The rabbit who bred success

The writer and TV producer Harry Thompson died of lung cancer in November, aged 45. As well as producing Have I Got News For You and They Think It's All Over, and therefore introducing to a wider audience the notion that David Gower is an etiolated toff whose valet irons his socks, Harry will be best remembered in the cricketing world for co-founding the Captain Scott Invitation XI and running it for 25 years.

He and I, best friends since the age of 10, had created this team for no-hopers while at Oxford University, and we took it with us when we left. He began cricketing life as the ultimate rabbit, incapable of hitting the ball off the square, and through extraordinary willpower and determination turned himself into an obdurate opening batsman and a useful medium-pace bowler with a good high action. He was an extremely competitive cricketer. As captain he had but one thought: to win.

To the gentle and even flabby arena of village cricket, he brought a rare single-mindedness: maybe not surprisingly, his all-time hero was Geoffrey Boycott. As the years went by, his and my approaches to running a cricket team diverged. When my book about village cricket, Rain Men, appeared in 1995, he was unfailingly generous about it, while agreeing with very little of it. Two years later the team split in two - he kept the younger and better players, I took the oldsters and baldsters - but we remained friends and frequently met to complain about the endless burden of running a cricket team. When he was diagnosed with lung cancer in April (having famously never smoked a cigarette), almost the saddest aspect for me was that he immediately lost his 100% appearance record for Captain Scott. The team had by then played 640 games, and he had played them all.

Harry was not always the easiest of men, but he gave much to cricket, not least an inexhaustible fund of stories that his friends hope to be retelling in 40 years' time. We shall particularly miss his indeterminate waft outside the off stump for no run, and his cries of torment whenever anyone misfielded a ball. He leaves a wife Lisa, two children from his first marriage, Betty and Bill, many many statistics and a mouldering pile of old kit.

This article was first published in the January issue of The Wisden Cricketer.
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