Scott Oliver tells the tale of Nayyar Abbas, who shelled out £1500 just for the chance to play club cricket, with the story taking detours into housing corruption and the changing make-up of one of the country’s most fabled club sides.
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Many would have been the club cricketer back in April and then on into May and June, when the prospect of a cricketless summer still looked an even-money bet, who was thinking: what would I give for a game of cricket right now. Eventually, as the lockdown eased and the phased resumption of the club game was set in motion, those idle hopes became a reality. Cricket returned, but not quite as we know it: sanitation breaks and off-limits dressing rooms; ad hoc competitions with shorter games, straight win/lose rules, and no promotion or relegation; and, with the enforced belt-tightening, few paid players and no overseas pros. Well, almost no overseas pros.
In mid-July, in the town of Muridke ten miles north of Lahore in the Pakistani Punjab, Nayyar Abbas, a left-arm spinner with 80 first-class appearances and 11 seasons as an overseas pro in the English leagues was also thinking: What would I give for a game of cricket right now? Pakistan was still in lockdown, but after testing negative for Covid 19 back home, Abbas, professional at Wollaton of the Nottinghamshire Premier League, shelled out £800 for a flight from Lahore to Manchester then entered two weeks of quarantine in rented accommodation whose £650 cost he is also covering himself.
Even so, he wasn’t entirely sure he would be allowed to play when he arrived: “I confirmed my plan on July 25th, to just come and help my club as a coach. The club had already told me with no promotion or relegation they were not going to pay me. The club has a lot of young lads, so I wanted to spend some time with them and help them. But then I wondered if I was allowed to play, so they looked at my visa and I was okay. So I thought: why aren’t I playing?”
Abbas is in his third season at Wollaton, just his second professional gig after an eight-year stint with Knypersley of the North Staffordshire & South Cheshire League, where he won the Cricket World ‘Club Player of the Year’ award in 2011. His desire was to play the final month of Wollaton’s truncated NPL campaign, equating to six matches, plus one or possibly two more in the playoffs against the NPL North division. That’s £1500 to bowl a maximum of 64 overs, not that his motivation was reducible to accountancy. “I was there in Pakistan thinking there’s something missing in my life,” he says. “Now my mind is not in that place.”
Joining Abbas for his mid-August season opener, after himself quarantining for two weeks, was 37-year-old off-spinner Paul McMahon, a Wollaton youth product who spent six years on the staff at Nottinghamshire. He also skippered Oxford University, Cambridgeshire and an England U-19s team that featured the likes of Tim Bresnan, Liam Plunkett and Nick Compton, and now works as legal counsel for the ICC in Dubai. With work bringing him back to the ICC’s Lord’s office in a normal cricketing summer, judicious use of his holidays enables him to squeeze in a bloc of games back at his alma mater.
Abbas finished last year as the joint leading wicket-taker in NPL, helping Wollaton achieve their joint best-ever finish of third. Sitting alongside him on 44 wickets was teammate and fellow left-arm spinner Zain Latif, an astonishing achievement in a strong league for a 17 year old, especially when he frequently bowls in the opening powerplay. Indeed, in a list of all NPL bowlers ranked by career averages and with a minimum of 50 wickets – a list that features the likes of Alex Tudor (18th), Luke Fletcher (17th), ex-Essex quick Ricaldo Anderson (14th), Samit Patel (8th), Corey Collymore (7th), Andre Adams (3rd) and Saqlain Mushtaq (1st) – Latif sits in sixth place, one behind Abbas and five in front of McMahon.
And yet, aside from a season for Nottinghamshire U-15s in 2017, Latif hasn’t been part of the county’s academy or ‘player pathway’, not that this is necessarily Notts’ fault. Latif’s teammates say he is concerned about how his batting and fielding might hold up in a higher standard and is diffident about pushing his cause. “He doesn’t know how much he is good,” says Abbas. “He’s a very good spinner, one of the best for his age I have seen. I’m really happy with the way he’s bowling. He’s a quick learner. There’s a little problem with his fitness but he has improved that since last year. He’s working really hard. But I would like to see him play for the county second eleven. He’s definitely good enough.”
Ed is a former First XI captain who, to the eternal tedium of teammates, reached his solitary NPL hundred back in July 2011 with a straight six off those half-decent amateur off-breaks of the aforementioned Saqlain (a story he has not so much dined out on as developed gout from). With Ed and I fancying ourselves as a pair of lo-res Brearleys, the combination of YouTube and WhatsApp, plus a real-life messenger at the game, opened up the Woolmer-esque possibility for (extremely) remote tactical input. And in a club cricket culture where, despite the lack of material reward, small advantages are increasingly sought, this might make the difference in a tight game and, ergo, in a tight championship. Of course, such input may not be entirely welcomed by the on-field skipper, but this is certainly an advancement from the analogue version of a drunken numpty with lowered inhibitions bellowing “Gerrim off!” from the top boundary. Progress of a sort.
In the end, the game’s outcome had more to do with Cavs’ greater depth than any tactical nitty-gritty. Wollaton posted a useful score of 191-7 from their 40 overs, a rusty Abbas contributing just eight (the last time the two teams had met, he made 106 and returned figures of 12-6-15-3). The total felt 15 or 20 light, and so it proved as Cavs chased down with four wickets and nine balls to spare, seeing off Abbas (8-1-21-3) through the middle overs as Wollaton ‘spent their resource’ in an attempt to get ahead of a game that looked like it might be decided on Duckworth/Lewis. Rumour has it that the tactics were queried in one WhatsApp group.
With the NPL having split into two six-team regions and eschewing promotion and relegation, there wasn’t a whole lot at stake other than the race for a top-two finish and, with that, passage to the bespoke playoff semi-finals. For a certain cherubic-faced 30-year-old spinner from just outside Lahore – playing for free, but with few freebies on offer – making the final would mean getting another eight overs out of his trip. Like everyone else, though, he was just happy to be playing.
“Wherever I go, I do very honestly my cricket,” says Abbas. “Last season we finished earlier [than Staffordshire], so I played for Knypersley as sub pro, one game, for free, before I went home. Lots of professionals, they just come and go back [without making a connection], but I want people to remember my name with good words.”
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