Kiama Second Grade was drawn to meet rivals Albion Park at Keith Grey Oval on a dreary grey old afternoon on the day before Australia Day in 1992. Kiama's season, as often seemed to be the case around these years, was stagnating once again after a promising start. Skipper Joe Murphy was unavailable for the match, and the trust had been placed in your humble correspondent to lead the team.
In the days long before covers became a permanent fixture on the South Coast, the overcast gloomy skies had already put the wicket square under enormous water pressure, and the outlook of more rain during the day appeared likely. In short, it was an old-fashioned "wettie", but at least not in patches across the wicket. The whole length was a mudbath. With no official umpire, it came down to the two teams to decide whether play could begin. Your humble correspondent was but 22 years old and not disposed to argue with the majority consensus, but both sides wanted a game of cricket, and so it was that we agreed to get on. The toss of the coin fell to Kiama, whose captain decided that the wicket was not going to be better later in the day, and chose to take a gamble by batting first and hoping to put on a defendable score - much to the chagrin of most of his teammates.
Early on the move looked like it could be a winner. Gary Koks took the idea that on such a track it was better to attack with fury before it got the better of you and took you down, and immediately started to flay at anything wide or short of the stumps. He was batting well down the wicket, about a metre in front of the crease, to try and get closer to the pitch of the ball. As was to be expected on this type of wicket, most of the deliveries faced were "popping" once they pitched, and the higher, slower than usual two-paced deliveries made it difficult to play any kind of regulation cricket shot. Still, the scoreboard was ticking over. With his opponents gradually aware of where he was standing, it came to pass that after every ball that he played and missed at, the keeper was quickly throwing the ball at the stumps, while Gary desperately groped back with his foot to retain his position within the crease. Four throws missed, while one connected with the stumps but was given not out by the square leg umpire - a decision that the Albion Park team felt that the Kiama player stationed in that position obviously lent favourably towards his teammate. They were not to be denied however, and within a couple of balls the inevitable happened - Gary played and missed again, the keeper threw down the stumps, and Gary was out by a sizeable distance. His quick fire 16 had gotten Kiama to 1/20 before his dismissal. Now it was up to his teammates to follow it up.
Unfortunately this was not to be. Mick Heinecke was soon caught behind for 2, and his skipper followed in the same way for the same score. Both had decided that aggression was the key also, and both perished flailing at wide deliveries they should have let go. Mick Bryant could only find time to be dismissed in similar fashion at the other end for a duck, and at 4/24 Kiama’s innings was in disaster mode.
Our team was positioned under the awning of the old dressing shed at Keith Grey Oval, which was located in the north-eastern corner of the ground. As our innings stabilised slightly, we had watched with mild interest as an elderly lady had slowly walked her way through the gates, and was making her way around the outside of the boundary towards where we were all sitting. It was unusual, because the day and weather did not befit cricket viewing, and she did not appear to be looking for someone she knew playing the game. Once she saw where we were sitting though, she made a slightly faster beeline right towards us.
One of our number said "Hi" or "G'day" to her - it may have been Gary, but I can't be completely sure anymore. Whoever it was, I'm sure that it wasn't long before they regretted their actions, because the rest of us certainly did regret it. With the invitation to talk having obviously been given, she was off, and there was little to stop her.
Gary was terrible. Incorrigible. Whether he offered the first greeting now no longer mattered. As he is wont to do, he began engaging in conversation, thinking it was an amusing sideshow to what was happening on the ground. Soon enough though, he, and the rest of us, realised that this encouragement was completely misplaced, and that she had now decided that we were actually hugely interested in her stories, and they kept coming at us machine-gun style. Gary, realising his mistake far too late, was now looking for a place to hide, but with this elderly lady, there was no such thing.
"I like sport. I like tennis and football. I played cricket and hockey for Australia. I was just playing cricket in the park one day, and this person came up to me and said 'You're really good. You should play for Australia!' So I went and played for Australia. Then one other time I was walking past a hockey game and they asked me to play. So I played and I scored 10 goals and everyone was amazed. There were some people there who came over and said they were from the Australian hockey team and that they were looking for another player and would I play with them, so I did"Have you ever felt like a half hour could feel like an afternoon? This was the punishment of having gotten out too early in the game. Many of us learned from this experience, and made it our motto to not be dismissed early ever again. At one stage during this onslaught, Chris Sellars was dismissed, which not only allowed Steve Holz to escape this insanity by making his way to the crease, but led Chris straight into the firing line. As he walked up the ramp towards us and into the shed, he was accosted. "Hello there, I'm Nutty Nanna!". "Oh... yeah... hello" came Chris’ confused reply, and as he walked into the shed, Nutty Nanna followed, and continued to again say how she liked sports and she used to play cricket... all as Chris was trying to remove his protective equipment. He eventually had to step into the toilet and close the door in an effort to have some privacy for the occasion, though for a moment it looked as though our guest was going to follow him in and continue the conversation. Chris didn't surface until her exit some twenty minutes later, and his first question on his reintegration with us was, "Who the hell was that?!?", forcing us to relive what he had missed while being one of our few bats to dig in at the crease.
