Ben White

SHIRE WIN AT OLD TRAFFORD! 💛🖤 A HUGE 105 run victory for the Shire as the lads wrap up the Lancashire tail in just half an hour! What a way to finish it! 🔥 UP THE SHIRE! #BecomeGlorious

The winning moments! Look at the limbs and scenes! #BecomeGlorious

The moments that matter so much 💛🖤 #BecomeGlorious

🏏 TODAY’S FIXTURES 🏏 Firsts @PurtonCC (h) Seconds @CalneCC (a) Thirds #SwindonRoyalChallengers Best of luck to all! @WEPLCricket @WiltsCricket @swsportsnews 🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️

One of the last true Test cricketers in my book. A specialist in a generalist world. Quietly confident enough to continue with his ways, even when some mocked his hat, his much-repaired gloves and even his Weetabix. The best wicketkeeper of his time by some distance. And one of the greatest ever. Always made great art. With cricket gloves. With a brush and easel. Whether gathering the ball behind the stumps. Or leaving it in front of them. And still found time to send a lad he had never seen a video, cheering him up immensely on one of his darkest days two years ago. Happy birthday, @jackrussellart.

🏏SATURDAY FIXTURES! 🏏 Firsts @CheltCricket (a) Seconds @Potternecc (h) Thirds @winsleycc (h) Best of luck to all involved!! @WEPLCricket @WiltsCricket @swsportsnews

Michael Atherton faced more than 20,000 balls in Test cricket, most of them from the deadliest generation of fast bowlers the game has produced. His average tells you what he scored. It doesn't tell you what he survived. On this day in 1989, a 21-year-old Atherton made his Test debut against Australia at Trent Bridge, called up after the rebel tour to South Africa gutted the England side, and he was out for a duck two balls into his first innings before making 47 in the second. From that unpromising start grew one of the most misjudged careers in the sport, and three facts make the case. First, the average that gets thrown at him needs its context restored. Atherton finished with 7,728 runs at 37.69, and in any casual conversation that number ends the argument. But run the 1990s through a filter and something remarkable appears: across the whole decade, the true golden age of fast bowling, when Ambrose, Walsh, Donald, Wasim, Waqar and McGrath were all operating at once, only two opening batsmen in the world passed 6,000 Test runs. One was Mark Taylor. The other was Atherton, opening for a side whose batting collapsed so routinely that his wicket was usually the only wall standing. Second, runs were never really his currency. Atherton absorbed over 20,600 deliveries in Test cricket, which puts him in the top tier of ball-facers the format has known, and it works out to roughly 100 balls soaked up every single time bowlers wanted him gone. His defining innings says everything about the trade he worked in. Johannesburg, December 1995, England sliding towards defeat, and Atherton batted 643 minutes for 185 not out to steal a draw from a match South Africa had already won everywhere except the scorebook. Third, the nickname. The Australians called him The Cockroach, and Steve Waugh's men did not mean it fondly, because it described the one quality they could never bowl their way around, the maddening refusal to be stamped out. Most batters of that era were measured in hundreds. Atherton was measured in hours, and against that generation of bowling, hours were the harder thing to score.

🏏 SATURDAY FIXTURES 🏏 Firsts @WBCricketClub (a) Seconds @erlestokeccc (h) Thirds @corshamcc (h) Best of luck to all involved!! 🏏☀️ @WEPLCricket @WiltsCricket @swsportsnews