PLAYING at royalty, recent columns have recalled how HRH the Maharajah Jam Singh of Nawangar – Ranji to his friends – became something of a cricket fixture in the North Yorkshire village of Gilling East, near Helmsley.

Ranji, the first Indian to play in tests for England, is particularly remembered for raising the team – including several England team mates – which in 1907 took on a village XI to raise funds to restore the church clock.

It certainly chimed with Mick Kilvington from Richmond, whose great grandfather George Kilvington was Gilling East’s captain for at least 25 years from 1881-1906 and who himself has a remarkable cricket pedigree.

The great West Indian spinner Sonny Ramadhin, mentioned in Tuesday’s column, turns up again, too.

Mick, who runs a taxi business, still has the silver tea set presented to his great grandfather to mark 25 years as skipper.

It doesn’t mean, of course, that he mightn’t still have been skipper in 1907 or that he didn’t play in the clock match.

We’re still trying precisely to time it.

Mick himself began playing at Gilling East, before spells with Ampleforth and Scarborough II. It was after joining the Royal Signals in 1964, however, that his cricket career really began firing.

Based at Blandford, he played for Dorset, in 1959 finishing third in the Minor Counties bowling averages behind Richard Jefferson of Norfolk (58 at 9.72) and Ramadhin, then with Lincolnshire, who bagged 56 at 9.76.

M J Kilvington had 25 at 10.12, hoped to have made more appearances but had to play the Army game, too. “Basically all we did in the summer was play cricket, but it didn’t do much for your promotion prospects,” he says.

Durham County scorer and historian Brian Hunt provides the statistics – “Richard Ingleby Jefferson, son Will now plays for Notts, nearly seven feet tall” – gloomily adding that not a single Durham bowler finished in the top 50.

“It must have been a moderate season,” he adds, self-evidently.

Perhaps Mick Kilvington’s finest hour had come the previous year, however, when he took all ten – “10-26.16.2 overs, captain couldn’t get the ball off me” – for Dorset against Cornwall.

After an inter-services tournament at Lord’s, he returned to the Dorset ranks, claimed the first eight wickets against Somerset II and was within sight of becoming the only cricketer in history to go through the card in successive matches when a Somerset batter got himself run out.

“I remember throwing the ball at the captain and saying that we me knackered,” says Mick. “Mind, it was still a magical August.”

BRIAN Hunt’s testimonial year continued on Tuesday with a jolly dinner at Bishop Auckland Golf Club, though none of the expected first teamers was able to be there.

Luke 14:18 came to mind. Readers will know chapter and verse.

Among those who did make it, however, was the column’s old friend Graham Smith, heavyweight Bishop Auckland opening batsman in the 1970s and still farming at Sedgefield.

The doctor’s computer, Graham swears, lists one of his conditions as “eats for England.”

Director of cricket Geoff Cook, still known as Nipper in his native South Bank – “it’s because I was the littlest,” he said – proved an admirable stand-in, joined at the other end by Laim Plunkett, summoned from his Teesside home.

The Beardless Wonder himself wore his suit for the first time since Durham’s championship winners were presented to the Duke of Edinburgh at a Buckingham Palace reception.

The duke, recalls Brian, asked him if he had to spend much time on the road.

“I’m away from home about three months a year,” replied the Wonder, to which the duke replied that his wife would like that.

The excellent Ann Hunt was next in line. “So do I,” she said.

DURHAM’S cause in the ongoing championship match with Yorkshire is said greatly to have been helped by the Tykes’ demoralisation after last week’s astonishing defeat by Somerset.

Set 476 to win in less than a day, Somerset knocked them off with 4.3 overs remaining – the second highest winning total in a county championship match and eighth highest in the world.

As Martin Birtle in Billingham points out, however, there is both a precedent and a moral to the story.

At Headingley in 1901, Yorkshire – unbeaten for almost two years – hit 325 in the first innings before dismissing Somerset, who followed on, for 87.

By the end of the second day of three – the second day, mark – Somerset’s second innings stood at 540-5, finishing on 630.

Palairat, Phillips and Braund hit centuries, Yorkshire allround George Hirst finished with 1-187.

Needing 393 to win, the home side were all out for 113. Having led by 238 on first innings, they lost by 279.

Yorkshire swiftly recovered, remained unbeaten for the rest of the season and won the title by the length of Leeds high street.

STUMPS barely drawn in Cardiff, an email arrives from the Pleasant Dinners Cricket Club, co-founded by Hartlepool exile Graeme Harper.

“We’re all staunch traditionalists afflicted by a nearpathological dislike of change,” he once explained.

The email underlines it.

“What better was to relax after a draining day of Ashes cricket than a pot of tea and a Tunnock’s teacake?”

A couple of hours later there’s another email from Alf Hutchinson in Darlington, who’s been reading the Yorkshire fans’ website Corridor of Uncertainty after the first day’s play.

Cook was out in his usual way, it says – “waving his bat outside off stump like a teenage boy who’s found his sister’s dildo.”

