How Gooch Is Fighting A Poison At The Heart Of Cricket

Lord’s, Saturday July 15, 1989. Nottinghamshire require four runs from the final ball of a cracking Benson and Hedges Cup final against Essex.

- Peter Hayter

Wily left-arm swing bowler John Lever, calling on all his experience in county and international cricket, sends down a near-perfect yorker.

Notts off-spinner and No.9 batsman Eddie Hemmings digs it out so sweetly that it slips through the cover ring and, as the rival fans in the capacity crowd cheer and fear its progress in equal measure, it stays just enough ahead of the chasing Brian Hardie to crawl over the rope in front of the Grandstand to secure a dramatic victory.

Outside the ground a queue has been forming for an hour or so. It is made up of the skint, the homeless, the desperate. As on other major match days, once the ground has disgorged the 28,000 who came to watch the first showpiece of the county season, they will go in and clean up, for which they will each be paid ten quid, cash in hand.

Among them this day, so the story goes, is one of the most gifted professional footballers of his generation, a star of the old First Division with one of the most fashionable London clubs, so lost to gambling that his chairman used to pay his wages to the bookies direct.

The only thing he couldn’t pass, they said of him, was a betting shop. Not that he ever had much while he was at the top. Now, five years after retirement, a tenner is a tenner.

Graham Gooch, captain of the beaten Essex side that day, did not know of this cautionary tale unfolding while he and his teammates were consoling themselves in the pavilion dressing room and sharing beers with their opponents.