Hoggy: Welcome to My World

‘No, Twatook, it wouldn’t be. They don’t play Test cricket on a Wednesday.’

A lesson swiftly learned for Midders, who would think twice before his esteemed coach sent him off on any errands again. I’d say I felt sorry for him, but most of us suffered in a similar way, some worse than others.

Midders got away lightly compared to the poor young whippersnapper who had travelled with Padge on an away trip to Glamorgan a few years earlier. This was before my time, but the tale was often told of an unnamed player—let’s just call him Twatook—who sat in Padge’s car for the long drive down to Wales along with a couple of his new team-mates.

As they travelled down the M5 and started to approach the Welsh border, Padge turned to the young lad sitting quietly in the back.

‘You have got your passport with you, haven’t you, Twatook? We’re about to go into Wales.’

‘Erm, erm, erm, no Padge, I don’t think I have,’ came the timid reply.

‘Oh Christ, didn’t anybody tell you? We’re going to Wales. It’s a different country. What are we going to do when we get to the border? We’re going to have to hide you.’

So Padge pulled his car over, opened the boot, moved several cricket bags to the back seat and told his victim to lie down in the boot until they had crossed the border. Young Twatook climbed in, snuggled down and Padge slammed the boot lid shut. He drove off into Wales, leaving his captive in the boot to think about the foolishness of forgetting his passport. Once the border had been safely negotiated—armed checkpoints and all—the hostage was released, poor lad. I’m sure Padge felt that it was all good character-building stuff.

Where Padge had led, there were plenty of disciples ready to follow, which has made the Headingley dressing-room a dangerous place to be at times over the last few years. Probably the biggest irritant in the Yorkshire team in recent years—myself aside—has been Anthony McGrath.

The problem with Mags is that he is easily bored and he likes to fill his time by pissing off his team-mates. A few years ago, one of his little pet projects was to put his team-mates’ cars up for sale in Auto Trader magazine, always at a bargain price carefully calculated by Mags himself. The advert for the car would usually say something along the lines of:

‘Owner forced to move abroad, Price reduced for quick sale. Please call…’

and then include the player’s mobile phone number. Inevitably, for such a bargain, these adverts attracted plenty of interest from potential buyers, prompting an endless stream of phone calls to the victim’s mobile. Time after time, he would have to say, ‘I’m sorry for the misunderstanding, but it’s not for sale.’ Which could be quite amusing on the first two or three occasions. But when it came to the 25th call in the space of an hour, it could start to become more than a little irritating.

Bogus adverts aside, Mags has often been implicated in one of the great scandals that has swirled around the Yorkshire team for several seasons now. This is the ongoing mystery of Jack the Snipper, a long-running case that has yet to be cracked and has baffled some of the finest criminal investigators in Yorkshire and beyond.

The culprit in this case is known to be someone with access to the Yorkshire dressing-room. He (or she?) waits until the dressing-room is deserted, then quickly seizes his (or her?) moment, moving in with a pair of scissors and snipping the toes off a sock belonging to the intended victim. When the victim goes to pull his sock on after the game, he pulls it up to his knee and realises, to his horror, that he has become the latest victim of JACK (OR JACQUELINE?) THE SNIPPER.

Understandably, nobody has ever owned up to these crimes, so the mystery remains unsolved. Police now suspect that the culprit may have multiple identities.

Not the most original of practical jokes, perhaps, but most of the Yorkshire players have seen it as a mildly amusing, relatively harmless gag if they happened to be a victim. But one season the Snipper targeted David Byas so many times that he no longer saw the funny side. Gadge, as he was known (for his extraordinary Inspector Gadget-like extending arms in the slips), was our captain at the time and, after his socks had been snipped for the umpteenth time, he decided the time had come to put an end to the tomfoolery.

In the build-up to one Sunday League game at Headingley, Gadge told us that we all had to be at the ground by 10 o’clock in the morning, even though the match wasn’t due to begin until 1.30 in the afternoon. It seemed a strange request, but Gadge was keen on punctuality, so everyone dutifully turned up at the appointed time. At which point the skipper took us all out to the middle of the ground at Headingley and asked us to sit in a big circle. He sat down with us and then told us why we were all sitting there looking as though we were about to play Pass the Parcel. ‘Right, you lot,’ he said, ‘nobody is moving from this circle until I find out which pillock has been snipping my f***ing socks. I just want to know who it is, then we can have a quick chat, move on and all go for some lunch.’ Nobody said a word. For a good few minutes there was complete and utter silence.

‘Come on,’ said Gadge, after a while. ‘I’m not joking here. We’re going to get to the bottom of this nonsense. Whoever has been snipping my socks is sitting in this circle and I want to know who it is.’

