Here’s a singular cricket team, well balanced, hard to beat: Dick Spooner, Geoff Cook, Colin Milburn, Tom Graveney, David Townsend, Peter Willey, Alan Hodgson, George Sharp, Alex Coxon, Jim McConnon, Bob Willis. No-nonsense openers, some glistening strokeplayers, a mean and hostile pace attack, two Test match off-spinners, and Spooner and Sharp can share the gauntlets. A clue to provenance: at Chester-le-Street’s Test match this weekend I’ll be reverently downing a stiff one in the Milburn Lounge in fond memory of that bonny Falstaffian which the bar honours — good Colin, 17 years dead this year, still grievously mourned. It is hard to believe that Durham weren’t even a first-class county in 1990 when Burnopfield’s Milburn died, just 48, of a heart attack in his favourite pub, the Britannia at Newton Aycliffe, near Darlington.
It is a Geordie XI, of course.
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