Somerset County Cricket Club
Many congratulations to the team I've followed and supported, and was a member of the club for many years, since first watching them at the Weston-super-Mare cricket festival in the mid-1950s, a venue no longer used by the county as these days all home matches are played at their Taunton headquarters.
Today at Lords they won the Royal London One-Day Cup (50 overs per side) easily beating an admittedly under-strength Hampshire.
For many years Somerset won nothing and frequently inhabited the bottom part of the County Championship. In those days they always played entertaining, if not successful, cricket and it was often said that they were the second favourite team of all other cricket followers in the country - if that was the case it probably involved a degree of sympathy for honest endeavours that brought no reward.
All that began to change in the early 1970s when the legendary Yorkshireman, Brian Close, moved to the south-west to captain Somerset. Closey put the fear of God into the players and into many committee men. Results began to improve and a new confidence emerged.
By the late 70s Somerset had turned into the most entertaining side in the country with Viv Richards, Ian Botham and Joel Garner in their pomp ably assisted by the new captain, Brian Rose (now club president) and Vic Marks (both England test players), along with the salt of the earth professionals such as Colin 'Herbie' Dredge from a Frome cricketing dynasty, and Pete 'Dasher' Denning from Chewton Mendip where his father ran the butchers shop, sadly to leave us far too early when not even out of middle-age.
Another member of that side was Peter Roebuck, Cambridge graduate and opening batsman, probably good enough to have played for England. He was an introvert, his own man in so many ways and very much a loner. He went on to captained Somerset in the late 1980s but was always a controversial figure at the club. After he finished as a player he became a highly acclaimed writer and broadcaster on the game but tragically committed suicide in South Africa eight year ago following allegations about his private life.
The side of the late 70s and early 80s swept all asunder in the one-day formats, winning several competitions. Over the next 20 years they were very much 'up and down' and until today the last competition they won was in 2005. However in the intervening period they finished as runners-up no less than ten times in various competitions including three in the County Championship, the competition I still regard as the most important ('proper cricket'), and which they have never won although currently they sit top of that table.
I'ver had some wonderful times following Somerset, not least because of the fans. They are funny and dedicated - they have to be supporting such a team.
I always quote one instance as an example of what I regard as the typical Somerset supporter's priorities. It was Monday 27 August 1979, a bank holiday, and Somerset were playing the 'old enemy' Gloucestershire at Taunton on the second day of a County Championship match. I had left the ground on a 'pass out' at lunchtime to find refreshments (these days the ground itself supplies a wide-ranging selection) and as I returned to the ground through the gate the elderly, white-coated gate steward spied a pal to whom he shouted, "Have you heard? Mountbatten's been blown up. He's dead" (no Internet or mobile phones then - the gate steward had gleaned the information from his transistor radio). "Is he?" said the mate. "Botham's batting well isn't he?" I was going to write it in the Somerset dialect in which it was spoken but that would have been unintelligible to anyone not born in wellies with a straw in their mouth. Nevertheless, even on such a sad occasion it showed what a Somerset cricket follower regarded as important.
