It is true that the way footballers abuse each other and match officials can be pretty uncivilised. Martin Ward, the deputy leader of the Secondary Heads Association, is so upset about the bad behaviour of professional footballers that he thinks matches should be shown on TV only after 9pm because of the bad example the players set to children. But hang on; wasn't the marriage of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles supposed to prevent embarrassments like having her head on the stamps? Once again, a first-class mess.. At least someone's getting excited about the royal wedding. The Royal Mail is to issue some special stamps to mark the occasion, just as they did for the Prince of Wales' first marriage in 1981.
No doubt, the designs are being finalised, the printing presses readied, and the collectors are getting their orders in already. They will join mugs, tea towels and other sycophantic trinkets on the sideboards of Britain's dwindling band of monarchists. He made 1,172 runs in his 22 Tests at an average of 37.80, and scored 45 centuries.. Sheppard never wavered in a cause in which he believed, yet there must have been days when he looked back in nostalgia to those happy sunlit times when he was a county cricketer and a religious novice.In 1962-63, during his last tour, the England party were invited to a reception. Sheppard was wearing his dog collar and when a bishop mounted the platform Trueman called: "Hey, David, is that your senior pro?"Sheppard scored 15,838 runs in his first class career, 1947-63, at an average of 43.51.
Do you think that Sheppard, because of his outside views, might complicate the search for a solution if he became England's captain?By coincidence it was on that same tour that Basil D'Oliveira, the player who brought the whole controversy to a head and caused South Africa to be exiled from cricket, first emerged. Ron Roberts, a distinguished freelance and no bigot, who managed several overseas tours and who worked ferociously hard to bring the races together on that continent, wrote to E.W. Swanton in March 1962: They [several South African cricketers] have made more practical gestures towards international cricket than David Sheppard in his publicised stand against them. A superb slip field, he had one bad day, later in his career, in Australia that brought a laconic comment from the suffering bowler Fred Trueman: "Aye, it's a pity t' Rev doesn't put his hands together more often in t' field."He retired to his vocation in 1963 with one sunset memory, 112 at Lords in the last Gentlemen v Players match. It was on this occasion that Tony Lewis, called up from Cambridge to make up the side, remembers Ted Dexter, the last of those Light Blue Stars, swinging his bat, playing strokes in front of a mirror and declaring, "These cocks can't bowl." Those cocks included Trueman and Derek Shackleton.Sheppard's unremitting opposition to the then South African government policy of apartheid - he had refused to play against South Africa in 1960 - must have hindered his prospects with England, certainly of a long captaincy, for there were still many inside the game who felt that by making cricket a channel of communication they could eventually affect the Afrikaaner government's attitude.
