Posted by Send your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only really interested in your own experience, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. (But if it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.)
Ged Ladd’s official cricket biographer, Herbert Ackgrass, writes…
The match in question was the traditional Ged Ladd & Co v Charley the Gent’s Charity XI in June 2001. However, this match report focuses on one dismissal – per the scorebook: Charley the Gent, c Ged, b David, 20.
Nothing especially unusual about that: a high but not unprecedented score for Chas, while Ged has been known to hold on to catches occasionally.
Of interest is the subsequent clash of words between those two titans of the game, because the e-archive contains some telling correspondence – in particular Charley The Gent’s response to Ged’s reference to “the dolly catch”.
Chas’s reply is a masterpiece of denial, worthy of the great King-Cricketer Laurence Elderbrook himself:
“As I recall I was being verbally abused by some of your close-in fielders – and to my dismay some of my own team on the sidelines.
“The innings was low scoring, wickets were tumbling around me, and it was almost impossible to get a bat near any ball, given the wides, no-balls and balls trickling along the ground.
“In an attempt to satisfy everyone, I attempted a pull shot to leg, only to be temporarily blinded by a shining white vision, which turned out to be Ged’s brand new cricket whites.”
Despite a much impoverished Ged Ladd & Co bowling attack, the reluctant bowler who got Chas, David, was bowling superbly and had just completed a hat trick with the last ball of his previous over. Chas’s misjudged pull resulted in a rare ”four-in-four” or “double-hat-trick”, depending on your choice of term.
Bowler David was the same David who had led to Ged’s “Bob Willis spotted in a wine bar” incident a few years earlier.
Also worth noting is that Charley the Gent’s June 2001 e-whinge dates Ged Ladd’s shiny white cricket troos at spring 2001, not 2002 or 2003 as previously reported on this site.
Judging by the picture it was a remarkable catch in clearly extremely limited visibility.