SINCE it wouldn’t be cricket without Spout House, a note that the gardens of Arden Hall at Hawnby – home of the Earl and Countess of Mexborough – will be open from 2pm-5pm tomorrow to help the glorious club’s pavilion fund. Cream teas, too.

Hawnby’s on the high road from Osmotherley to Helmsley, in North Yorkshire, the hall particularly noted for its spectacular yew hedge – at least 200 years old and sometimes supposed to date from the medieval nunnery which preceded the hall.

“It’s more the hedge as mountain range,” someone supposes.

Two tunnels pass through it, the interior said to be cathedral- like. Everything else in the garden is reckoned lovely, too.

TUESDAY’S column invited songs with a sporting theme and at once becomes a candidate for Top of the Pops.

Tom Purvis in Sunderland proposes everything from Anyone For Tennis, a 1978 number 40 for Cream, to The Kid’s Last Fight, with which Frankie Laine reached No. 3 in 1954.

There’s Skiing in the Snow (Wigan’s Ovation, No 12, 1978), Marbles by Blackgrape (No. 46 1998) Sailing (Rod Stewart, No 1 1975), Walking Back to Happiness – another number one – and even Gone Fishin’, which dear old Bing sang when charts were still something on the end of a hospital bed.

Seat of his pants, the Stokesley Stockbroker proposes the hot air ballooning anthem (and Nimble commercial) I Can’t Let Maggie Go and, about as accurately, Little Arrows by Leapy Lea.

“The Company of Archers at Scorton must love it,” he says, though Tom supposes it more of a darts theme.

Ian Robson in Durham records that English folk singer Roy Harper had in the 1970s a “fairly well known” single called When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease – described as “capturing the atmosphere of a village cricket match in an elegy to a previous age (complete with brass band.”).

DJ John Peel asked that the BBC play it in tribute to him in the event of his death. The Corporation duly obliged.

NICK Gates, inspiration behind Coaches Across Continents, won the Beyond Sport global award for the best new charity on Thursday evening.

We wrote of him last Saturday.

Nick, 42, is the son of former Boro centre half Bill Gates and his wife Judith, presently in Castle Eden, who attended the ceremony in London. The competition was impressive.

“Bill and I were humbled by all that was being done by the shortlisted charities, from working with slum kids in South America to using football to promote peace in Palestine,” says Judith.

They’d left Nick – “so proud for him” – setting off for dinner with Tony Blair, having had his photograph taken with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Sir Michael Parkinson.

Today they plan a restorative walk in the hills; Nick’s heading back to Malawi.

The rise and fall of Michael ‘Never’ Reddy: retired

MICHAEL Reddy, the much travelled footballer reckoned by former Sunderland manager Peter Reid to be the most exciting youngster he ever worked with, is on the move again.

Reddy signed from Kilkenny City in 1999, was Sunderland’s young player of the year in 2001 but swiftly earned the nickname Never because of a desperate series of injuries.

Officially retired in 2007, after a third unsuccessful hip operation, he moved to Greenland and subsequently married the attractive Falkland Islands native he’d met at the Greenland Fish Festival.

Reddy for anything, he followed her south. The man once valued at £5m now turns out for Port Stanley Albion.

STILL fishing, former Spennymoor Boxing Academy secretary Paul Hodgson – among the column’s oldest friends – had his hands even fuller than normal recently, after landing a record breaking 10lb 9oz rainbow trout last weekend.

Hook, line and sinker? “No, I did honestly, it was like something out of Huckleberry Finn,” he insists.

The fish was caught on sweetcorn, something which more experienced anglers reckon a canny bit bait. “It’s the colours which attract them,” says one. “He’s certainly caught one hell of a trout.”

Hodgy’s modestly ascribes beginner’s luck. “There were lads there who’ve been fishing for years and who didn’t land a thing. I haven’t been at it five minutes.”

The story appears to be true, though for reasons to do with water clarity, it’s probably best to draw the line there. Whatever the expression on the fish’s face, this must be the one that got away.

and finally...

THE unusual thing about the two-legged Motherwell v Llanelli UEFA Cup tie which ended on Thursday (Backtrack, July 7) is that both teams played their “home” game on someone else’s ground.

Motherwell were at Airdrie, Llanelli at the new rugby stadium in the town. It’s by no means unique, however.

Fellow Welshmen Llansantffraid, for example, played their 2000 Champions League game at Wrexham while Estonian opponents FC Levadia Maardu moved their game to Tallinn, the capital.

When Manchester City played E B Streymur of the Faroe islands in last season’s UEFA Cup, the away leg was switched to the Faroese capital and the English tie to Barnsley.

The rock band Bon Jovi had got to the Eastlands Stadium first. It was having to be re-laid.

Speaking of Man City, readers are today invited to name the Northern Irish international, now 70, whose time there in the 1960s was sandwiched between spells at Sunderland and Middlesbrough.

Spellbinding as always, the column returns on Tuesday.