Summer Sports - Cricket
Covers doing their overnight duty “ 58 I PC APRIL/MAY 2017
Angus does come here to chat about things, maybe suggest I leave a bit of grass on, or whatever, but there’s no real interference in what I do
Uxbridge was firmly back on the Middlesex calendar, and has remained so ever since. Dave came to the club in 2013. He loves it when a Middlesex game is on. He admits he frets about how his pitch is going to play, but loves the buzz of the full ground, the advertising hoardings, the media attention, and all the build-up ballyhoo. “It’s a different ground altogether when
Middlesex are in town. We all love it here,” he said. Thirty years ago, Dave abandoned a career
in retail banking at Barclays - other high street banks are available - for groundsmanship. He’d been voluntarily doing the pitches at Harrow Cricket Club, where he played. Another club at Gerrards Cross offered him a paid position doing theirs, and Harrow, not wishing to lose his services, offered similar payment. In total, these contractor earnings matched his banking pay, so a new career, doing something he loved, beckoned. In the following years, spells working contractually at Wembley - both old and new - and Lord’s came his way.
He came to Uxbridge on the departure of
Vic Demain for the deputy head groundsman position at Trent Bridge and subsequently the top post at Durham. Dave has, for years, been a good friend of
Angus ‘Gus’ Fraser, who is Director of Cricket at Middlesex as well as an England selector. As an opening bat for the Harrow club, he used to face up to Gus as a young new ball bowler for Stanmore, before his county and international career took off. The 46-cap ex- England player is now the decision maker on all things cricket at Middlesex, including where they play home games away from Lord’s.
Although one or two other venues do get a
look-in, Uxbridge looks like the preferred choice for Angus and Middlesex these days. The likes of Chris Gale and Brendan McCullum definitely ‘put bums on seats’ and money in the till. Advance publicity effort is intense and sells tickets but, as Dave tells me, fliers can mislead. They certainly did last year when the latter and Middlesex captain Eoin Morgan were billed to play, but both were, in
T20 Blast action at Uxbridge
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