all the good ones are married

was only picked for Somerset's Benson & Hedges quarter-final against Hampshire in June 1974 when our first-choice fast bowler Allan Jones was ruled out with a leg strain. The call to join the first team came a few hours before the game. I packed my kit and hurried to the Taunton ground.

The dressing-room had a concrete floor, reached by a narrow, precipitous flight of steps. The green floor paint was so scarred by players' spikes that it was down to the bare concrete everywhere except under the benches. A doorway led to another room with some less-than-fragrant urinals along one wall and a communal plunge bath. Beyond that was a little physio's room with a couple of couches that were used far more often for sleeping than for treatment; Somerset did not even have a physio in those days.

It was a perfect summer's day, scorching hot, with the sun glinting from the gilded weather vane on top of the church spire. There was a tremendous atmosphere and a capacity crowd, with the gates closed long before Brian Close won the toss and put Hampshire in. They made a solid start until I bowled Barry Richards, the South Africa Test star. I took another wicket without addition to the score and with Graeme Burgess chipping in with a couple more for no runs, Hampshire had collapsed from 22 for none to 22 for four. They recovered well to 182, thanks mainly to Trevor Jesty's 82, but I was pleased with my bowling and fielding. That was just as well because I had been picked as a bowler and was well down the batting order, at No 9. By the time I walked out to the wicket, taking some deep breaths to calm my nerves, the game was as good as lost. We were 113 for seven, needing 70 runs from the last 15 overs.

The last of our recognised batsmen, my unofficial mentor and bowling coach, Tom Cartwright, was at the crease and he walked over to me as I came out to the middle. "All right young 'un?" I nodded.

"Don't try to knock the cover off it straight away. Play yourself in, we've still got a few overs in hand."

Unfortunately, Tom immediately departed, caught at mid-on for a duck, and was replaced by Hallam Moseley, a definite tailender. I farmed the strike as much as I could and with an odd boundary and a few nudged ones and twos from me and a few lusty blows and flying edges from Hallam we had whittled the target down to 38 runs by the time Andy Roberts, the lightning-quick West Indies bowler, returned to the attack.

I had not even set eyes on him before that day, but I was aware of his fearsome reputation. He had been terrorising English batsmen all season and had put several of them in hospital. He had removed a couple of our batsmen in his first spell - I think he scared one of them out � but I had no intention of showing him too much respect. I was well set and when he dropped one short, I swivelled to hook it over square leg for six. Roberts stood there, hands on hips, glowering at me, then snatched the ball as it was returned from the boundary and stalked off back to his mark.

We needed 32 runs. I told myself to put the last ball out of my mind and play the next one on its merits. Tapping my bat lightly, I settled at the crease and watched Roberts running in again. I saw the ball as it left his hand, the sun glinting on the polished side, the white stitching along the seam a few degrees from the vertical. I didn't see it again until it was about a foot from my face.

In those few tenths of a second some part of my brain had recognised that this was another short one and I had rocked on to the back foot, shaping to hook, but there was one crucial difference: this was the fastest ball I had ever faced. Halfway through the shot, I realised I was way too late on the ball. Before I had digested that alarming fact, the ball had smacked into my face and in those far-off days batsmen did not wear protective helmets. In an instinctive act of self-preservation, I had thrown up my gloved right hand and that absorbed some of the impact, but the ball still smashed my hand into my mouth with savage force. I dropped my bat and backed away, cursing and spitting blood, then realised that I was spitting bits of teeth as well. Two teeth had been knocked out and another two broken off at the gum line. Even more alarmingly, they were on opposite sides of my mouth and the ones in between were noticeably looser than they'd been a few moments before.

I was staggering around so groggy that I almost slumped to the ground. Peter Sainsbury, the Hampshire left-arm spinner, ran up to me and said: "Are you all right?"

"Fine," I said, although it was an instinctive, not a considered, reply.

Meanwhile, as good fast bowlers should, Roberts paused at the end of his follow-through only to give a quiet nod of satisfaction and fix me with another of those penetrative stares. Then he turned to pace back to the end of his run-up, ready to deliver the next thunderbolt. As he did so, I spat out the last fragments of tooth, took a few sips from the glass of water that the twelfth man had brought out and then let him assess the damage.

Believing that the game was lost, he and some of the crowd wanted me to retire hurt to avoid further punishment, but that had never entered my mind.

