The Nightwatchman

03/10/2025

The toss for the 1999 World Cup final brought a unique occurrence for English league cricket, as both captains had a connection to the same club: in this case, Smethwick in the Birmingham League.

Steve Waugh had played three games there in May 1988, while Wasim Akram was due to get going immediately after the World Cup was done – in the end, a safe haven from the burning effigies back home.

Both men played it very much to type, and both showed their teammates what world-class cricketers were all about.

Waugh’s mini-stint brought scores of 2, 124 and a match-winning 135* against Coventry & North Warwickshire. James While walked out in that game with 15 required from 13 balls, and took a single off his first. Which is when he got a crash course in Tugga.

“Between overs, Steve says to me, ‘Right mate, you’ve got to block the next over off this fella’. It was Rob Grant, one of the top seamers in the league. Sharp. ‘If he gets me out, we’ll lose. I will take 12 runs off any three deliveries the fat c**t at the other end bowls me.’ It was Geoff Edmunds, Shropshire’s left-arm spinner. Anyway, to say I blocked out six would be wrong: I played and missed at three of them, and pushed one through cover for two. But I survived. And lo and behold, Steve then hit the first three balls of Edmunds’ over for four – a brilliant lesson in backing yourself and thinking about the right way to win a game.”

Wasim, meanwhile, turned up 15 minutes late for his debut against West Bromwich Dartmouth, in a cobalt blue Porsche. He came in at 129/3, slog-swept a six over the pakora stall in a cameo 11 off eight, then sent down an eye-popping opening spell at WBD’s very decent top order: Mark Wagh (who would retire with 12,455 first-class runs), Mike Rindel (who had played 22 ODIs for South Africa) and Richard Dalton (good enough to crash a 59-ball 76 against Derbyshire for Minor Counties two years earlier, then 69 from 47 against Worcestershire four days later).

Nine overs into West Brom’s reply, however, they were all back in the shed, all courtesy of Akram: one bounced out, the other two comprehensively bowled.

“Rindel creamed one through the covers for four off Wasim, cracking shot, and you just saw something change in him,” recalls Smethwick’s Steve McDonald. “You often felt he was bowling within himself but he really let the reins off. That little spell was absolutely electric to watch.”

Akram’s next spell saw him terminate Rob Fenton’s stout middle-order resistance. This he did by breaking his toe and then his jaw in a three-ball burst, the latter delivery dislodging two teeth as it came in under the grille and back out above it.

At 59/6, with one in hospital and almost 40 overs still to bat, West Brom might have been forgiven for chucking in the towel…

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> Adapted extracts from ‘Sticky Dogs and Stardust’, Wisden Book of the Year in 2024, available here: https://fairfieldbooks.co.uk/shop/sticky-dogs-and-stardust/

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30/09/2025

The ECB’s Supplementary Support Programme is helping to give state-school educated cricketers the chance to compete with their private-school peers on a more even footing, writes Adam Hopkins

Read:

The ECB’s Supplementary Support Programme is helping to give state-school educatedcricketers the chance to compete with their private-school peers on a more even footing, writes Adam Hopkins

29/09/2025

Happy 91st birthday to Lance Gibbs, the greatest spinner in West Indies history and for six years Test cricket’s leading wicket-taker.

In 1964, the summer after snaring 26 wickets at 21.3 to help West Indies win 3-1 in England, Gibbs was back for a second year at Whitburn of the Durham Senior League, the club that had made him the region’s first £1,000 pro in 1962, a season that was progressing nicely until a finger injury derailed things.

Playing north of the Tyne at Ashington in the Northumberland League was his Guyana, West Indies and future Warwickshire colleague, Rohan Kanhai.

The pair of them were paid £1,000 each (just under £18,000 in today’s money) for weekly columns in The Sunday Sun, holding forth on cricketing matters local and international – warily at first (there were benefit matches to think about) but increasingly stridently as the summer wore on.

Both men regularly extolled the virtues of enterprising play and bemoaned teams who set out to play for the draw, which was perhaps a little disingenuous given how the pair of them so thoroughly dominated their respective leagues. That was hardly a surprise, either – according to the ICC’s retrospective ratings, Gibbs was the world’s No.1 bowler and Kanhai its No.2 batsman, behind only Sobers.

As their record-breaking summers developed, and their teams pursued titles, both Kanhai and Gibbs selected an XI from their respective leagues to face off in a showpiece game in August, playing for a little bit of cash and a whole lot of regional pride.

One of Gibbs’ picks was a young Indian business administration student from the South Shields club: Jawad ‘Joe’ Hussain, father of the not-yet-born Nasser.

Quite a buzz to be hand-picked by a cricket superstar, you’d imagine!

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> The full story of Gibbs’ spell at Whitburn (and Burnley) and Kanhai’s at Ashington (along with Aberdeenshire, Blackpool, Crompton and St Annes) appears in the second volume of ‘Sticky Dogs and Stardust’, available here in hardback or e-book format: https://fairfieldbooks.co.uk/shop/sticky-dogs-and-stardust-2/

25/09/2025

Read Matt Thacker's editor's letter from issue 51 of The Nightwatchman

https://thenightwatchman.net/news/issue-51-out-now

23/09/2025

20/09/2025

Matt Thacker makes his editor's choice selection from issue 51.

Matt has chosen Roy Peachey’s A Walk in the Park.