"I live in a nursing home, but it's boring. I get bored, so I just walk away. I've got lots and lots of friends there, everyone likes me. They all call me Nutty Nanna. Sometimes I just go for a walk, and come back a couple of days later and they ask me 'where have you been?' I walked to Canberra one day, it was very cold, it was snowing and it got caught in my hat. Sometimes I just walk up to people's houses and ask if I can stay for the night. Most people are very nice, and they call for the police to come and give me a ride home".
"I write children's books. All of my stories have animals in them, but they all talk and act like humans. They're very interesting. I like to have the pigs wearing their business suits and having meetings in the mud, and then they walk muddy footprints everywhere and the cleaners get upset with them for messing up the place that they have just cleaned"
"I like sport though. I wanted to play football (rugby league) but they wouldn't let me. When I was a little girl I used to play football at school all the time, against all the bigger boys, and I was always the best player. I used to score lots and lots of points. They all said I should play, but they wouldn't let me because I was a girl"
"I learned how to fly a plane. Once I was on a plane and the pilot was choking on his dinner, and everyone got scared and said 'we're going to crash!' And they asked if there was anyone who could fly a plane, and I said I could, so I went up and flew the plane and landed it safely, and everyone was so happy, and the pilot was okay but he never ate donuts again when he was flying".
"But I like sport. I played cricket when I was a little girl. And then I played for Australia..."
It may well have been that we would never have been rid of her antics. She moved away for a spell, and we thought that was the end of it. We could only laugh as she headed down to the boundary fence on the north-eastern side of Keith Grey Oval, and accosted the fieldsman at deep fine leg, no doubt explaining that she liked cricket, and that she had been playing one day… well… you probably know the story as well as we did by now. As the Albion Park fieldsman moved to his new position at the conclusion of the over (no doubt mightily relieved of the situation), Nutty Nanna returned to focus her attention back on us. Some of the guys ran to avoid the conversation, finding an excuse to find something in their cricket bags or look for a drink or grab a cigarette. On this occasion Nutty Nanna almost latched onto Peter Netherclift, whose 15 in the middle order was Kiama’s second highest score of the afternoon. His deadpan “yep” and “yep” and “right” to her constant stream of endless rhetoric was about the best any of us had managed, until Michael Faulkner chimed in.
Faulky had missed the initial onslaught, having been stationed at square leg, no doubt counting rocks and little else. Now he was seated with the pads on awaiting his turn at the crease, and as was his way, as only Faulky could, he began to ask questions of Nutty Nanna that were… shall we say… of a highly inappropriate nature. It was a tough ask, because his questions were an attempt to interject into the constant circle of stories that she was telling us, and there was little doubt it was all going well over her head. In fact, all they did was to cause more hilarity amongst his teammates, as we tried to process the dribble coming from our newest best friend and the tirade of abuse coming from our opening bowler. Eventually (and I can promise you none of us really knew if it was going to end) Nutty Nanna shuffled off around the ground, to look for more friends to play cricket with or tell stories about animals, leaving us not only shattered from the experience, but shellshocked on the cricket field. Despite our best efforts, Kiama had been dismissed for just 74.
Back to the cricket, and Kiama took to the field knowing we needed a big effort. The chosen opening pair was Faulkner and Netherclift, but after two balls it was obvious that we needed someone with more pace than Nev had on this pitch. Faulky’s first two balls went through over head height from a good length, which meant that Nev’s swing wasn’t going to be as effective here. Instead, the skipper turned to perennial Kiama favourite David “Moz” McCormack to come from the northern end. It was certainly no fun for the batsmen. Faulky took two early wickets, and was proving immensely difficult to play. Every ball came through at a different height and pace off the wicket, with only loose deliveries any chance of going for runs.
