Lead image credit: Bill Yates

Friday night, eve of the match, end of the working week. You’re down the local, as you often are before a big league game, only this time, instead of a couple of steady, relaxing beers (“one’s not enough, two’s too many, three’s just right”, as the adage has it) and the usual chit-chat with the pub’s cricketing infidels – people who don’t know their trigger movement from their trigonometry and couldn’t care less whether you’re going to shorten your backlift tomorrow – you’ve lost your beverage-discipline and are ordering chasers with each pint, soon foregoing the beers altogether and vaguely justifying it to yourself as an occasional pre-match ritual of Garry Sobers.

Instead of winding down, you’re getting wound up. And with justifiable reason, too, for tomorrow’s new-ball spell, away at Rishton in the Lancashire League, is going to be brought to you by Allan Donald. White Lightning. You pop to the offie on the way home. For a bottle of White Lightning.

The year was 1996 and the 29-year-old Donald was still very much in his pomp, still two years out from his iconic Trent Bridge tussle with Michael Atherton, at which point he sat directly above Ambrose, McGrath, Muralitharan and Warne at the top of the ICC bowling rankings. He had been Player of the Match in his most recent outing, against England in Cape Town, and would record figures of 42-17-69-7 in his next, on a featherbed in Ahmedabad. The previous summer, he had topped the County Championship bowling averages (88 at 15.48) as Warwickshire lifted the trophy.

“My Dad was happy we lost”, quips Russell Whalley, “because I found out years later, just before he died, that he was paying Donald a £100 win bonus out of his own pocket. I think he were on twenty grand overall”.

The cash prize for winning the league was, of course, minuscule by comparison, but that’s scarcely the point in such matters of parochial braggadocio. And with 106 wickets at 10.74, top on both counts, ‘White Lightning’ could scarcely have done more. Indeed, despite being a famously limited batsman, he even put together a mid-season sequence of 37*, 32*, 30, 40, 31*, 0, 22*, 20, 69*, 33 and 22*, testament to someone who, despite driving up from Birmingham on the morning of games and leaving shortly after the finish, took all facets of his job extremely seriously once he crossed the line, giving every drop of sweat to the Rishton cause.

“He absolutely gave it 100 per cent”, reflects Brian Heywood. “He must have done for Rishton to win the league because they were nowhere near as good as in 1995. And he played with great honour and dignity, too, competing fiercely, but a great sportsman at the same time.”

You suspect that no-one who played with him – much less those who had the dubious pleasure of facing him – will forget the year Allan Donald roared into bowl in the shadow of the east Lancashire moorlands.