Read: https://thenightwatchman.net/news/editors-choice-issue-51

18/09/2025

How Moin Ashraf’s MACC Academy is nurturing the next generation of talent in Yorkshire and beyond

The MACC Academy

With coaching programmes for young cricketers, the Academy is supporting talented players take their skills to the next level.

17/09/2025

Has any cricketer come quite so close to glory as James Neesham, only to have it brutally snatched away? Not even Misbah-ul-Haq’s bodged scoop-sweep in the inaugural World T20 final against India ‘beats’ it, since Pakistan, unlike New Zealand, already had a global tournament win under their belt.

When Neesham launched Jofra Archer’s second legal delivery of the World Cup final super-over high into the Mound Stand on that July day six years ago – having already deceived Ben Stokes with a wide slower ball in the 49th over of the game with 22 needed off nine, only for Trent Boult to step back onto the boundary after taking the catch – very few people in the ground believed the Black Caps would not go on to lift the trophy. As you may have heard, however, soon it was “absolute ecstasy for England and agony – agony! – for New Zealand”.

Only Neesham can know whether he is truly over all that, but long before then he had shown himself to be a phlegmatic sort of fella, with an unusually witty and (Kiwi-typical) self-deprecating Twitter account, the sorts of traits that made him a much-loved teammate during his two full years of English club cricket.

The first came in 2009 at West Bromwich Dartmouth in the second tier of the Birmingham League, when Neesham was only 18 and wet behind the ears. He made a duck on debut, 102 next game, then three single-figure scores in a row followed by a 14, which saw him demoted to No.7, where he made 70 – in defeat. Such was the summer’s steep learning curve that Neesham managed only one more fifty and a grand total of 373 runs at under 25, along with just 25 wickets with the ball. West Brom finished sixth of 12.

Two years later, Neesham was back in the UK, spending a year in the second tier of the Essex League with Upminster, who would miss out on promotion by one spot. The big Kiwi’s output improved considerably, however: 753 runs (at 68.45) was the most in the division, while only five bowlers managed more wickets than his 33. Upminster also made the county cup final, Neesham contributing 129*, 48*, 0 and 72 to that run before missing the final, which was lost in his absence.

Still, Neesham certainly enjoyed his season – “I loved my time there as the overseas pro,” he reflected, “although somehow all my clothes shrunk that winter” – and left a few standout performances for them to remember him by: 7/43 in a 21-run win at Chingford, 7/59 and 56 in a three-wicket victory at Fives & Heronians, 155* in a 205-run trouncing of Orsett, and 125 off 87 balls at Hadleigh & Thundersley, where lips were licked about “the 25-metre boundary at one end”.

It would not be too long before Neesham was a locked-in member of New Zealand’s white-ball squads, if not always picked in the XI. There were also a smattering of Tests, Neesham making 137* on debut against India as McCullum ground out an un-Bazballian 302* from 559 balls to secure a draw.

From there, he headed to the Caribbean, playing all three Tests of a 2-1 NZ win, blasting 107 in the victorious first Test in Jamaica and a pair of fifties in the decider in Barbados. His star was in the ascendant, it seemed. Ultimately, however, he would gravitate increasingly to the T20 format, where he has played in all the major franchise competitions, including six different counties in six Blast campaigns.

During the first of those, at Derbyshire in 2016, he had one last outing in league cricket, guesting for Kimberley Institute CC in the Notts Premier League. Coming in at No.5, he whacked 67* off 37 balls, putting a couple into the horse field at Hucknall, then took two wickets in the first over, including Notts opener Jake Libby. Kimbo looked like running out easy winners until rain came with seven overs left and local rules denied them.

"He wasn’t rapid in professional cricket," recalls teammate for the day George Bacon, "but he certainly seemed rapid that day. Our wicket-keeper wasn’t the biggest, and his position was about five feet below the level of the striker’s stumps because of the slope at Hucknall."

A full season of the 25-year-old Neesham would probably do a job in club cricket, although he wasn't even paid for his appearance for Kimberley. "I think Hucknall complained and there was some more digging into the visa he was on," adds Bacon.

"The intention was for him to play more than one game for us but I think the outcome was he couldn’t take payment from us to play, or it would have impacted his eligibility for Derbyshire because of the visa he was on. But he was a great bloke, who had absolutely no problem with Sam Johnson chewing his ear off asking questions about Kane Williamson and Brendon McCullum."

Happy 34th birthday, Jimmy Neesh. We hope you’re bearing up.

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10/09/2025

The story of Wissal Al-Jaber and Maram Al-Khodir – Syrian refugees given new hope and purpose by cricket – is one of the standout chapters in Annie Chave's debut book, published by Fairfield.

Read Wissal and Maram's story (and 10 more inspirational tales) in Cricket Changed My Life.

https://fairfieldbooks.co.uk/shop/cricket-changed-my-life/

08/09/2025

Issue 51 of The Nightwatchman is out now, full of wonderful long-form cricket writing from Jarrod Kimber, Ashley Giles, Daniel Gallan, Archie Kalyana, Irfan Farooq, Huw Turbervill, and more

Print: https://thenightwatchman.net/buy/the-nightwatchman-single-issue-print-issue-51

Digital: https://thenightwatchman.net/buy/the-nightwatchman-single-issue-digital-issue-51