Khan't do without him. Ken Norling tells why...
Twenty years of the Reds, and the character of the club hasn’t changed that much from the weirdness of its origins.... We’ve had:
And we've had Alec Kahn. The one Red who didn't adopt that grand motto of the sixties - sex and drugs and rock 'n roll. At least not the drugs, anyway. And certainly not the drink. Just as well he had left-wing politics - I can’t imagine what else would have got him involved in such a madcap escapade as the original Royal Park Reds side.
We've been lucky to have Alec. A club like ours needs a bit of cement to bind it together, and Alec has provided that both on the field and off. His record on the field speaks for itself. Well over 200 games, well over 6,000 runs - three times as many as any other player. I won’t try to suggest those runs have boosted cricket as a spectator sport; but then, who am I to criticise?
Alec's innings have gone a long way to ensuring that the Reds A Grade always remained competitive, even in its darkest years, and have provided a crucial counterbalance to the extravagance of the rest of our top order for two decades.
What has been even more important for the Reds - and latterly the Mercantile Cricket Association - has been the work Alec has put in off the pitch. When I told the secretary of my previous club that I was leaving because we were setting up the Royal Park Reds, his grumpy response was, "I hope you realise just much bloody hard work’s involved". He was right, but then we had Alec Kahn.
I'm told there have been years when Alec wasn't on the committee. I can't remember them. I’m sure he's never missed an Annual General Meeting. And I do know that we've always known exactly who was registered for the club, how to contact them, where we stood financially, what the Association required of us, and all the other administrative jobs that you only notice in a club when they're not getting done.
And, of course, we were up-to-date with every quirk of the Association rules, every clause and sub-clause that could be invoked to our benefit. (It helps that Alec has written many of these.)
A lot of us have had our grumbles about Alec over the last twenty years. And I'm not just talking about a procession of batsmen with "run out" against their name. In our very first season David Dunstan coined the phrase "the Bismarck school of captaincy" to describe Alec's approach, and there’s a dourness about Alec's approach to the game that doesn't always bring out the best in other players.
What we need to remember, though, is that we are dealing with a man with an obsession for detail, and especially cricket detail. I was warned about Alec before the club started. He was then editor of the International Socialist newspaper, The Battler, and habitually sat and read every line to check for typos before it went to press. And if I didn't believe that story, I was convinced when we played our first practice match and discovered a ten year old Sheffield Shield match carefully scored, in varying colours of ink, in the scorebook we were using.
Alec is man obsessed with cricket, a man who will sit and watch the rain come down in the hope of an hour's play, a man prepared to pull the lining out of his car seats to use as sponges to try to dry a pitch, a man who can still tell you exactly how the very first wicket fell for the Royal Park Reds. (It was his, of course.)
There are a lot of reasons why we play for the Reds. Mainly it's because we love the game of cricket. Yet for most of us that love is just a romantic fling. For Alec, it's a grand passion.
So I'm already looking forward to the thirtieth anniversary. I’m confident the Reds Cricket Club will still be around for that occasion. By my estimate, Alec will be thinking about his 10,000th run by then, and will be putting up motions about the legality of using pinch-hitters to the AGM. And he'll probably have J.Kahn to second them.
Thanks, Alec. Cricket clubs come and go - none of the three I've previously played with still exist. The fact that the Reds are still going from strength to strength owes a lot to you.