Innings closed for Laundy

"There'll be no Frank Sinatra jobs," he insists. "I came home, threw my gear in the bin and it went out with the rubbish on Wednesday. I think I've had a pretty good innings."

Darlington and District League president Brian Dobinson agrees. "John's not just been a tremendous cricketer but a gentleman from first to last."

Now 64, John was a 12-year-old choir boy when first he played for Haughton, on Darlington's north-east hem. He stayed for 34 years, and for the last 18 has turned out for Ingleton, ten miles to the west.

His last match, as long he had planned it to be, was back at Haughton, where it all began.

His 18,000 runs included three centuries and 56 half centuries. There've been over 600 wickets - for the first 20 years he was a wicket keeper - 700 catches and winner's awards in every local cup final except the Egglestone, in which he appeared 12 times but always on the side which came second.

"You don't have highlights, it's just a way of life," says John, though his best remembered match may have been as an umpire - whilst recovering last year from a prostate cancer operation. ("I'm not sure if the catheter wasn't still in.")

Ingleton played at Witton-le-Wear - Witton's well remembered Willie Nelson bowling, John at the bowler's end and both helplessly distracted by the continuing belligerent banter between square leg umpire Stuart Dawson and several disaffected fielders. Finally they realise that it had been an 11 ball over.

"I'd transferred the counters from one pocket to the other and was counting backwards. Willie was on his knees, running in off two paces," recalls John.

"The amazing thing was that neither of the scorers nor the square leg umpire himself told us was going on."

The Darlington and District League began in 1961, Haughton denied admission in the first season because of the state of their pitch. "It was a cabbage patch, like a lot more, but these days it's absolutely top rate.

"We were going absolutely nowhere playing friendlies. The league has encouraged a great deal of improvement."

Retirement was difficult. "It's been a way of life. I've had some battles but I don't think I've fallen out with anyone for very long.

"I can still bat and bowl a bit, but any old time cricketer will tell you that the hard bit is fielding. I decided at the start of the season that Haughton would be my last match."

Now, he says, he'll take up the place at critics' corner long reserved for such luminaries.

In his final match he was dismissed for a single but was offered a final over when Haughton's top scorer was 68.

"I put the ball on the spot one last time and bowled him. I have to say I rather enjoyed that. It was a pretty good way to go."

Dave Greener, roundly familiar in North-East club cricket, is back in action with Clara Vale - Tyne Valley - after five weeks out with a broken finger. Fractures heal, gout doesn't.

The pain was so intense that Dave, excused boots against Bomarsund, not only fielded in flip-flops but took a catch at slip.

Then they asked him to bowl. Bemused, the umpire found himself holding a pair of size ten flip-flops whilst Dave, like Jemima Puddleduck, went barefoot. Sadly, he failed to take a wicket.

"It was slippy, I was like an elephant on ice," he explains.

Now in his 36th successive summer of Saturday cricket, 50-year-old Dave - equally well known as an after dinner entertainer - was paraphrasing Groucho Marx when we bumped into him at Esh Winning v Horden, football, on Tuesday evening.

"If I'd known I was going to last this long," he said, "I'd have looked after mesel' a bit better."

Bob Taylor, the admirable Horden lad whose unhappy final months at West Brom we chronicled in February, has signed for Cheltenham - close enough to his Lichfield home for the bairns not to have to change schools.

Bob, 36, has been offered a 12 month contract following his testimonial at West Bromwich but after months out of the first team picture.

"I spent Saturday afternoons watching the football results and twiddling my thumbs," Superbob had said. "At my age you need to be involved."

At Cheltenham, he's back at the races.

As seldom sighted as a dingy skipper, the column had an exclusive on Tuesday - all the better for being dubbed "unauthorised" by those concerned.

An official statement admits that talks on "cooperation" between Darlington and Mowden Park rugby clubs - the most fierce of rivals - is continuing.

An unofficial source comments: "It's caused a lot of problems. Things are at a very sensitive stage."

Ken Mitchinson's 50 years service to football refereeing was marked with presentations from the Football Association and Referees' Association last night.

He's had even longer with the Church Lads Brigade - "and you're supposed to retire from that at 60" - and has long been a stalwart of St Andrew's church in Bishop Auckland.

Ken, 81, took to refereeing after 10 playing years with Leewoollen United, one of the Auckland and District League's forgotten sides. "You had to have something else to do," he says.

Though he reached the Northern League middle, he only sent off four players in his career - two for fighting at Darlington, another two at Sedgefield.

"There wasn't the indiscipline" he says. "The game's a lot different now, a lot faster, but I'm not sure that they enjoy themselves any better."

The occasion may be toasted with one of the 150 bottles of home made wine in his cellar. "My son had to stop making it. My wife decided I had enough."

Fifteen years since last he officiated in the Northern League, 55-year-old David Lowes - "fit as George Courtney's dog" - is making a comeback on the line.

"Until this season I've always had a Sunderland season ticket," he explains, then insists that the only reason for joining that great exodus is because he works two Saturdays a month.

It wasn't even that he rang about. Hartlepool Referees' Society marks its 70th anniversary with a five course dinner at the Mayfair in Seaton Carew on September 20 and is anxious to fill more seats.

Tickets are £17.50, any profits to the Hartlepool and District Hospice Building Fund. Dave's on 01429 261784.

Should the fourth Test last that long, tomorrow's proceedings will be enlivened by a Sir Jimmy Savile lookalike competition, organised by NPower.

"Sir Jimmy is a hugely popular figure who holds great appeal for sports fans," says a spokeswoman, though Who's Who lists his recreations as cycling, running and wrestling but not cricket.

A bit like the Albany Northern League tea hut of the year competition, the winner will receive a year's supply of Yorkshire Tea - in the Northern League it's 99, from the Co-op - and £100 cash.

The evergreen Sir Jimmy, 77 on Hallowe'en night, will be across from Scarborough to do the honours.

The Darlington and District Football League, formed 98 years ago, has kindly sent its handbook. Records list successful sides like Darlington Wire Mills, Bakelite, Theatre Royal (second division champions 1927-28), Rocket and Heighington, first division winners for four successive seasons in the 1950s.

Saturday football now much threatened, just 11 teams remain - including Hole in the Wall, of whom the column proudly remains president, and East End WMC whose change colours are listed as black, black and black.

It was Henry Ford, of course, who claimed that customers could have any colour Model T so long as it was black. How the referee will clash himself has not yet been discovered.

John Briggs forwards a report of top level talks in Italy aimed at s trengthening Silvio Berlusconi's control but bedevilled by rows about football and allegations that Berlusconi behaves like Mussolini. The Northern League chairman is furious, adds the report. He usually is.

And finally...

It's Wycombe Wanderers (Backtrack, August 19) who play at the Causeway Stadium - renamed from Adams Park after a six figure sponsorship deal with Causeway Technologies.

Among those who knew the answer, Keith Bond in Brompton on Swale invites the identity of the "football luminary" - a very familiar ex-England international - who co-wrote They Used To Play On Grass.

We're out to graze again after the bank holiday.

Published: 22/08/2003