So tired, tired of waiting, tired of waiting for you...

Today's title comes courtesy of Ray Davies and the wonderful Kinks.

My feelings on the absence of cricket are amply illustrated in that line. You really don't realise what you have until it isn't there any more and while my garden has benefited from the absence of cricket and football from my life, I miss it badly.

I hope you are enjoying my pieces on the early heroes of the club, as much as I enjoyed reading more about them in contemporary articles in the British Newspaper Archive online. It helped me to get a better 'handle' on them and turned them from names and players into people. In the process I found a lot of stuff that I never knew and I hope that they have been of some value and interest for you.

Most of my blog week, such as it is, has been taken up by someone from overseas who keeps trying to post spam through the comments boxes. He/she must have tried fifty times this week to post the same thing, taking up however much time. If they are reading this, please save yourself some time, because the filtering on Blogger is excellent and easy to use. It takes me less than five seconds to tick two boxes and delete them, because I don't want anything on the site that isn't relevant to the game and specifically Derbyshire's place in it.

In other news, I came across a nice piece on Twitter earlier, which asked who you modelled your bowling action on as a child.

Mine was easy.

Between the ages of ten and fourteen I wanted to be Alan Ward, whose upright action, flowing run and arch back, prior to releasing a thunderbolt, was a thing of magnificence. In trying to replicate it, I realised that I was around a foot too short for authenticity, not to mention about forty miles an hour. At the start of a net session, or my first spell in a game, I would run in to release my weapons of mass destruction, usually to the detriment of line and length. Once I had it out of my system, and my back started to hurt, I settled down to something more sedate, considerably more accurate and a lot more effective.

After waking up too many next mornings with back ache, I realised another role model was required and I became Eddie Barlow (pictured). This was far more authentic, as I had the requisite glasses for one thing and Eddie was far from fast. I even cultivated the mopping of my brow with a forearm, which Eddie did, while attempting to fix any batsman who hit me for four with a basilisk stare worthy of the great man.

I got my share of wickets in school and club matches, but my batting style was more Alan Hill than Barlow. The chances of my scoring a hundred between lunch and tea were slightly less than my being the winning horse in the Grand National, even if I did surprise team mates in one match by putting the first ball of the innings over mid wicket for six. Slow and steady did it, even though my boundaries always, to me at least, had the natural flair of the Cape...

He is one of the many Derbyshire players I would have loved to know and am sure that I would have emerged from the encounter the better for it. Not one contemporary has ever had a bad word to say about him and his contribution to them and the club.

Which is why, when the club asked about our greatest overseas player earlier in the week, my answer was unhesitating. Peter Kirsten was brilliant, and the best batsman I have seen in county colours, while John Wright was less flamboyant but not far behind. Barlow brought them both to Derbyshire and his example transformed a club that was dying.

Before Barlow, you always got the impression that we went into matches hoping not to lose. There was plenty of grit, not too much flamboyance and precious few wins between 1971 and 1975. If it happened it was a special individual performance, but when Eddie arrived, and especially when he became captain, the whole ethos changed.

Derbyshire went into matches EXPECTING to win. We didn't always, but the wins became more common, the young players developed confidence under a skipper who oozed it and the cricket became purposeful, aggressive and dynamic.

In three all-too-short years he transformed the club. As my Dad said, as we watched him look every bit as good as Sobers while playing for the Rest of the World in 1970, 'If we signed that fella there'd be no stopping us'.

Like a lot of other times, he was right. Had we managed to get him then, rather than five years down the line, who knows what we might have achieved?

Barlow was the best. It was an absolute privilege to see him.