Mark 'Chief' Freeman shares a few thoughts on playing the game with those who have a 'dispensation for fiction'.
Setting off on a fine summer's day clad in the nylon whites with a few coins for after-play drinks at the club rooms can be soured by one thing alone: the prospect of staring down the wicket at the competition's truly ugly participants. Here we must mostly discuss Bill Leane from Coles-Myer CC, a club remarkable only for its singular gracelessness. An odious, grim-faced hideosity is our Bill. An ornament to the inartistic and unaesthetic.A pitted burlesque of the misshapen. We don't like him much.
Besides the unpalatability of his personage, he is a seasoned ch---. This was most clearly displayed at his side's pestilent acreage a few years back, when, in the guise of square-leg umpire, Leane disallowed a Reds' catch at second slip. He claimed it had brushed dust before coming to hand, despite protestations that such talk was rubbish. Ross Attrill (Botticelli' s Venus by comparison) loudly and rightly pointed out in the vernacular Leane's dispensation for fiction when it suited his side's progress, and a tribunal appearance resulted for the 1998199 competition Best & Fairest winner.
As captain, Leane's jaundiced view spread to his pasty collection of evil-empire salesman, with Eugene Izzard and the impressionable Rowdy Heller in particular failing to resist Leane's bleak and airless take on park cricket. One bright moment of revenge for the Reds came when our viciously-paced opening bowler Drew Bali made toothpicks of their stumps, both departing in the same over to calls of 'Pots and pans' (Something to do with retail...ed?) from the Reds outfield.
Then there was the game seasons ago during which the Coles-Myer side took to calling runs for the hapless Reds' batsmen. With their perennially insipid attack made tricky only by the bile flowing freely from their racked carcasses, the fielders caused two runouts by this illegal method, eventually winning by a run. King Billy Leane led from the front, spitting at Simon Roberts after dismissing him to win the game. Besides later copping a much deserved stretch from the tribunal, he managed to enrage the mild-mannered Reds' captain Max Pollock and this writer found himself in the extremely unlikely position of working with his personal nemesis, Heller, in holding back the two men from their impending toe-to-toe dust-up.
After what looked like a much-hoped-for retirement, Leane reappeared in a post-Jenny Craig guise, with, much to the shock of Reds' players, a seemingly lighter disposition. But it soon palled, his blackness swamping any hope he may have had of becoming reasonable in the minds of those he played against.
Others to significantly lower the tone of the competition included the screamingly high-pitched Peter Knight from East Malvern (whose childishness was almost too much to bear for the team he led), and one or two members of the Wagg clan from Burnley. But nothing to compare with the fabulous vacuum of warmth and humour that exists within Bill Leane.