Riverside is no Holmes from home for traveller

Graeme Holmes, Liverpool luminary, was among many who headed to the Riverside for the Australia v Pakistan match, only for his North-East sporting jinx spectacularly to continue.

Graeme's a Northern League enthusiast, too, checks before travelling and then usually discovers that an unforeseen monsoon has scuppered the match ten minutes before kick off.

At West Auckland, memorably, he not only turned straight round and headed for home but turned round straight into a wall, adding a £500 garage bill to the day's expenses. Had the ECB known he was coming, they'd probably have switched the match to the Orkney Islands.

Rain began just ten miles south of Chester-le-Street. By the time they'd paid a fiver to park the car, it was tossing down.

"We kept putting the radio on for news of the game, occasionally switched on the windscreen wipers and after sitting in the car for three hours, decided there'd be no play and headed off home - the first one day match in seven years to be totally washed out."

Twenty miles down the road the car conked out - too much windscreen wiper, apparently - and the AA had to be summoned.

Graeme's e-mail is headed "Complete and utter waste of time and money." In Liverpool, the sun had been shining all day. It was where we were, an' all.

It aint half hot on the Cornish Riviera, too, though it's strictly for business reasons - he runs a fish and chip shop and caf - that Chris Old finds himself out on that geographical limb.

"Someone rang me from Teesside last week and reckoned it was pouring down," he says. "It gave me a bit of something to gloat about."

Remember Chris Old? He was the Middlesbrough born cricketer who played in 46 test matches for England, took four wickets in five balls against Pakistan - the other was a no-ball - and was in the team for 'Botham's Test', the immortal Headingley victory over the Australians in July 1981.

England, it cannot be forgotten, followed on 227 behind and at 136-7 in their second innings were offered at 500-1 to win.

Enter the Squire of Ravensworth, admirably aided by R G D Willis. Old, known as Chilly for reasons which doubtless need no explanation, scored 29 in a ninth wicket partnership while Botham went ballistic at the other end, took Border's wicket in Australia's seismic second innings and (as the Squire oft reminds him) twice dropped Alderman off The Great Man. England won by 18 runs.

Whilst the rest of the team prepares for 20th anniversary celebrations, however - a book, a video, a reunion - Old will be frying, whatever the night.

"It's a battle," he admits. "We've cut costs as far as we can go, but certainly can't afford to pay staff to cover for me while I swan off to watch cricket. There's no possibility at all of me being anywhere else but here."

He'd joined Yorkshire in 1966, a batsman who turned his arm over, but succeeded F S Trueman as the county's top strike bowler and was skipper until an acrimonious departure for Warwickshire in 1982.

After leaving the first class game in 1985 he was chief executive of the Norton Cricket Club Trust in Stockton and, still more briefly, involved with a Darlington based scheme to offer sports scholarships to under-privileged youngsters.

Old - whose brother Alan played cricket for Durham and Warwickshire and fly half for England - was appointed part time cricket development officer in Cornwall, applied for his own job when it became full time and, to his undisguised chagrin, failed to get it.

"Basically neither my wife nor I had a job and we were a bit limited in what we could do," says Old, 52. "Around here it really had to be a guest house, or something in the tourist industry."

He owns the Clipper Restaurant at Praa Sands, near Penzance, enthusiastically welcomes old faces from the North-East, still applies for cricket jobs and often gets neither and interview nor an explanation. He can't, he insists, explain it.

"I get a bit envious looking at the people who have coaching jobs in the counties and wonder what qualifications they've got that I haven't.

"Most of them seem to be coached by overseas players or run of the mill county men who've never achieved anything special at all and with no more coaching qualifications than I've got."

Still, there's always the hope of a hot summer on the Atlantic coast. "From about now until the end of August we're open seven days, working 14-15 hours a day, hoping desperately that the sun will shine wall to wall, like it is now.

"Just for a couple of months in the year, I mightn't even have time to miss my cricket."

Jack Chapman was also rained off at the Riverside, so spent the day researching still more about Albert Elsdon.

"Uncle" Albert, as we were saying before the break, is reckoned the most prolific North-East wicket taker of all time - at least 3,200 victims, Jack believes, though 3,500 may yet be a conservative estimate.

(Barney Frewin, the most successful one-club man in the region's cricket chronicles, added to his 2,100 wickets for Normanby Parklands with seven for next to nothing on Saturday. He is 57.)

Albert Elsdon bowled in spectacles, Jack recalls - "looked a bit studious, as if he might have collected insurance" - but had begun as a batsman.

Born in Bearpark on May 13 1904, Albert hit an undefeated 64 for Durham - "cowie-handed" - in a 192 seventh wicket partnership with Jack Carr in 1934.

He'd begun at Langley Park, blossomed at Medomsley where he topped both batting and bowling averages, took 4-31 on his county debut in 1929 and apart from the war years is reckoned to have topped 100 wickets every season between 1929-56.

Jack Chapman, from Hebburn, is still beavering away - right handed, probably - at his epochal history of club cricket in the County Palatine. It will be quite splendid when it happens.

Bobby Robson, another Langley Park lad made good, recalls his Co Durham browtins up in Celebrity Childhood Memories, published to help the BBC Children In Need appeal.

Newcastle's manager, it transpires, was a member of both the Scouts and the Church Lads Brigade, taught the bugle by someone in the pit band and asked at the age of seven or eight to play the Last Post at Langley Park cenotaph and again at the gave of the unknown soldier.

"I felt quite emotional and also really excited. I played my little heart out," recalls Bobby and - of course - he's been doing it ever since.

l Celebrity Childhood Memories is available for £5, including postage, from Henry Buckton, PO Box 2770, Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 0XD.

Clearly the sun has also been shining on Mark Johnston, the North-East's top racehorse trainer - three big winners at Ascot, another at Redcar on Saturday, a staff party in Middleham tonight to mark the occasion.

The amiable Mr Johnston, alas, is recovering from a sporting injury of his own.

Challenging his ten-year-old son Charlie on those micro-scooter things, the big boy racer fell at the first and dislocated his shoulder. Parade ring duties have been taken over by his wife, Deirdre.

"I can't even have a glass of champagne unless I don't put the saddle on straight," she says.

Whilst no doubt making the heart grow fonder, absence meant that we missed the presentation night for Darlington Greyhounds - one of the football clubs of which the column is president.

The annual "Quote of the Year" prize was therefore unawarded but might have gone to John Laycock, who inadvertently described a football as as flat as a bone, or to Dave Lewis who claimed that Lancaster was "in Yorkshire somewhere."

Both, however, would probably have been pipped by ageing goalkeeper Alan Smith, who also produces the programme.

The season's final game had been against Darlington GSOB, who mustered only nine men, asked (in vain) to play 30 minutes each way so they could watch a match on the telly and eventually lost 4-3.

Alan's report is as-ever compelling. "My thanks," he concludes, "go to Dr Roger Wood of the Food Standards Agency, throughout whose riveting lecture on problems with inconsistent European analysis of mycotoxin levels in food this entire report was written."

BACK to Liverpool, which is where this column came in and the last one, on June 15, bowed out.

We'd asked the only English city always to have had a team in football's top flight and Everton and Liverpool provide the answer between them - though as John Milburn (e-mail address shanksisgod) points out, it was a near thing.

In 1954, Liverpool were relegated - with Middlesbrough - from the old first division but Everton ("happily for the city, if not for all of us") passed them on the way up, promoted behind Leicester City.

Shanksisgod adds one of his own. Since the introduction of the English fourth division in 1959, he asks, which is the only team never to have played in neither the top nor the bottom division.

Fair to middling, we return - and glad to be back - on Friday