Would you have wanted to bat on this wicket? Albion Park's number four batsman was a solid guy, tallish and wide across the shoulders. Having lost two wickets fairly quickly, he was obviously of a mind that some defence could be in order early on in his innings, until he had a handle on how the wicket was playing. With this in mind, he was batting just outside of his crease, and getting a good stride in down the wicket in defending away Faulky, who was having one of his excellent days with the ball. Faulky, left arm over the wicket, in the middle of his fourth over, came in and sent down another ball that was on a good length, swinging into the right handed batsman. Once again he plodded down the wicket, his bat plonked alongside his front pad in a perfect forward defensive pose. Unfortunately for him, the ball popped off that good length, climbing slowly and passing all defensive apparatus, and cracked right into the middle of the batsman's unprotected forehead. Even in 1992 there were only a small number of players who had switched to wearing helmets in the South Coast district, and given the grey overcast conditions the batsman had even forgone the need for a cap. The possible seriousness of the situation did not stop immediate hilarity as the batsman remained in his defensive pose even as the ball bounced off his forehead, and rolled back to Faulky at the end of his completed bowling run. Faulky picked up the ball, inspected it for damage, and turned on his heel and returned to the top of his bowling mark.
Our batting friend was a tough customer. Three or four of us enquired as to his condition, but he just shook it off. His batting partner met him and inspected the damage. There was a raised, red welt already apparent, along with the stitch marks from the ball going straight down the centre. Not only did it look as though he had half of a cricket ball lodged firmly in his skull, it also proved that Faulky was indeed keeping the seam very straight. He decided to bat on, but his demeanour had changed as to his batting approach, and a wild and windy swat at the next couple of balls were played and missed, before in the following over he played the same way to Moz, whom he edged to keeper Pat Sellars, to complete a tough duck for the plucky Park batsman. At the gathering at the fall of the wicket, Holzy suggested that the batsman had at least been middling the ball, while Faulky was indisposed to suggest that we needed a ball change, as the seam on one side had flattened out.
3/13 moved along to 3/35 after 18 overs, and having decided to bowl out our two opening bowlers the skipper was beginning to sweat. Redemption came as, in his final over Moz was able to pick up two wickets, while young Warren Campion was run out by Chris Sellars for a duck. Faulky's ten over spell had produced 2/16 and a bruised head, whilst the always over-modest magician Moz had finished with 3/19. Albion Park had slipped to 6/35 off 20 overs, and the game had tightened once again.
The game now fell into the hands of the second wave of bowlers, that being the initially held back Nev, and your humble correspondent. Nev did the right thing by his captain, picking up a wicket in his second over, leaving Park at 7/36 and in dire straits. However, fortunes changed and the match swung again. As mentioned before, Nev's bowling was not quite fast enough to take advantage of the track, and the leg spinner at the other end was not getting any help from it either. Added to this, well experienced Albion Park pair of Matt Gooden and Mick Farrelly were at the crease, and played particularly well to the conditions. They played forward to everything, they took no risks when the ball was straight, dropped the ball for singles into the gaps provided by the fielding captain's overly attacking fields, and when the ball was dropped short they hit it hard. This combined with the relative inexperience of the two bowlers, who struggled to find a different line of attack against this batting, and the inexperience of the captain. He posted what were probably over-attacking fields in the hope his bowlers could exploit them, and wasn't able to make any changes that could disrupt the flow once this partnership had settled in. His decision to stick with these two bowlers to the (ultimately bitter) end was somewhat forced by the fact there was no real fifth bowling option selected in that week's team - had it been a normal game no doubt Steve Holz and Chris Sellars and even Michael Heinecke would have had to share that load. In hindsight, perhaps giving them a chance to break the partnership would have been worth a try, but the thinking at the time was that Nev and myself were our best chance to take those wickets. This proved to be incorrect, as Farrelly (27) and Gooden (14) took Park to victory with three wickets in hand and almost 15 overs in hand.
I started this story by stating that sometimes a game can be memorable for more than just the result. Most in Kiama's position would choose not to remember this game because of the eventual result, and the fact that it had slipped from the team's grasp with 39 runs required and only three wickets needed for victory. But it is those other moments that sometimes stick hardest in the memory - Koksy almost being run out half a dozen times before finally perishing in that fashion, a fighting innings under difficult circumstances from Nev, a kid trying to prove himself at higher levels, a batsman using his head rather than his bat in comical fashion (given the lack of major damage), and the brilliant bowling of Faulky and Moz to give the Kiama team a chance at unlikely victory. But sometimes, it can be that which has nothing to do with the match, an incident that transcends the game to become folklore amongst those that were a part of it. And no one who was a part of this Kiama team will ever forget the legend of Nutty Nanna.