The doctor who examined me after the game told me that I had suffered mild concussion from the blow, which might explain the curious sense of detachment I felt as I brushed off the twelfth man's restraining arm, picked up my bat and walked back to the crease.

I was strangely calm as I watched Roberts moving in, accelerating smoothly as he approached the wicket, the arm whipping over and the ball arrowing towards me. This one was a very full length, noticeably slower than the previous ball, but still fast enough and with a little late inswing to help it spear in towards my toes. But I had gambled that he would follow such a vicious short-pitched ball with a yorker and I got enough on it to clip it away for three runs through mid-wicket.

We now needed 29. I kept farming the strike as much as possible and we had put on another 22 runs � I hit another six and whacked Roberts for a couple more fours � making our partnership worth 63 from 13 overs, when Hallam missed one ball too many and was out for 24.

There were only seven runs needed to win from 16 balls, but our last man, Bob Clapp, was walking to the wicket, a sight that usually had bowlers licking their lips. Bob was a useful bowler but his career batting average was in the low single figures. However, on this occasion he did all that was required, blocking, leaving or playing and missing without losing his wicket, while I kept sneaking singles and then a three in which Bob had to dive full-length to make his ground. He later told me that he reckoned he'd been run out by a good 12 inches. Had there been a third umpire using slow-motion replays in those days, the game would have been over then.

Those watching must have found the tension unbearable, but my concentration was so total that I was no longer aware of their existence, although my nerves must have been jangling for, having brought us to within two runs of victory, I played and missed three times in a row before connecting with a flowing drive to a half-volley.

As I saw the ball speed away and smack into the boundary boards, I raised my bat over my head and heard the loudest roar I had ever heard. I had scored 45 out of the 70 we had made with the last two wickets to win the game. Bob Clapp was nought not out. He had fully earned his win bonus.

I was on the biggest high of my life so far; we had won and I collected the Gold Award for player of the match, although perhaps I should have shared it with Andy Roberts. If he had not smashed my teeth, we might not have won. I needed some emergency dentistry, but that could wait. I showered and changed, then went straight to the Stragglers' Bar to join in the celebrations.

People I had never seen before were wringing my hand and slapping me on the back but I took most satisfaction from the quiet nod of approval I got from Close, the Somerset captain, as he caught my eye across the bar. He then followed it up with some nononsense cricketing advice. "Know why you got hit?" he said. "Because you took your eyes off the ball. Your head can move faster than any other part of the body, so providing you know where the bloody ball is, you can always get your head out of the way."

As I was pouring my first pint over my smashed teeth, two old Somerset professionals, Bill Alley and Kenny Palmer, called me over and gave me some more fatherly advice. "Today, you're everybody's hero," they said. "Just remember that tomorrow they'll have forgotten you again."

I thanked them for their wise words, although in truth I did not want anyone raining on my parade that night, but in time I came to appreciate how right they were.

The headlines gave me a small problem when I strolled into my local, the Gardener's Arms, later that evening. Expecting at the least a pint on the house I got a cold shoulder instead. "The usual, please," I said as I approached the bar. I would have had a warmer welcome from an iceberg. "And just what is your usual?" the landlord said.

"You know what it is," I said. "The same as it's been for the last year and a half." He gave me another frosty glance, then picked up the evening paper and dropped it on the bar in front of me. The headline read: "Everybody's hero: 17-year-old Somerset youth plays a blinder".

Then, as now, the legal drinking age was 18. There was a beat of silence, then he winked and said: "Must be a misprint. The usual, then?" and pulled me a pint. In fact it was a misprint. I'd been 18 since the previous November ... although I had also been a regular at the pub for rather longer than that.



In September 1974, only three months after we met, I proposed. Kath recalls the moment far more vividly than I do, but she was not as drunk as I was at the time. If breaking the news to our parents had been daunting, telling Brian Close, the Somerset captain, was decidedly scary. The result was predictable: Closey exploded.

"Now listen here, you bloody young fools," he said. He turned to me first. "For heaven's sake, Ian, your mind should be on cricket. A marriage this young might damage your career before it has properly begun." He went on in the same vein for a while, paused to see if this was having any effect, then gave a sigh of resignation. "If you're set on this, I can't stop you, but I'll tell you this: Kathryn is a wonderful girl and if you do anything to hurt her, I'll skin you alive."

