Lockdown delivered another fabulous virtual fellowship event with guest speaker Allan Lamb, aka Legga, Lambie. Assistant Jim Connell tells us how this former England cricketer and captain was batting at his very best on Zoom.
Almost 40 years since his test debut against India, Lambie enthused about his time playing with many English cricketing greats including Ian Botham (Beefy).
Lambie is well known to Liverymen for working alongside Beefy in an English Lamb and Beef advertising campaign, promoting Quality Standard Beef and Lamb. What we did not know is that they were so bad at live cooking that was the reason that they were made to switch to cartoon characters. Not only that, but the voice overs were so wooden the producers sent them off for a long lunch, which miraculously solved the problem!
What was apparent from all the anecdotes was that most cricketing tours of Australia involved drinking copious amounts of Bollinger Champagne, supplied by David Gower, and attending quite a few red wine dinners organised by Beefy. Pre-match team talks were more about which Australian red wine to order, rather than opposition player weaknesses and tactics.
Whilst this sounds quite unorthodox, the tactic clearly worked because they retained the Ashes on the 1987 tour captained by Mike Gatting. This was despite losing the previous series to the West Indies 5-0 and being branded by the press as the worst cricket team ever to leave our shores.
In the Q&A session, Lambie chose West Indian's Malcolm Marshall and Viv Richards as the best bowler and batsman he had played against.
Despite statistics pointing towards Jacques Kallis, the greatest all-rounder was declared to be his great mate Beefy, as his ability to single-handedly win matches meant he simply was the best.
There were many other fabulous cricketing stories told, enough to fill a book.
They may very well feature in Alan's autobiography Silence of the Lamb so I may have to look into that. However, I'm certain that many of the stories shared with us could not ever go to print, which meant it was fantastic to be part of this event to hear them first hand.
The traditional Champagne Draw, sponsored by Assistant Dave Richards, was won by fellow Liveryman Jock Harmer.
Special thanks to our Events and Engagement team who together with Carla staged a great event.
What it taught us was that Lambie had a career which spanned a time where you played hard but also enjoyed good old fashioned ‘sledging’, pranks and most of all camaraderie.