Eye screams

At Shrewsbury School a couple of weeks ago, with nice ceremony, they opened a swish new indoor cricket centre alongside what Neville Cardus once called ‘the most beautiful playing fields in England’. All I could think of was Private Eye — for this was where the magazine’s founders learnt their cricket. I wondered what they’d have thought of four floodlit indoor nets, bowling machines, and banks of television screens to examine the crookedness of your cover-drive. Not that the Salopian four, who together left the school in 1955, were luminous players of the game, but I know they loved it: in my time, I have been captained by Richard Ingrams; been run out (twice) by Willie Rushton; I once put on a stylish five for the first wicket with Paul Foot; and I’ve lolled in a deckchair at Taunton, watching Somerset lose, alongside Chris Booker.