayed that if he were spared - Lyght out of darkness - he would spend the rest of his life serving God.

As good as his word, Andrew was baptised.

Twelve years later, the North-East's outstanding club cricket professional of the 1980s has died. He was 44.

He came from Guyana, they always said, but he belonged to Crook.

A delightful man with a perpetual smile, he played for Crook from 1983-88, made countless friends, broke endless records with both bat and ball.

"As well as being the best pro we ever had he was also the bravest and one of the nicest men," says former Crook treasurer Roy Coates, now secretary of the Durham County League.

He was less complimentary, however, after discovering that his star import had also been playing football for Crook Town Rangers - moonlyghting, it might almost be said - a team of which the column was president and our old friend Ian "Boss Hogg" Hawley the principal promoter.

"I went crackers," Roy recalls. "The last thing we needed was our pro getting injured playing football. His illness put all that into perspective."

Cancer of the lower abdomen was diagnosed in England and treated at Newcastle General Hospital, Andrew's work permit extended so that the chemotherapy could continue.

"I heard God call me in Newcastle hospital," he once recalled. "From that moment I knew there was nothing ever to be afraid of again."

He'd played several games for West Indies 'A', would probably have been in the test squad but for his drinking and smoking - "and when those guys talk about smoking," Backtrack observed in 1991, "they don't just mean ten Woodbines."

He even admitted using dope, appropriately named, in the dressing room during an A team tour of Zimbabwe in 1980. "I got more runs than anybody that tour.

"I knew I'd have been in the first team but for that."

Then everything changed. Born again, he grew dreadlocks and a beard, became vegetarian, renounced alcohol, tobacco and most of Satan's other perceived works.

"Typical," said Roy Coates - joyously - on his return ten years ago. "He goes years and years without getting the drinks in and when it comes to his round, he's teetotal."

West Indian cricket took exception to his dreadlocks - "why can't Andrew play in his knots in a country where there is freedom and tolerance of religion?" demanded the Abroke News, without ever getting an answer - in Crook they were blunter yet.

"You look like a nanny goat," someone said.

Andrew insisted that they were part of his committment to Christ. "If they pick me fine, if they don't I praise the Lord, anyway."

In the early 80s he'd played for Bethesda in North Wales, spent 1991 with Brechin in Scotland, never lost touch with the Crook lads.

Roy Coates had heard the cancer had returned, rang Guyana two weeks ago, was assured it was just a "weakness".

Dear old Boss, then Crook's substantial wicket keeper, recalls heavy sessions, dawn card schools and the shield presented by Andrew's friends in the north to sit alongside the more conventional trophies.

He'd been billeted to a house near the golf club where the somewhat primitive facilities remained at the bottom of the yard. For emergencies and other extremes, a bucket was thoughtfully provided.

"The best man ever to fill a pail," read the shield's (slightly sanitised) inscription.

And so, says Ian Hawley, he was