John Monk – Oh Captain! My Captain! – by Greg Pearce

John was the captain of Anson when I first joined the club.  John and his vice-captain, Ian Attridge, were both very big characters and it was from these two that a lot of the energy in the dressing room came.  John was very comfortable with being captain and everybody looked to him for guidance.

Both myself and Paul Evans played our first game at the start of the 1999 season.  John hadn’t netted that winter and saw that there were two new players.  He asked Alf what we were both like as cricketers.  Alf had netted with us and in true Alf style, replied: “They are both opening bowlers and should bat at 3 and 4.” (Remember this was the same man that told us that you could fit 100 double decker buses in the Peter May sports centre and that he would take on Essex!)  John soon realised he had asked the worst person possible and tried again with Paul Dale.  At last John got some sense.  “Paul is more of a batsman and Greg is more of a bowler,” Paul D explained.

So Paul Evans batted up the order and I went in at 8.  With one wicket left, I was at the non-striker’s end when Monky came sauntering in, wearing his customary three jumpers. It was April after all.  Lee was umpiring and said to me: “Greg, don’t go mad and think that you have to score runs too quickly.  John is one of the best opening batsmen we have.”  I lent on my bat and looked forward to watching John smash the ball to all parts.  I backed up as the bowler ran up and watched as John missed his first ball and had his stumps scattered to all parts.  It was an inauspicious start to my playing time with my Anson hero.

My second game was over Fairlop and I didn’t bowl in the first 20 or so overs of us fielding.  This concept was alien to me and I must have fancied the thought of bowling to the batsmen I saw. I resorted to actually saying “John, give me a bowl, for fuck’s sake!”  Monky replied with “Not at the moment.  It’s a team game,” and he was right.  This was the first exposure I’d had to both the Anson ethos of giving everybody a game and to one of John’s captaincy lessons.  He would always tell me that “It’s somebody’s day.  You just have to find them.”  On that day, he obviously wanted to try other ideas before giving me a bowl.

I think it is fair to say that you need a bit of time with John to understand him and that in those days, his piss taking from the outset, rubbed some people up the wrong way.  John would always wind you up and 18 year old lads were meat and drink for his wit.  He was always going to get the upper hand in any verbal dual. But in the end, as everyone got to know him, they all saw that there was no malice in his comments and realised how funny he was.

John is my favourite Anson cricketer because he taught me how much is to be gained by thinking about the game and about our standard of cricketers specifically.  John would say that you can tell a batsman’s strength by his first scoring shot.  He was normally right.  From this, I learned that your job as a bowler and a captain is to do what the opposition don’t want you to do.  If a batsman is strong on his legs, the last thing you want to do is to feed him there.  You need to bowl where he isn’t as comfortable.  This is where you will take his wicket on the majority of occasions.

After a few years at Anson, I captained my first game during the first tour.  By this time I was vice captain to John and he had to leave on the Saturday night.  This left me captaining on the Sunday. It meant a lot to take a phone call from John on the morning of the game.  He reminded me not to let the game drift and also passed on a message of good luck.  For all of the bravado and micky taking, he could be sensible sometimes.

By the time I became full time captain of the club, I wanted more from John than he could give me.  I took to opening the batting with him and he had a few really good knocks.  I also wanted him to come on first change and bowl lots of overs for me.  After a while, he had to tell me that he could do one or the other, but not both.  I just wanted to get as much cricket out of him as I could, but he was getting older.  I would love to have captained him when he was 25!

John thought so much about the game that he knew what he could and couldn’t do better than anyone.  John was, as Lee said to me: ‘one of the best opening batsmen at the club’ and was an excellent player, especially off of his legs.  He also brought his common sense strategies to his batting and would tell me that the faster they are, the straighter you play.  He has to be up with the best batsmen to never hit 100 for the club.

A story that really makes me smile is when as captain, he saw me itching to bat and promoted me above himself in the order.  With five balls to go in the innings, I went out to bat, but was at the non-strikers end.  There was another wicket the next ball and John then took guard.  He proceeded to hit all 4 balls he faced to the boundary.  Leaving him 16 not out from 4 balls and me 0 not out having not faced a ball.

But it is John’s bowling that was his real strength.  He would amble up and bowl medium pace, but the end product was so much more than that.  He would tell me how he tried not to bowl the same ball, twice in a row.  You could see the cogs turning in his brain, as he was trying to figure out if the batsman played the last ball convincingly or not and what he was going to bowl next.  He would tell me that he was never quick but he’d got some very good players out in his time.  Again it was his thinking that made him stand out.

I realise that I’m making Monky sound like a saint, but his mouth did get us into trouble a few times.  Although I didn’t play in the game, Taggs has told me many times of the game that it nearly all came to blows with Plessey CC.  I think it was the phrase : “That’s it, let him borrow your bat because you did nothing with it” that really lit the fuse.  John was a master at the one liner and proved that the put down with humour is far more powerful than just telling a batsman what you are going to do to his wife….

I remember something that really got John’s goat, was when we came up against batsmen that were obviously above our standard.  John would say to me “Stop telling him how good he is” as I ran through after being hit with another shot that showed the batsman’s real class.  John on the other hand would say the opposite.  In the fabled match against Middlesex Tamils (also known as Sri Lanka, when people who were there recount it), one of their batsmen was about 80 from 40 balls and looking like a million dollars.  John bowled and the batsman leaned on the ball and it went like a rocket through cover for another 4.  John looked up, out of breath, and said with tongue firmly in cheek: “You’re shit mate!”

John holds the record for wickets taken in an Anson career.  His economy rate is also second to none and although the game has changed drastically, I’m sure John would have thought his way around the problem of 20/20 style batting and the railway sleepers they now call bats.

Quite simply, John Monk was a great captain, a fine all-rounder and is the greatest wicket taker in Anson history.  I don’t think his wickets total will ever be beaten.