Still nobody said anything. There was another long, uncomfortable silence. After we’d been there for about half an hour, Gadge became more insistent—still reasonably calm, but the tone of his voice raised slightly. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘If nobody has got the balls to own up to doing these stupid stunts, it’s a piss-poor effort. All you need to do is be big enough to own up, then we can move on.’

And still nobody said anything. We had probably been there for around an hour when Gadge started to get angry. ‘For f***’s sake,’ he said, ‘will somebody PLEASE tell me who has been snipping my f***ing socks?’

Once again, there was only silence. And I kid you not, we were sitting out on that field, in that circle, for three hours. THREE WHOLE HOURS! Eventually, at one o’clock, the opposition captain arrived out in the middle, asking if we were ready to toss up, and Gadge, as captain, had no option but to get up and leave us. So Jack the Snipper had slipped off the leash again and he remains at large to this very day. If you ever find yourself having to spend a day in or around the Yorkshire dressing-room, it may be worth your while packing a spare pair of socks.

The same season as that unfortunate incident, there was an outbreak of a similar—but unrelated—crime in the Yorkshire second team. At the time, I was in and out of the first and second teams, so I saw some of the events first hand and have called on extremely reliable witnesses to fill me in on the bits I missed. Again, this spate of crimes involved some tampering with the kit of a senior member of the dressing-room, but this time socks were not involved. This time the crime was theft and the stolen items were underpants belonging to Steve Oldham, Esso, the second team coach.

Pinching someone’s underpants might, again, seem like a fairly low-level jape, causing brief hilarity in the dressing-room, and mild irritation to the victim. But if you’re playing away from home for a four-day match and you have four pairs of undies stolen, it can be more than a little frustrating. It’s difficult to replace the pants, for a start, because you have to be at a cricket match all day while the shops are open, and a week without undies is, I imagine, not much fun.

And if, like Esso, this happens to you for seven four-day matches in succession, that’s twenty-eight pairs of underpants that have gone missing. Boxer shorts, Y-fronts, briefs; you name them, Esso lost the lot.

As you’d expect, Esso grew more and more frustrated as his stock of underpants became gradually depleted during the season. But he tried hard to keep his cool, to make it seem as though the thefts weren’t getting to him, to deny the prankster the satisfaction of seeing him upset.

That pretence of calm became harder to maintain once his pants started to reappear in increasingly unusual ways. The first pair was returned during a game at Bradford Park Avenue. Esso was sitting watching the game, when he casually glanced up at the flagpole and noticed a pair of his Y-fronts billowing in the breeze where the Yorkshire flag should have been. Nobody would own up to hoisting the offending item, so Esso made us all run around the ground for an hour in the pouring rain at the end of the day’s play.

The next second team game was at York and we travelled to the ground as usual in three or four cars. I was in one of the middle cars and Esso was in one of the cars further back. When we turned off the A64 for the last leg of the journey, we saw the road sign saying ‘Welcome to York’, but hung over the corner of the sign was another pair of Esso’s undies. I’m not sure whether he stopped his car to retrieve them or not, but at the end of the game at York we found ourselves running round the outfield again as punishment.

Perhaps the thief was starting to take pity on Esso by now, because the underpants were being returned to him on a regular basis. Never in a straightforward way, but at least he was gaining pants rather than losing them. I wasn’t around to see the next pair returned, but I heard that they were discovered during the second team’s next home game at Bingley, where the groundsman had a dog. At some point during that game, the groundsman’s dog was spotted running onto the field, wearing what looked very much like a pair of men’s briefs. I missed out on the post-match laps of the boundary that time, but by this stage Yorkshire’s second team must have been the fittest side on the circuit.

It was now getting towards the end of the season and, whether or not the thief was running out of ideas, he was running out of time to return the rest of his loot. Our final home game of the season was at Castleford and, when Esso drove into the ground, he was finally put out of his misery. Strung around the railings of the car park, like bunting at a school fair, were the remaining twenty-one pairs of underpants, good as new, ready to be reclaimed by their rightful owner, and Esso’s torment was at an end. Isn’t it nice when a crime story has a happy ending?

I don’t want to name names here in case anyone’s lawyer gets onto me, but there were strong suspicions that Alex Morris, our gangly all-rounder from Barnsley, may have been involved in these pranks. And Gareth Batty, the off-spinner, was also considered not to be beyond suspicion. But once again, the crime remained unsolved. For some reason, Alex left Yorkshire a couple of years later and moved to the other end of the country to play for Hampshire. Similarly, Batts soon departed to play for Surrey. I’ve never found out whether their departures were related to the case of Esso’s undies.

Once I had finished my A-levels in 1995, I spent most of the summers of 1996 and 1997 playing for Yorkshire’s Second XL I made my first-class debut in July 1996, against South Africa A, but didn’t get a run of games in the first team until a couple of years later. In the meantime, I was able to go back on a weekend and play for Pudsey Congs with Ferg and my mates. And that would invariably be followed by a good few beers in the clubhouse on a Saturday night, which I was quickly learning was all part of the fun.

