Andy Capostagno Cricket
People tell me I have a nice job. Go to as many rugby and cricket matches as you like, don’t pay to get in, write a few lines about the match and spend the rest of the day relaxing in the pool on one of those inflatable chairs with a hole in the armrest to accommodate a beer can. The people who believe this, it goes without saying, have never heard of deadlines.
But last week I met a man who really has got it cracked.
He plays golf twice a week on one of the finest courses in the country, commentates on the occasional cricket match and makes his living selling houses at Fancourt estate in George. His name is Garth le Roux and he used to be a famous cricketer. You may have heard of him.
Le Roux used to be a huge oke with a Kitchener moustache who lived life in the fast lane. Well, given that he now lives alongside the ninth hole at Fancourt and has given up trying to part batsmen’s hair with bouncers, you might say he has pulled over to the hard shoulder, but other than that he’s the same huge oke with the Kitchener moustache that he ever was.
The first time I took notice of him he nearly killed me. He landed a couple of sixes 10 seats away from me at the county ground in Bristol. He remembered the innings.
“Were you in those bucket seats up on the roof?” “Yes I was.” “Sorry. Good hits though, weren’t they?”
Yes they were. No one in those bucket seats could ever remember having their lives endangered in such a manner before, and with good reason. They were 30m up in the air and 150m from the middle. They were entitled to feel safe.
Le Roux, you see, could hit a cricket ball. He now hits a golf ball with the same calculated violence and has got his handicap down to three.
Le Roux is famous for his bonhomie and after nine holes of wildly variable golf (he played well, I played appallingly) we repaired to the bar to talk cricket. We have a mutual friend, it turns out, one John Russell Troutbeck Barclay, “Trout” to one and all. An Old Etonian with almost none of what that normally entails other than a frightfully proper accent, Trout was a joy to commentate with and, 20 years ago he captained Garth in the league of nations combo that was Sussex County Cricket Club.
Talk on these occasions usually gets around to Graeme Pollock. “I don’t believe there’s ever been a great batsman who started his knocks so badly. You compare him to Viv Richards, for instance, and I don’t mind admitting that I was petrified running in to bowl at Viv, because you could give him a perfectly good outswinger a foot outside off-stump first up and he’d whip you through mid-wicket for four. With Polly you always had a chance early on, particularly if you had a bit of pace because he didn’t really like it round his ears.”
Fancourt, the home of Le Roux, is a place where the course is never crowded, the beers are always cold and placing is allowed on the fairways that some courses I’ve played would happily use as greens. The big oke with the Kitchener moustache has quite definitely got it cracked.