This is a group of young blokes, many of whom are easily bored and need to find things to occupy their underdeveloped brains, a situation that inevitably results in a lot of practical jokes. For quite some time in the Yorkshire second team, I felt well out of my depth in terms of the pranks. And to make matters worse, the prankster-in-chief was the coach himself.
Doug Padgett was a coach from the old school, a former Yorkshire batsman who had been the club’s coach for donkey’s years and usually travelled with the second team. He was a good bloke, but he had a time-honoured way of making a new lad feel welcome.
Take the piss out of him whenever possible.
This is the man who would welcome a lad making his debut by sending him round to take the day’s lunch order. ‘Here, Twatook,’ he would say (he called all the younger lads Twatook). ‘Do the lunches for us, will you? Go round and see how many of the lads want steak and how many want salmon, then nip to the kitchen and tell the chef.’ So the new lad would eagerly set about his task, taking all eleven orders, only to find when he got to the kitchen that the only option available for lunch was lasagne, something that Padge and the other ten players were only too well aware of.
Another trick of Padge’s was to ask a new lad to go to his car and find out the Test score from the radio. James Middlebrook was one who stumbled into this trap. ‘Midders, Twatook, nip to your car and find out the Test score for us, will you? There’s a good lad.’ So off Midders trooped to his car and sat there for ages, frantically tuning and re-tuning the radio in an attempt to find Test Match Special. He returned slightly crestfallen, having failed in his mission.
‘Sorry, Padge, the Test match doesn’t seem to be on the radio today.’
‘No, Twatook, it wouldn’t be. They don’t play Test cricket on a Wednesday.’
A lesson swiftly learned for Midders, who would think twice before his esteemed coach sent him off on any errands again. I’d say I felt sorry for him, but most of us suffered in a similar way, some worse than others.
Midders got away lightly compared to the poor young whippersnapper who had travelled with Padge on an away trip to Glamorgan a few years earlier. This was before my time, but the tale was often told of an unnamed player—let’s just call him Twatook—who sat in Padge’s car for the long drive down to Wales along with a couple of his new team-mates.
As they travelled down the M5 and started to approach the Welsh border, Padge turned to the young lad sitting quietly in the back.
‘You have got your passport with you, haven’t you, Twatook? We’re about to go into Wales.’
‘Erm, erm, erm, no Padge, I don’t think I have,’ came the timid reply.
‘Oh Christ, didn’t anybody tell you? We’re going to Wales. It’s a different country. What are we going to do when we get to the border? We’re going to have to hide you.’
So Padge pulled his car over, opened the boot, moved several cricket bags to the back seat and told his victim to lie down in the boot until they had crossed the border. Young Twatook climbed in, snuggled down and Padge slammed the boot lid shut. He drove off into Wales, leaving his captive in the boot to think about the foolishness of forgetting his passport. Once the border had been safely negotiated—armed checkpoints and all—the hostage was released, poor lad. I’m sure Padge felt that it was all good character-building stuff.
Where Padge had led, there were plenty of disciples ready to follow, which has made the Headingley dressing-room a dangerous place to be at times over the last few years. Probably the biggest irritant in the Yorkshire team in recent years—myself aside—has been Anthony McGrath.
The problem with Mags is that he is easily bored and he likes to fill his time by pissing off his team-mates. A few years ago, one of his little pet projects was to put his team-mates’ cars up for sale in Auto Trader magazine, always at a bargain price carefully calculated by Mags himself. The advert for the car would usually say something along the lines of:
‘Owner forced to move abroad, Price reduced for quick sale. Please call…’
and then include the player’s mobile phone number. Inevitably, for such a bargain, these adverts attracted plenty of interest from potential buyers, prompting an endless stream of phone calls to the victim’s mobile. Time after time, he would have to say, ‘I’m sorry for the misunderstanding, but it’s not for sale.’ Which could be quite amusing on the first two or three occasions. But when it came to the 25th call in the space of an hour, it could start to become more than a little irritating.
Bogus adverts aside, Mags has often been implicated in one of the great scandals that has swirled around the Yorkshire team for several seasons now. This is the ongoing mystery of Jack the Snipper, a long-running case that has yet to be cracked and has baffled some of the finest criminal investigators in Yorkshire and beyond.
The culprit in this case is known to be someone with access to the Yorkshire dressing-room. He (or she?) waits until the dressing-room is deserted, then quickly seizes his (or her?) moment, moving in with a pair of scissors and snipping the toes off a sock belonging to the intended victim. When the victim goes to pull his sock on after the game, he pulls it up to his knee and realises, to his horror, that he has become the latest victim of JACK (OR JACQUELINE?) THE SNIPPER.
Understandably, nobody has ever owned up to these crimes, so the mystery remains unsolved. Police now suspect that the culprit may have multiple identities.
Not the most original of practical jokes, perhaps, but most of the Yorkshire players have seen it as a mildly amusing, relatively harmless gag if they happened to be a victim. But one season the Snipper targeted David Byas so many times that he no longer saw the funny side. Gadge, as he was known (for his extraordinary Inspector Gadget-like extending arms in the slips), was our captain at the time and, after his socks had been snipped for the umpteenth time, he decided the time had come to put an end to the tomfoolery.
In the build-up to one Sunday League game at Headingley, Gadge told us that we all had to be at the ground by 10 o’clock in the morning, even though the match wasn’t due to begin until 1.30 in the afternoon. It seemed a strange request, but Gadge was keen on punctuality, so everyone dutifully turned up at the appointed time. At which point the skipper took us all out to the middle of the ground at Headingley and asked us to sit in a big circle. He sat down with us and then told us why we were all sitting there looking as though we were about to play Pass the Parcel. ‘Right, you lot,’ he said, ‘nobody is moving from this circle until I find out which pillock has been snipping my f***ing socks. I just want to know who it is, then we can have a quick chat, move on and all go for some lunch.’ Nobody said a word. For a good few minutes there was complete and utter silence.
‘Come on,’ said Gadge, after a while. ‘I’m not joking here. We’re going to get to the bottom of this nonsense. Whoever has been snipping my socks is sitting in this circle and I want to know who it is.’
Still nobody said anything. There was another long, uncomfortable silence. After we’d been there for about half an hour, Gadge became more insistent—still reasonably calm, but the tone of his voice raised slightly. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘If nobody has got the balls to own up to doing these stupid stunts, it’s a piss-poor effort. All you need to do is be big enough to own up, then we can move on.’
And still nobody said anything. We had probably been there for around an hour when Gadge started to get angry. ‘For f***’s sake,’ he said, ‘will somebody PLEASE tell me who has been snipping my f***ing socks?’
Once again, there was only silence. And I kid you not, we were sitting out on that field, in that circle, for three hours. THREE WHOLE HOURS! Eventually, at one o’clock,