Devonshire cream

Why does this cricket team select itself? In batting order: George Emmett (capt.), Peter Bowler, Ian Ward, Roger Twose, David Shepherd, Roger Tolchard, Jeff Tolchard, Chris Read (w.k.), John Childs, Jack Davey, Len Coldwell. Seven of them played Test cricket. A serious clue to the county they represent is that guest 12th man is recent tearaway English fast bowler whom the then chairman of selectors Ted Dexter once addressed as Malcolm Devon.

In celebration of young Monty Panesar’s resplendent bowling for England this summer, I had thought of ruminating on an all-time team of Sikh cricketers, but I found I didn’t have too many research engines after I’d come up with Bishan Bedi and Douglas Jardine’s pal, the Yuvraj of Patiala. To be sure, the success of two newcomers to the England side this summer, Panesar and the Bolton-born, second generation Pakistani Sajid Mahmood, might have done wonders for British multiculturism — just as the triumphant return to the colours of wicket-keeper Chris Read has been warming to club cricketers in the county of Devon, designated by Lord’s as a ‘minor county’ for well over a century and never remotely likely to be considered ‘senior’.

Don’t all write in if I’ve missed a Brixham Bradman or a Lynton Larwood, but I reckon the bonnily combative little gloveman Read nicely completes my all-time dumplings’ XI. All were born in the county, except our captain Emmett, son of a British army sarn’t major and born in Agra in 1912, but a nut-brown Devonian through and through, who had, like the others, to move from the deep south-west to play for a championship county. Emmett was one of the cricketing luminaries of my Gloucestershire boyhood. His opening partner here, the nicely named Bowler (Derbyshire & Somerset), was born in Plymouth, as was Ward (Surrey & Sussex).