“As a child I ‘inherited’ from my father his old train set, numerous dinky cars and a collection of Eagle Annuals. In ‘Eagle Annual Number 5′ (1956) amongst the adventures of Dan Dare, a cutaway drawing of a ‘Britannia’ Class 4-6-2 Locomotive and highlights in the life of Denis Compton was a small article entitled ‘Cricket By The Fireside’! Subtitled ‘a realistic way of playing imaginary matches indoors’ the article presented a set of rules to play a match of cricket with a pen, some paper and a book.

I played many enjoyable matches under these rules between teams of actors (John Wayne always played a leading role), family and friends, artists, writers and cricketers of the day, Botham, Gower, Viv Richards and Bob Willis amongst others – on occasion the likes of WG Grace and CB Fry would get a run out. These all tended to be one-off matches, teams were constructed for the match and disassembled afterwards with no records kept, leagues unformed and trophy’s un-won. Eventually my alphabet cricket gave way to rules involving dice where national leagues were formed, internationals played and statistics obsessively poured over! Regards – Andrew Hopcroft”

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