By this time, a promising ginger-haired wicketkeeper called Matthew Duce had made his way into the first team at Congs. For me, as an outswing bowler, it is always important to have a decent wicketkeeper in your side to hang onto all those nicks, so Ducey was good for me because he had a safe pair of hands. And the fact that he had an attractive sister who would come to watch us was an added bonus.

Sarah was a similar age to me, she was single at the time, and this gave Ferg an idea. One Saturday, when we were playing away to East Bierley, I was sitting watching the game while we batted, and Ferg said to me: ‘I bet you couldn’t get a date with Ducey’s sister, Hoggy. No chance at all. In fact, I’ll bet you a fiver that you can’t.’

Unbeknown to Ferg, in the previous couple of weeks Sarah and I had already had a couple of liaisons that we had managed to keep a secret. But I wasn’t about to tell Ferg that, so the next week I turned up and was able to announce, to his astonishment, that I had indeed managed to get a date with the supposedly impossible Miss Duce, and I would be going out with her that evening. What a result! A date with an attractive girl and a fiver from Ferg already in my pocket to buy her a couple of bags of crisps. That must’ve been the easiest money I’ve ever earned.

Sarah and I soon became good mates and, for a girl, she wasn’t a bad ’un at all. I must have been keen, too, because I even started taking her along when I went to meet Ferg in the pub (yes, I knew how to show a girl a good time). I used to go to his local, the Busfeild [sic] Arms in East Morton, he would have a pint of Tetley’s, I’d have a pint of Guinness and we would talk about cricket, the universe and everything else besides.

Even once I was on the books at Yorkshire, if I ever needed a few words of wisdom I would go back to Ferg’s pub to chat to him, and Sarah would usually come with me. Halfway through the 1998 season, I was becoming fed up with the lack of first-team cricket I was getting at Yorkshire. I’d been doing well in the second team, but there were a lot of pace bowlers around at the time. There was Darren Gough and Peter Hartley opening the bowling, then Chris Silverwood, Craig White, Paul Hutchison, Ryan Sidebottom, Gavin Hamilton and Alex Wharf. It was an amazing crop of seam bowlers.

In one second-team game at Harrogate, I took seven wickets against Worcestershire and they expressed an interest in signing me. I asked Ferg for advice and he suggested that I should go down to Worcester with Sarah, have a look around the place and see what we thought. We went down there for a weekend, stayed in a hotel and had a chat to Bill Athey, who was Worcestershire’s second-team coach. He had played in that game at Harrogate and kindly missed a straight one that I bowled to him. We quite liked the look of Worcester, but I went back to Yorkshire and told them my situation, and they persuaded me that I still had a good chance of playing in the first team. We mulled it over and eventually I decided to back myself to succeed at Yorkshire.

So Sarah and I were very much an item by now and before long I was invited for a game of golf with her dad, Colin. We went to play at Gotts Park in Leeds and it soon became apparent to me that I was dealing with a family who weren’t backwards in coming forwards when Colin told me that he had had a vasectomy. Why did he need to tell me that? I’d only just met the bloke, and I barely knew what a vasectomy was, but Colin clearly decided that it was something I needed to know. There must have been a long and awkward silence while I worked out what I was supposed to say in response. In the end I probably just grunted.

Things didn’t get any better once the golf started. On one of the early holes, he played his tee shot, then wandered off to the right and rested his three-wood against his golf bag. I told him he’d be well advised not to stand there, because I never really knew where I was going to hit the thing. So he stepped back a couple of paces, and it was a good job he did. From my tee shot, I whacked the biggest slice imaginable. The ball flew off at 45 degrees and smashed straight into Colin’s three wood. It was a freakish shot, it hit bang smack in the middle of his carbon shaft and the club snapped clean in two.

Not the best of impressions to make on my prospective father-in-law.

But at least Colin seemed to like me, which was something that certainly couldn’t be said of Sarah’s mum, Carole, in those days. She had found out about the start of our relationship while she and Colin were away on holiday in France. Sarah hadn’t gone with her, so Carole phoned up while she was away to check that all was well.

‘How are things at home?’ she asked Sarah. ‘Any news?’

‘Not much really, Mum,’ said Sarah. ‘Oh, except I’ve got a new boyfriend.’

‘Oh, that’s nice. Anyone I know?’

‘Well, yes, you know of him.’

‘Is he from the cricket club?’

‘Yes, he is.’ There was a short pause while Carole worked out the likely candidates.

‘And will I like him?’ she asked.

‘Erm, not sure, Mum. I think you will.’

‘Oh, Sarah, please don’t tell me it’s that Matthew Hoggard. That boy is so rude. And he’s always drunk.’