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News ArchiveWimbers Retires
Wendy Wimbush, who has been scoring for nearly forty years, has retired from international cricket. Wendy first scored for the BBC in 1969 and has covered every home Test series since and many abroad. There was a presentation to Wendy in the Investec Media Centre on the Friday of the Lord's Test v West Indies, 18th May.
Walk - thanks
A huge thank you to all the many members of the Cricket Writers’ Club who so generously sponsored Paul and me on the 150-mile Wisden Walk. We set out from Hugh’s home in Upton Grey (near Basingstoke) on Saturday 19 May, aiming for the Herefordshire offices of Matthew Engel, editor of Wisden 2007. We allowed ourselves ten days for the stroll… and we did it. I promise we walked the whole way. (In fact, we even nipped over the border into Wales on the last day, so spry were we.)
We were raising money for the Laurie Engel Fund, and to my delight and amazement it looks as though we will have collected around £8,000. And a sizeable proportion of that has come from CWC members. (The Fund is named after Matthew Engel’s 13-year-old son Laurie, who died from a particularly aggressive form of cancer in September 2005.)
The walk was an utterly wonderful experience, and one we somehow managed to negotiate without blisters. At almost every turn, the countryside was its vibrant early-summer best. For the first few days, it was impossible to believe that we were walking through the frantic, overpopulated, overtarmacked, overcommercial South-East. Unlike the Botham walks, one of our guiding principles was to avoid roads wherever possible, and until we reached Gloucester on Day Seven, we had passed more donkeys (four) than shops (three).
But another, and perhaps more important, guiding principle was to sample as many pubs as possible – and safely outnumbering donkeys and shops combined was the number of different beers we downed. Reflecting our rural route, almost every hostelry seemed to be called The Plough or The Harrow. And every brew the Hog’s Delight or the Shepherd’s Companion.
By and large, the weather was very kind. The first days were bright and mild, then a touch muggy, before it turned cool, and a trifle damp. Well, more than a trifle. On the penultimate day – Day Nine, in darkest Herefordshire – it rained. Every one of Old Possum’s cats and Battersea’s dogs waterfalled down on us. It was diluvian. But it cleared up for our last day, the bank holiday (while the rest of the country was drowning in that Noah-like flood). And the whole way, we met nothing but kindness, generosity and an unstinting welcome.
And just in case you’re reading this, thinking to yourself that you’d really meant to make a donation but, damn it, it’s too late now… Well, it’s not. You can either give online at www.justgiving.com/wisdenwalk or send a cheque, made payable to “TCT Laurie Engel Fund”, to my home address (in the Media Guide, or email me at hugh.chevallier@wisdengroup.com). But chances are you’ve given already, so thank you again. It’s enormously appreciated, especially by the Engels. The day we finished our walk would have been Laurie’s 15th birthday. Hugh Chevallier and Paul Coupar
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