Tetherdown Trundlers Cricket Club

Robert Everett

For many years there stood, on Moorgate, a men’s discount emporium called “Closing Down Sale - Everything Must Go Ltd.” until, in the last recession, this crafty place finally succumbed to its own promise and folded. Everett’s lengthy city career has had a similar aspect: its conclusion has been so long in the making and punctuated by so many false alarms, codas, reprises and encores that well-connected friends refuse to believe it will actually happen. Others have forgotten what he was doing here in the first place, if indeed they ever knew: Everett himself is hazy about it.

All the same, each will fondly remember at least a dozen leaving dos, in all conceivable formats, over the four or five years between Everett’s mooting the idea of buggering off and his finally getting round to doing it. As the umpires draw stumps on 2013, Everett and his entourage do, this time, really seem to be packing their trunks and heading for the airport. Well, so they say.

He may have forged a wildly successful career out of his departure from employment, but some associations a man may not leave. The clutching bosom of the Trundlers will never let you go. Everett becomes, accordingly, our first Overseas Country Member. The Trundlers’ Franchise, having fruitily blessed the Shires, the Balearic and the Andalucían hinterland, is set for touchdown in the South Pacific.

On the cricket pitch, Everett’s record deceives to flatter. Out in the middle – and let’s be honest: he is a little bit out in the middle – his compact frame has drawn comparisons with famous men: hunched over his blade as the sun droops to the horizon he casts a Boon-like silhouette. His lusty wafts in that ambiguous corridor outside off are executed with the timing of a comic genius. The interplay between his light-loafered grace when tickling one fine and those periodic howitzers he lofts over the infield is complex: here he is an apprentice butcher, there a ballerina. In that order.

Everett has not bowled often: the record reflects just seven overs in ten competitive matches, though at the time it seemed like an awful lot more. Yet one could not accuse him of misusing his limited opportunities: his seven completed* overs places him as the sixteenth most prolific bowler on the roster but, at three hundred and twenty four balls, author of the third most deliveries. And what an enigmatic collection of balls they were: wrong’uns, googlies, gogglies, ganglies, flippers, flubbers, flappers, floppers, beamers, boners, bonkers, Chinamen, Mongolians, Kalahari Bushmen, Tahitians and Mexicans – many, many of those – the only delivery entirely missing from his repertoire the decent ball on a good length on off stump. Nor was it only the batsman whom he kept guessing: wicket-keepers, slips and those backward of square would all look apprehensive as Everett trotted up to the popping crease, and it is a rare bowler indeed for whom the square leg umpire calls for a helmet. Scorers are known to pack an extra pencil sharpener just to cover the extras.

So, as he leaves our immediate circle (there’s drinks this evening, dinner on Thursday, a net next week, a forthcoming trip to the races and the farewell tour of Spain just concluded) we can reflect gratefully on the labours of this faithful servant: thrice a Cuxham tourist, twice an International Trundler, 91 handsomely blown runs to his name, and four times as many wides and no-balls. No better a man to spread the gospel of the Trundlers in the South Seas. Well played, sir; well played.