Life of Brian

So Middlesex are jetting off to Antigua for a post-season jaunt during which they will play a game for the largest prize ever offered to an English county club – at least until next year, when the prize for winning the Championship goes up to £500K.

Things have changed a lot since Brian Brain recorded his month-by-month thoughts on his 1980 season with Gloucestershire and their post-season Caribbean excursion to Barbados for a few friendly one-day matches against club sides in “Another Day, Another Match”.

Brain was a pace bowler who made his debut for Worcestershire aged 18 in 1959 but did not get capped until 1966, which meant that he was a year short of qualifying for a benefit when they sacked him in 1975. Moving to Gloucestershire prolongs his career, but he spends much of 1980 worrying about his financial future, and there is a happy ending when the county grant him a testimonial for 1981.

He would therefore have approved of the increases in player salaries. As a senior professional in 1980, he was paid £4500. In the wider economy, salaries have roughly quadrupled for equivalent jobs over the period, but his successor is now paid more like 10-12 times as much, which in real terms means that he would be earning two to three times as much today.

Interestingly, it appears that the rewards for playing in high-profile media circuses have increased by the same factor: Brain could easily understand why his county colleagues Mike Procter and Zaheer Abbas had gone to play for Packer at £20,000 a year, which scales up to about $500,000 today, or what such players might reasonably expect for an IPL contract. (Those who think Procter would have been worth more may not realise that his powers were waning by 1980; he came off his full run in only three or four of Gloucester’s games and mostly bowled off-spin when using the old ball.)

On the other hand, Brain might not have appreciated the change in his after play routine. The hot bath followed by a trip down the pub for a few beers and a game of darts is now an ice bath and a quiet Powerade before an early night. Worse still, he is pictured waiting to go into bat against the touring West Indies: that he has on a then-new helmet with a perspex visor is merely nostalgic, but the caption exults in his ingenuity in managing to smoke a cigarette while wearing it. Brain would not have enjoyed today’s healthy asceticism.

But whatever has changed, I hope that today’s players still get wonderful invitations such as the one Brain received from the Indoor Corridor Cricket Association at St Andrew’s University. Indoor corridor cricket was apparently ‘a quasi-religion which involves a squash ball of gruesomely variable pace and bounce, a plastic beach mat, mega-long-hops, the occasional kitchenette, plenty of nicks and a perpetually humid atmosphere that favours the bowler who keeps plugging away there or thereabouts and is always looking to do a bit.’

The letter went on to say that the Association had elected him, by a 7-1 majority over Leicestershire’s Ken Higgs, their Honorary President, ‘a position which carries with it absolutely no responsibilities whatsoever except a letter of delighted acceptance and permission to use your name when recruiting new members. The term of office is one year, whereupon you will become a life member which will entitle you to absolutely nothing except our veneration, which you already possess.’

The difference is that today’s player might feel able to afford slightly more than the nil donation which Brain enclosed with his acceptance.