Next it was Kath's turn for a lecture. "Ian is a bloody marvellous cricketer. He will play for England some day so you mustn't do anything to stop this. If you interfere with his career, I'll tan your a***." We listened respectfully to all the advice from Brian and our parents about postponing our marriage plans until we were older and wiser, and then ignored it. On January 31, 1976, we were married.



Kath found it particularly hard to deal with all the hundreds of requests from charities, all doing very good work in their own field. How could she possibly recommend that we support some and not the others? In the end, we were both very grateful for the advice given by that great and very kind-hearted man, the late Eric Morecambe, who sat next to Kath at Lord's on the one and only time she was invited to attend a function there. In the course of conversation he said, "Now, how are you coping with the sudden fame?" And when Kath mentioned the agonies she was going through about the requests, he said, "Just choose one charity that's close to both your hearts and put all your energies into that." It was wise advice, and we followed it.

GEORGE WEST ― Sitka the Lab hadn't seen a teal before, but she knew the sights and sounds of a duck hitting the water.

When the first little group of teal buzzed our four decoys, turned on less than a dime and hit the surface with a splash a mere 20 yards in front of us, it was new information for her in one way because there had been no shots. Still, birds were down and she made a big splashing move to pick them up.



Of course, the teal ― duckdom's ultimate hit-and-run artists ― didn't need any real reason to take off, but a golden monster sloshing through the pond toward them was enough to get the booster rockets going. The pair of bluewings exploded into the air and were gone in a flash.

There was still 10 minutes left until legal shooting time, so we could afford to wait and watch as more and more tiny ducks, ones and twos and threes, zoomed over, saw the decoys sitting below and landed to check out the impromptu hunting pond, the result of recent rains on the grain fields of Live Oak County.

"Sheet water."

That's what the duck guys call it, that thin layer of rain water than builds in tiny landscape depressions in grain fields after a storm. In the Panhandle, the larger form of the phenomenon is known as a playa lake, but by any other name it's still a puddle duck's dinner table and a hunter's sweetest dream.

Two or three inches deep in most places, it's just deep enough for a teal's feast on the wheat or milo or corn stubble that it covers up, and when the rain falls and the sheet water ponds form, the hunting gets good.

Kevin Hagedorn had found sheet water on land his father-in-law owns near George West in Live Oak County. The natural pond was dotted with mesquite and acacia trees, and the early season teal ― mostly bluewings but a few greenwings ― had been pouring into the spot every morning for several days. He didn't have to offer twice for us to scrape together some steel shot and accept a chance to hunt the speedy little ducks on a Sunday morning.

"They've been there since the season opened," said Hagedorn, who already had convinced me that I could afford to forego my waders back at home and use my camouflage dove pants and saltwater wading boots to make the hunt. "One morning I had a limit of teal and a limit of whitewings and was finished by 8:30 a.m."

Hagedorn, a native of Indiana who found he liked the brush in South Texas, got married and stayed in George West, said he hadn't seen teal feeding and resting on small ponds like this before, mainly because the area, like the rest of Texas, was plagued by years of drought before spring and summer rains turned the Brush Country into a fall paradise. Teal migrating through the area decided they liked what they saw, and they've been hitting the pond, and others like it, since ducks first started moving through in August.

The early teal season is designed to allow hunters to take advantage of the early migration of teal, many of which are gone to Central America by the time the regular duck season opens. With a four-bird daily limit and a 16-day season this year, the special season closes today in Texas. The hunting has been good throughout most of the state, thanks mainly to lots of water from the statewide rains, said Dave Morrison, duck program leader for Texas Parks and Wildlife.

"The coast has been really good," Morrison said. "And East Texas finally got some water, and that was really good. The Central part of the state wasn't as hot, but it still was pretty good shooting."

Morrison said the good teal hunting and the wonderful habitat conditions only mean good things for the regular duck seasons to come.

"Habitat is good. Conditions are good. With just a little more rain to keep things going, it could be spectacular," he said. "I'm pretty optimistic about duck season."

And we were optimistic about our chances once Hagedorn said he thought the clock was right, and we could begin shooting. Almost on cue, a flight of four teal buzzed from behind us, out of the sun, and hit the water close to the decoys. Nobody fired a shot. We just weren't ready. They saw us moving up under the trees where we were hiding and lit out for a new place to feed.

The next group that came in, however, presented good shots, and two teal fell to the guns. Then another, then a couple more bluewings and a greenwing. Then it was over, as fast as it started. Three guns, three limits and the sun was just coming up in the east. A perfect teal hunt