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Reply to "Sir Wes Hall was a relentless force who tormented England's batsmen for West Indies, but also starred for Accrington CC"

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/11/10/15/4623FE6900000578-5070207-image-m-153_1510326096776.jpgThe legendary swing bowler was one of a number of West Indian Test players at the top of the game who ended up in former mill towns to play Lancashire League cricket during the 1960s

He ducks under the perimeter rope and is off, hobbling out on his own to the square where, for three seasons in the early 1960s, he would run in with the wind at his back. (He arrived from the Highams End, named after a local cotton manufacturer. It accentuated his swing, he always felt).

Those who are here to chaperone Sir Wes see that he has gone and set off in panicked pursuit. Everyone fears a fall. But he is already halfway out to the middle, prodding the turf with his stick. 

As they reach him, he asks: ‘Why you worryin’?’ - wearing the big smile of a man who has found lost treasure: long-buried memories of a time and place which are suddenly flooding back.

Bringing him back here was an irresistible, if remote, notion when Sir Wes expressed such a wish in the recent BBC documentary ‘Race and Pace’, which told the extraordinary story of how West Indian Test players at the very top of the world game ended up in small former mill towns to play Lancashire League cricket. 

Accrington’s population was only about 30,000 at the time: in modern football terms, this was akin to Cristiano Ronaldo pitching up at fifth-tier Fylde FC on the Lancashire coast

Sportsmail began making inquiries and discovered a collective enthusiasm exceeding all expectations, not least from Sir Wes in Bridgetown, Barbados. Just six weeks after our first calls, he was being driven down the bumpy old track this week and alighting in front of the whitewashed pavilion at a club where 2,000 people would gather to watch him in his pomp between 1960 and 1962.

Fully 9,000 supporters would flock to bigger Lancashire League grounds like Burnley, to watch the great West Indian stars, which is why the clubs established a tradition of employing them which extended for over 30 years. 

Learie Constantine and Frank Worrell preceded Sir Wes. Charlie Griffith, Michael Holding and Vivian Richards followed him, with Rishton paying Holding £5,000 a summer and Richards double that sum. The financial scale of today’s elite sport means we will never again see the world’s best pitching up in a village like that.

FM
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