By Alan Fairley: July 2023

Watching the Ashes series on TV recently, I was reminded of my brief dalliance with the quintessentially English game of cricket as a teenager in the early 1970s.

The football season had recently ended and, as a consequence my Saturday afternoons were representing a gargantuan dark void waiting to be filled and as I contemplated ways of utilising the freetime which was on offer, my dad said to me ‘Do you fancy going to a cricket match?’

My initial negative reaction to this proposal was tempered by the thought that, if nothing else I would be attending a sporting event of some kind so father and son headed for the station and boarded a train to Partick where the Hamilton Crescent cricket ground was hosting a Western Union encounter between West of Scotland and Kilmarnock.

My perception of cricket up until that point in my life had centred around visions of village greens in quaint little English towns upon which gentlemanly figures pranced around in white trousers and jumpers while families sat around the edge of the pitch with their neatly prepared picnics, all to the soundtrack of leather striking willow – for the uninitiated that relates to the bat hitting the ball, its not a line from a porn movie.

This however, this was no quaint English village. 

This was Partick.

At the time Partick was arguably one of the roughest areas of Glasgow and the approach to the cricket ground encompassed a trek through some scruffy looking streets, housing some dodgy looking pubs, but the ground itself was akin to an oasis in the desert with its wide swathes of delicately manicured grass and and an appealing little pavilion occupied by gentlemen wearing club ties whilst sipping glasses of cool beer in the early summer sunshine – a sharp contrast to the ambience of the football grounds in which I had spent my winter Saturdays over the course of the previous 8/9 months. 

As I sat down and struggled to come to terms with the intricacies of this rather complex game, my interest levels heightened with the appearance of one individual – a man called Intikhab Alam.

Every team in the Western Union was allowed to field one professional and West Of Scotland had secured the services in this regard of Intikhab, a renowned Pakistani internationalist, and when he came into bat, the game took on a new dimension.

After my interest had been awakened, things took off and I soon found myself heading towards Hamilton Crescent on pretty much every day of the school holidays, running the gauntlet of Partick’s mean streets to cover the short journey from the station and getting involved in every aspect of the club’s activities – watching, playing, working the scoreboard at first XI games and even helping the groundsman to cut the grass.

Ironically, it was my apparent prowess as a player however which eventually led to the cutting of ties with the game for which I had rapidly developed such a strong affection.

I was playing for the West of Scotland junior team and, without sounding arrogant, was establishing myself as one of the best spin bowlers at the club but, despite my on-field contributions, I was finding it difficult to become accepted within what was clearly a closed environment.

The reason for that?
One word….. snobbery.

Cricket in Glasgow was, and possibly still is, an elitist game.

Most of the guys in the junior team were educated at selective fee-paying schools such as Kelvinside, Jordanhill, Allan Glen’s and Glasgow Academy and I was one of the few who attended a state school.

OK, Bearsden Academy wasn’t exactly Grange Hill but it did have an impressive academic record (even allowing for the influxes from the Courthill ghetto and the badlands of Westerton) but, unlike those schools mentioned above, it wasn’t an institution which would have necessitated my parents paying obscene amounts of money every term for the privilege of attending, and as as such I became ostracised by my team mates and often found my name missing from the team sheet for no other reason than the absence of the old school tie.

Things came to a head one night at training, or ‘nets’ as it was known.

The aforementioned Intikhab was supervising the session and as I was practising my spin bowling technique, he came over and singled me out for some personal coaching before suggesting that I should be training with the senior players.

I could feel the eyes of the posh lads burning holes in the back of my second hand cricket jumper as he led me away to join the seniors.
Their undisguised resentment and jealousy simmered for several days, culminating one night with four of them jumping me as I left the ground after training before giving me an almighty kicking.

As I gingerly raised my bruised limbs from the dusty Partick pavement, I made up my mind that my short lived involvement with the game of cricket was over.

I still watch the game on TV and often wonder if my development as a cricketer had been allowed to continue, how far might it have taken me?

These posh boys have a lot to answer for.