Not The Spin: Spring 2025 Edition
Martin Chandler |Published: 2025
Pages: 32
Author: Davis, Rory (Editor)
Publisher: Lancashire Action Group
Rating: 4 stars
Rory Davis’s editorial kicks off the Spring 2025 edition of Not The Spin with some prescient words, The 2025 season is upon us and Lancashire are everyone’s favourites to win promotion, what could possibly go wrong?
What indeed, but here we are with more than a third of the Championship campaign behind us and where are the Red Rose? As I write this review we are rock bottom and, depending on how this weekend’s meeting with Derbyshire at Old Trafford unfolds, we might well still be there when it is published.
So it will come as no surprise to learn that there is, as always, a good deal of criticism at the way the Club is run. Almost all is measured, and the basic complaints, that the Club seems to place little importance on red ball cricket or serving its members, are the same as ever. There is humour though, and I particular enjoyed a comparison between the various limited memberships that the Club now offers with the equally limited availability of some of its leading players.
The parlous state of the Club’s on field activities are also covered in a review of the relegation summer of 2024, and the mood is not greatly lifted by another article detailing the outcome of the four previous Lancashire relegations. Each time the fate has previously befallen the team it has bounced right back. Making that five out of five may soon be the impossible dream, but for now we can at least still have hope.
Sadness does however pervade most of this issue, nowhere more so than on a front cover that bears the smiling face of Peter Lever, a Lancashire legend from my youth who sadly passed away in March. Roy Cavanagh and Mark Giles produce heartfelt tributes to a man who may have been born a few yards from Lancashire but who always gave his all for the Red Rose and, 27* times, for England.
The mood does however lighten in places, none more so than in Mark Gretton’s choice of the county’s best ten overseas players. The article doesn’t start well, Gretton for some reason that is beyond me classifying Farokh Engineer as an overseas. But that single frivolous complaint apart I agree wholeheartedly with his choices, and particularly his number one.
There is much food for thought in Not The Spin for all Lancashire followers, but it will be of interest to all who value county cricket and at a mere £2 is an absolute bargain. It is available via notthespin@gmail.com.
*Lever took 41 wickets at 36.80 in 17 Tests and also scored 350 runs at 21.87, well above his overall career average. He also appeared in 10 ODIs.
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