Sir, – A few weeks ago I was in London with my photographic exhibition of still pictures from my autobiography, at the Hammersmith Irish Culture Centre. I had an extra day and I went to see some cricket at the Oval – Surrey was playing Gloucestershire. The dancing Mark Ramprakash made 90-odd runs.
In the ground I was passing the Pavilion and inquired if might I view the game from there. A very helpful official said he did not see why not. I told him I was from Dublin and had been a leg spinner a long time ago and had played for Ireland when I was still at Blackrock College, aged 17. He ushered me in to the Pavilion, which is like a cathedral of cricket. I passed a large oil painting of Sir Donald Bradman.
At the lunch break I joined some of the members in a beautiful dining room and the head waiter asked me was I on my own or would I like to join some of the members, addingcheerfully, “I’m from Limerick, what part of the old sod are you from?”
I joined two gentlemen who were over 80 and after welcoming me they wanted to know what part of Ireland I was from. I said, “Dublin, the capital of the Republic”. We had a great lunch and I bade them farewell and returned to my seat in the sunshine. My thoughts drifted back over 50 years ago, to 1952. I was on my way to Lords and would meet there the off-spinner from Cork, Jim Fitzgerald and Jimmy McKelvey from Belfast (now Doctor). We were to spend some time being coached with Middlesex. I remember on the old mail boat to Holyhead, it was a very rough crossing and then the train to London which was even grimmer. In my compartment there were two teenagers from Co Mayo with old broken cases tied with string and a few bottles of stout. They were good enough to offer me one, but in those days I was strictly a lemonade man. My cricket bag was on the rack above my head. I worried as the night wore on if there was a scuffle that my bowling arm or hand might be injured. I need not have worried, those two young men were deeply unhappy having to leave their homes with no job to go.
I just did not understand how bad things were in the 1950s. My father’s two brothers had spent half a lifetime in the car assembly factories of Birmingham like hundreds of thousands of other Irish immigrants. Nobody I knew in those days had a penny.
At the Oval, as I drifted off to one of my catnaps (which seems to me to be a more common occurrence now) the sound of the leather on willow seemed to soothe me. It dawned on me how different Irish cricket is now. The fact that we managed to beat England in the recent World Cup, effectively knocking them out of the competition: this would have been beyond our wildest dreams as little as 10 years ago.
When Ireland welcome England today at Clontarf there will be no quarter given, but the welcome will reflect a new respect and friendship between our two countries, two small islands and peoples who have given so much to Europe and the world beyond.
This seems to me like some sort of a completion of a journey in life and cricket, with a new understanding and of a shared future with our neighbours in trust and friendship. Isn’t life strange? A young man from north county Dublin, Eoin Morgan, leads England today against the country where he was born. – Yours, etc,