Scott Oliver talks to another hero of club cricket – a scorer who’s taken care of the book for more than 2,000 consecutive games for the club where former England captain, Mike Brearley, started his cricketing career.
This article first appeared in Wisden Cricket Monthly
For the majority of club cricket captains, one of the most important and vexing tasks of each pre-season is finding a reliable and competent scorer. Not at Brentham CC in Middlesex, where the scorebox has been occupied by the same man for so many years that they’ve named it after him.
Perhaps the most prestigious of his 2020 or so games was the 1972 National Knockout final at Lord’s, when Brentham lost out to Scarborough. Despite Ivor’s local legend, he has never been asked to score for Middlesex. “And I wouldn’t want to”, he says. “I have too many other interests: short-mat bowls, square-dancing, natural history, my garden, philately, family history and U3A.”
That said, he calls the Middlesex incumbent Don Shelley “an absolutely brilliant scorer”, and even picked up the use of fineline coloured pens from him when Shelley was at Ealing CC, this after “the bowler’s box got smaller and I had to change my ideas from pencil”. He still uses this method, and will do so until computerised scoring becomes mandatory. “If it did, that would be my exit.”
Ivor has his routines and habits – he arrives early enough for lunch and Sudoku before play – as well as a few pet peeves: loud music nearby or too much chatter on mobile phones, and scoreboxes that don’t offer an unimpeded view of the whole ground (a jovial dig at his own box since Brentham’s new pavilion went up!). But there’s no pomp and circumstance. He’s happy to climb over tubs of sawdust or bags of musty kit to take his seat. “Untidy scorebox!? You don’t go in your Sunday best, do you? You have to adapt!”
Sooner or later one of those kids playing dreamily nearby will be collared by a Brentham skipper and asked to take his seat in the Ivor Chaplin Scorebox, punching the runs into their smartphone’s touchscreen. But not quite yet. For now, the coloured fineliners have a bit more ink left in them.
