My Place in History: the One Next to the One Next to Bradman

For reasons beyond those of the immediate needs of the England team, I really wanted Alastair Cook to make a hundred at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. It's a symmetry thing, completing the circle, and, in journalistic terms, the wish for an angle. When he was a scholar at Bedford School not so very long ago, Cook was coached by the maddest cricket hatter of them all, Derek Randall, and how a young batsman of such serene temperament was created with his help is quite another story.

But 30 years ago this March, at the MCG, Randall played one of Test cricket's greatest innings, scoring 174 against Dennis Lillee in all his rampant pomp, as Australia won by 45 runs the Centenary Test, the celebratory match staged to mark 100 years of Test cricket, and precisely the same result as in the very first match. It's that symmetry thing again.

The Australians never did quite get Rags, a bloke who would get his wife to wear new pads for him when walking around the house, to break them in. He chattered inanely at the crease, burped, whistled, sang The Sun Has Got His Hat On and bounced to his feet to doff his MCC cap (no helmets then) and beam at Lillee when the great bowler dumped him on his backside. He was sledgeable only in the sense that it was best to say nothing at all. He batted like a dream too, driving beautifully and hooking with certainty until, with what would have been a remarkable win starting to become a possibility, he was caught at short leg from the bowling of the leg-spinner Kerry O'Keeffe.

It surprised no one that he then sauntered from the field, bat over his shoulder like Dick Whittington off to seek his fortune and, as the applause rang down from 80,000 people, went through the wrong gate, up the steps and into the royal box where sat the Queen.

All this I watched from much the same position in what was to become the old Ponsford Stand as did the current players who saw Hayden and Symonds lash together their match-winning stand last week. The Centenary Test was my last involvement with the England side, and although it was only to ferry a few drinks here and there (and to shift a few with Lillee, Marsh, Chappell and all in the dungeon changing rooms after hours) I never had such fun.

This time round, along with many others an opportunity was afforded me by the generosity of the England team to take my family on the guided tour of the new "G", a chance to stand on the outfield and risk a nosebleed at the back of the top tier, to see the paintings and photographs and artefacts.

Really, though, I wanted to show them a photograph that I hoped might be on display somewhere - the museum perhaps - taken at the Centenary Test which showed not just both teams but all the many previous Ashes combatants who had been invited to attend, from Percy Fender, the oldest, to David Lloyd who only two years earlier had had his testicles rearranged by Jeff Thomson. This was, it must be said, a slightly hamfisted effort, for rather than set up one large picture - the sort used for school photographs, in which the naughty boy has time to run from one end to the other, thus appearing twice - they staged a number of smaller ones and stuck them together.

Mainly, though, I remember standing on the back row, blazered up, next to Willis and his big hair, when this little man asked if we minded if he joined us. So, for about 20 seconds, before Roger Tolchard, Leicestershire's wicketkeeper-batsman, wriggled his way between us, I found myself perched beside The Don.

In the wonderful museum, we did indeed find the picture, along with a bat autographed by both teams (mine third down below the captain and vice-captain, so I can only think I had been deputed to get the signatures) and Rod Marsh's pads. I stood there for a while, watching and earwigging the visitors scrutinise the ranks of players.

"Look, there's Bradman. And Roger Tolchard." "Similar players." "And there's [Me! Me!] Bob Willis." Ignored. Not even a what-happened-to-him? or who-the-hell-was-he? Claude Rains was more prominent in The Invisible Man. You know where you stand in the pantheon when that happens and it is pretty much below stairs.