IT was in The Parks that Garry Park became the 100th player to represent Durham in first-class cricket 14 years after Phil Bainbridge became the first at the same Oxford venue.

From that original first-class team Bainbridge was first alphabetically, just ahead of Phil Berry and Gary Brown, while of last week's three debutantes Park came behind Ben Harmison and Moneeb Iqbal.

They will be numbered accordingly alongside their career records in the yearbook. But the numbers have nothing to do with those chosen by the players to wear on the back of their sweaters, which means it was pure coincidence that Iqbal wore No 99 on his debut. As he is not on the full-time staff and doesn't possess the sponsored kit, he had borrowed the sweater from Gary Scott.

Park was delighted to hear he had brought up the 100, saying: "It's a great feeling, especially on my debut."

He owes his presence at Durham chiefly to the county's former wicketkeeper Chris Scott, who was No 20 because Andy Fothergill kept wicket in that inaugural match.

Scott is now coaching Cambridge UCCE and Park, South African by birth, played for them while spending three years doing a sports science degree at Anglia Ruskin University.

He followed his brother, now a Cambridge PE teacher, over to this country and was playing club cricket when he began assisting Scott.

"He recommended me for a course and I went back to wicketkeeping in my second year at university after doing it for three or four years at school," he said.

"Chris is a great coach and he was a huge help to me. Where I am now has a lot to do with him. My goal is to establish myself at first-class level, but I still have a lot of work to do."

Garry's photograph in this year's Durham yearbook shows him with long blond hair, but he appeared at The Parks with a shaven head, saying "I was getting too much stick from the boys."

He also describes himself as a "skiddy" bowler and apart from scoring two centuries for Norton this season in the North East Premier League he has also taken a healthy number of wickets.

DURHAM are employing Stanhope-based Weardale Motor Services to transport them to away games this season and coach driver Ivor Ferguson has been dubbed Ivor the Driver.

He'll be on his own - other than the kit - for the trip down to Hampshire in two weeks because, with only a day inbetween, the players are flying down to Southampton from Edinburgh after the C & G Trophy match against Scotland.

DURHAM had half a point deducted from their county championship tally for falling one short of the required over-rate of 16 an hour in the defeat by Sussex. As the rate is judged over the whole match, they hoped to make up the deficit in the second innings, but the visitors didn't need to bat again.

It is said that good habits need to be formed in the A team, so it will not have gone down well that they had two points deducted in their recent match against Lancashire at Riverside.

THE Parks - said to include 100 species of trees - is mercifully unchanged since Durham last visited in 1997, except that the old scoreboard provides something closer to reality than the old approximations. There are a couple of cranes on the skyline to the south, however, confirming that ancient idylls these days are rarely far from the conflicts of modern life.

The construction in progress may well be that of Oxford University's new animal testing labs as during Durham's visit it was revealed that an animal rights group had discovered the labs' secret location in South Parks Road. The players probably didn't know this, otherwise they might have persuaded Ivor the Driver to take a detour in case he had to run the gauntlet of angry activists.

AS we scribes have an affinity for the favoured watering holes of the legends of the written word I called in briefly at Oxford's Eagle and Child, where the Inklings used to bounce literary ideas of each other in the 1940s. They included J R R Tolkein and C S Lewis, and it is also said that Colin Dexter, creator of Morse, used to drop in there.

There is apparently normally an E Morse in the current Oxford UCCE team, but he was doing exams last week. His name is Ed, not Endeavour.

DURHAM UCCE coach Graeme Fowler was not impressed when Durham showed no interest in seam bowler Lee Daggett after he took eight for 94 against them two years ago. A Lancastrian, like Fowler, Daggett was signed just before the current season by Warwickshire and removed four of Kent's top five in their first innings at Tunbridge Wells last week. That probably means Durham will be up against him at Edgbaston this week.