Brian Viner: Star turn from Bedser proves cricket is not just a batsman's game

On Monday evening, at the end of a splendid black-tie dinner at the Hilton on Park Lane, organised by the Lord's Taverners to celebrate cricket's 10 surviving centurions – the men who made at least 100 first-class hundreds – I sought out my colleague Angus Fraser and mused that such a glittering occasion would never be staged for comparable feats of bowling; celebrating the 10 bowlers who have taken more than 400 Test wickets, for example. Angus did not disagree. As every trundler knows, cricket has always been loaded in favour of batsmen, and the advent of Twenty20 tilts the balance even further, so it was gratifying, if a little paradoxical, that the star turn at Monday's event was a bowler, 90-year-old Sir Alec Bedser.

The old boy was called to the stage by the master of ceremonies, Mark Nicholas, because as well as honouring the 10 centurions, we were also invited to doff our caps to Sir Donald Bradman, it being just a few days after the centenary of the great man's birth, and there is hardly anyone alive better qualified than Bedser to lead such a tribute. He was the only Englishman alongside the seven Aussies selected by the Don in his all-time XI (Wally Hammond got to carry the drinks, as 12th man). He also delivered what Bradman called the only perfect ball he ever faced (a fast leg-break that did him all ends up in Adelaide in 1947), and he dismissed the Don on seven other occasions too, more than anyone else. So the audience duly hung on his every word when Nicholas asked him to account for Bradman's extraordinary record: 117 first-class hundreds at an average of 95.14. "He knew," said Bedser, "that the best way to get runs was not to give a catch."

It was true enough. Amazingly, Bradman hit only six sixes in his entire international career, and Bedser, in mightily impressive fettle for a nonagenarian, explained his particular method of hitting shots through the covers. So exquisite was his timing that he waited until the ball was practically underneath him before striking it, which meant that it always travelled along the ground.

Geoffrey Boycott had other tactics for staying in all day. The scorer of 151 first-class hundreds recalled the advice of his Uncle Algy, that "when two people get involved in a run-out, one of t'buggers is going to be unhappy. Make sure it isn't you." Amid much knowing laughter, he added: "I followed that advice all my life until I met that bastard Amiss." I don't know how Dennis Amiss, another of the centurions, reacted to being called a bastard. And I couldn't quite see whether the mother and grandmother of a young lad at the table next to mine winced at such salty Boycottian language.

The lad was Freddie Moore-Hobbis, a pupil at the Dragon School in Oxford, and in attendance because he had been chosen as the first recipient of the Taverners' Centurion award, to be given to anyone under 18 on the occasion of his, or her, inaugural century in organised cricket. Young Freddie bagged 103 not out on his 11th birthday, but of even more interest to the audience were his sporting antecedents. His late grandfather was Bobby Moore. And later, as I exited into the Park Lane drizzle, I couldn't decide what had tickled me more – the revelation that the grandson of Bobby Moore of Barking is a star cricketer at the hugely posh Dragon School – or Boycott's assertion that the England cricket team under Mike Brearley would "'ave been a lot better if I'd batted for both of us and 'e'd just captained".

Blue note of caution in the air over City

As an Everton supporter I have always felt a kind of kinship with Manchester City fans. Like them, we know what it is to be Blues existing in the Red-tinged shadow of a more successful club; we know what it is to be part of a large and passionate following subjected to disappointment after disappointment, never quite dismissing the hope that there might be a glorious future to add to the glorious past. Moreover, we have some fine football men in common: some of Everton's greatest players – Joe Mercer, Joe Royle, Howard Kendall, Peter Reid – wound up managing City. That feeling of kinship appeared to suffer a mortal blow with the astounding news that City, at a stroke of a sheikh's fountain pen, had metamorphosed into the richest club in the world. Yet there is still a familiar and reassuring sense of pessimism in the air over the blue half of Manchester. "Being City, it's bound to go pear-shaped sooner or later," they're saying. At least we Evertonians can still relate to that.

Hotel louts maul rugby's image

Last week, on a short golf trip to Ireland with some mates, I stayed in a hotel near Belfast. Among our fellow guests were the players and coaching staff of a Guinness Premiership rugby union team, whose behaviour I won't comment on except to say that half the hotel residents were kept awake until 5am, and that the following day the chambermaids had to deal with fairly copious quantities of vomit. Rugby a game for hooligans played by gentlemen? Don't make me laugh.

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