The bulk of the photos here are of the visiting West Indies team.
There are a few oddities in there too – after the West Indies game there was a charity match, an Allan Lamb XI vs Eric Clapton’s showbiz XI which is why there are photos of Clapton and Bill Wyman here.
But for me the main story of 1988 was the fact that Northamptonshire somehow signed Australian legend Dennis Lillee…
On a quiet Bank Holiday Monday morning in May, on a boring day in a County Championship match against Leicestershire, Lillee slipped in the field and damaged his ankle ligaments. I had my camera with me and took a couple of photos.
The next morning I wandered into the pressbox and asked the cricket reporter from the local paper (the Chronicle & Echo) if he’d be interested in them (and yes I know that I should have rung an agency or national paper as soon as it happened!).
He said yes, and asked me to take the film to the paper’s office, where they would develop it and see if it was usable.
When the paper arrived at home that evening I turned to the sports page on the back to see if they’d printed either of them. They hadn’t. There wasn’t even anything on the inside sports page.
The photo of him being carried off was actually on the front page, complete with a credit. I still have the clipping somewhere.
To their credit, they did pay me (something like £25) and gave the negatives back.
And a week or two afterwards their Saturday sport paper (“the pink ‘un”) also did a little story on the “local student who scooped the world”.
The picture was also published in Wisden Cricket Monthly and The Cricketer – the two main cricket magazines at the time.
Dennis Lillee himself asked for a couple of copies of the photo.
Some years later I was looking at books in Borders, and saw that there was a new Dennis Lille autobiography, so I had a flick through it. And the photo was in it. I chased up the publisher, proved I’d taken it, and they paid me for it as well.
