Originally Posted by
howard h:
“Gatt got more than 200 off them once, and he used to like a chip or two
”
Howard, just re-read Simon Hughes' A Lot of Hard Yakka - an excellent book where Hughes struck a good balance between the laddish anecdotes about life of a county pro with a hard nosed analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the life / system. In fact, he was scathing in his criticisms.
The book covered the decade or so of Hughes' career (80-93) where change was afoot in the county game but everything was still closer to 1970 than 2000 in how things were structured and run.
One thing that comes across is the changes in all of the sports science related stuff they do now which they didn't do then and especially in relation to food!.
Hughes began at the end of the 70's at a time when Gooch was probably the only pro who had a track suit and the routines he did then are automatic and commonplace now.
At Middlesex, Graham Barlow, a trained PE Teacher who had been to Loughborough Colleges was in charge of per-season training held at the Barclays Bank sports facility on the North Circular Road, where I played an SAL football match for Winchmore Hill against the Bank once, but is now not used and up for sale to potential developers.
But as Hughes describes all the training, nets and then matches, food is central to it all. However, it was not the health oriented approach used now.
On match days, the players would fill themselves up with tea and plates of biscuits before meandering down to do some nets and the lunch and teas were the sort of standard 'British' fayre of much carbohydrates (stodge) with pies, puddings, and lashings of custard (everything with custard).
When playing away and staying in the standard breeze block hotel usually close to a motorway, evenings would be spent in pubs and curry houses; makes Rooney's evening on the red wine on Saturday look positively healthy.
Gatting its true, consumed his fair share of this grub.
The line on him missing the Warne ball at the Oval was from Gooch, 'If it had been a cheese roll, he would have hit it'.
I know that Hughes is a bit marmite with fans; some like him and some don't but although he has never gripped me in his role as the analyst, I think he is a good writer and I really enjoyed Hard Yakka when reading it for the 2nd time.