Next in our series highlighting the club game’s highest achievers, Scott Oliver meets a northern powerhouse who honed his game in “proper, tough cricket” on Merseyside
Read more from The Wisden Club Cricket Hall of Fame series
This article was first published in issue 14 of Wisden Cricket Monthly magazine. Subscribe here.
When the 28-year-old Jonathan Dobing Bean arrived at Firwood Bootle CC in 1993 in the prime of his batting life, the feat of scoring a thousand runs in a top-flight Liverpool & District Cricket Competition (LDCC) season had only been achieved 35 times by amateurs in 101 years, and just 11 times, by six men, over the previous 35 summers. More than half of those 11 were by new colleagues of Bean’s in Bootle’s prolific top four.
Bean also played 80 Championship games for Cheshire, once scoring a hundred before lunch at Colwyn Bay, while he contributed a handy 50-ball 43 as they beat Bedfordshire in the 1996 MCCA knockout final.
There were a few NatWest Trophy drubbings along the way though, including encounters with Curtly Ambrose – who he “hit for four through cover almost by accident” and found “a proper handful” – and Courtney Walsh: “I came in at No.6, we were 17-4 and Mark Alleyne was the closest short-leg I’d ever seen. Practically on the wicket. Walsh had given everyone what I’d like to call ferocious bouncers but were probably just short of a length balls. I was expecting the same, but first ball he ripped out my leg stump with a yorker. Alleyne just said, ‘Tough shit’.”
Another highlight was an MCC tour to Namibia alongside Andrew Strauss, yet it was those Bootle years that set Bean apart: 22 hundreds, putting him third on the all-time LDCC list – the next best over the same period was nine.
The Bean counters were truly working overtime.
