From Score Box to Press Box

Martin Chandler | 8:56am BST 07 October 2022

Published: 2022
Pages: 178
Author: Markham, Ray
Publisher: CricketMASH
Rating: 3.5 stars

When I was a youngster, spending every spare moment of my summers doing some sort of cricket related activity, a scorebook close at hand was an absolute essential for me. In time I became so proficient at keeping a book that I was an occasional replacement for my father’s club side’s regular scorer. Thinking about it, my playing ability ultimately proving to be modest in the extreme, those Saturday afternoons as a callow youth spent scoring in the ‘A’ Division of the Palace Shield were the height of my cricketing career.

Despite my fondness for scoring fading as I got older I still did a fair amount as an adult, usually in short bursts for the teams I played for during those periods I wasn’t on the field which, when my side were batting, was most of the time.  I didn’t mind though as I quite scoring was, to my mind, infinitely preferable to the alternative of taking the umpire’s coat for half an hour. Of course I’d rather have been batting than doing either, but that rarely happened for very long.

There are two occasions, as a scorer, when I met someone like Ray Markham. The first was at Penwortham, a club near Preston that had a proper score box, and a scorer who had an array of coloured biros and a set of extra large score sheets with a number of areas for completion that my standard club book did not have. I must have been about 12 then – it would be twenty years before, at a small village ground in North Oxfordshire, I came across a similarly equipped expert scorer.

But enough of my story and on to Ray Markham’s. He describes his book as autobiographical, which it is but, dealing only with his life as a scorer, it isn’t a true autobiography and so can’t be compared with the only other such book I know, Bill Frindall’s Bearders.

His publisher’s blurb tells me that Markham is a retired teacher, and a veteran of eight previous books. That said other than that none are about cricket I knew nothing about the subject matter of those until I had a nose around the interweb. It seems most are on biblical subjects, which in part no doubt explains why, despite some of the challenges his life in cricket scoring have presented him with, whatever the provocation Markham remains consistently helpful, friendly and tolerant with all with whom he comes into contact.

Like me Markham’s love of cricket came early, as did his scoring. As life got in the way he deserted his scorebook returning to it only when he was invited to score a colts match in which his two sons were playing. Finding that despite the passage of time his enjoyment of and enthusiasm for the craft were undimmed he began a journey that ended with his being press box scorer at that unforgettable World Cup Final in 2019, by which time of course his book had long since given way to a laptop.

From Score Box to Press Box is written to entertain rather than present any sort of treatise on the art of scoring and perhaps inevitably therefore the early chapters are probably the best dealing as they deal with a combination of the eccentric collection of characters that Markham found himself scoring with at club level, as well as the often ramshackle facilities that were provided for him.

The second and shorter part of the book deals with the very different life of the press box scorer. The formula is much the same, concentrating on personalities and facilities. The difference here though is that the personalities are fellow professionals, and the facilities at Test match grounds (with the occasional exception of those for parking) are a world away from those encountered in that colts game that started the story.

Many of the experiences shared by Markham will be familiar to his reader, and the smile he has on his face as he writes comes through very clearly in his narrative. It is a slight shame that every now and again the reader’s enjoyment is interrupted by what I can only describe as a typesetting glitch whereby sentences suddenly stop and then start again on a new line, but hopefully the nature of the publishing process might permit that to be eliminated in future copies. If not do not be put off – ’tis but a minor irritation in an otherwise consistently entertaining read.