Frank Keating

Field marshals

Spend half an hour or so in front of a television on Saturday when Hampshire are in the field at Lord’s in the one-day county cup final. I guarantee some vivid <br /> and telling olde-tyme captaincy from the Australian Shane Warne.

Spend half an hour or so in front of a television on Saturday when Hampshire are in the field at Lord’s in the one-day county cup final. I guarantee some vivid
and telling olde-tyme captaincy from the Australian Shane Warne.

Spend half an hour or so in front of a television on Saturday when Hampshire are in the field at Lord’s in the one-day county cup final. I guarantee some vivid and telling olde-tyme captaincy from the Australian Shane Warne. No matter the tubby blond chevalier is probably the finest spin bowler the game has ever seen — now out to grass in England, it is his combative, cajoling and belligerently inspiring leadership of the hitherto fondly dozy southern county that has become one of the sights (and sounds) of our summers. Warne’s too regular tabloid dalliances obliterated any chance of his captaining Australia, a post he readily deserved for his cricketing nous and nerve, his wit, his wits and his wisdom. As with his beguiling bowling, there is a confrontational charisma about Warne’s field-marshall presence, and watching the 37-year-old zestfully infuriate the opposition as he manipulates and galvanises his troops stirs remembrance of those fearsome and relishably autocratic county captains who so enlivened the pastoral paddocks of my boyhood.

Three score or so years ago they’d march their infantry into Gloucestershire for summer-holiday three-dayers, magisterially shouting the odds and putting the fear of God into us urchins behind the ropes — officers and commanders like wolfish Wilf Wooller, despot of Glamorgan; Middlesex’s martinet R.W.V. Robins; cocksure young bigshot ‘Snarler’ Marlar of Sussex; or Kent’s purply-faced pat-rician B.H. Valentine, Somerset’s eccentric experimenter R.J.O. Meyer of the Josephite blazer, and Northampton’s beery F.R. Brown of the curly pipe and white-silk cravat.

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