My favourite: Alison Mitchell on being enthralled by Curtly Ambrose

He was the towering man with the long arms and white flashing wristbands. To my pre-teen self, Curtly Ambrose (now Sir Curtly) was an alluring giant

He came back. He kept coming back. He was ours.

He was the towering man with the long arms and white flashing wristbands. To my pre-teen self as I sat alongside my father watching Northamptonshire play at Wantage Road in the early 1990s, Curtly Ambrose (now Sir Curtly) was an alluring giant.

When he grinned, his mouth spread the width of his face and his teeth gleamed. I remember seeing that grin when he celebrated a wicket, usually having cleaned up a county batsman with a 90mph rocket delivered from his 6ft 7in frame, with a release point some 10 feet off the ground. When he pumped his arms in celebration his sweatbands resembled a shower of celebratory confetti. 

During a particularly quick spell of bowling, if you saw Curtly stand mid-pitch delivering a withering stare to an opposition batsman, you knew that batsman was in trouble. If the stare broke into a tiny smile, the batsman knew it would be worse.

Stare or no stare though, my older brother and I just thought Curtly was cool. In the garden, Curtly’s bowling action was eminently replicable, with the waggle of the cocked right wrist. We’d play ‘guess the bowler’ in the back garden, and my brother added him to his repertoire alongside the run-ups of Merv Hughes and Abdul Qadir.

When Curtly played for Northants, he was ‘ours’. The 1990s was still a time when overseas players became attached to counties and returned season after season. The sense of pride felt when watching him in a Northants shirt became mixed with squeamishness whenever he was in a West Indies shirt training his radar on the stumps of England batsmen. Mike Atherton was his most frequent victim, dismissed 17 times by Curtly in Tests.

I don’t remember anyone around the County Ground ever using Curtly’s surname in conversation. You might have heard captain Allan Lamb refer to ‘Ambi’, but otherwise Curtly was enough for us supporters. So please excuse my continued use of it here.

If I’d been old enough back then to recognise the ‘strong, silent type’, Curtly would have fitted the bill perfectly – at least when it came to the press. His famous moniker when in his pomp was “Curtly talks to no one”. Fortunately, when I was watching Curtly play for Northants in my school holidays, I had no reason to ask him to speak to me. All I had to do was lean out over the advertising hoardings as his long strides carried him towards the pavilion, hold up an autograph book and ask him to sign it, which he duly did.

"The pride when watching him for Northants mixed with squeamishness when he trained his radar on England batsmen"

Curtly featured in my first visit to a Test ground. The year was 1992 and it was a significant one for Northamptonshire cricket with Lamby leading a side that included Curtly to long-awaited victory in the NatWest Trophy. En route to that triumph, my father and one of his cricket-loving friends decided to make a day out of the semi-final against Warwickshire, and take all their children to Edgbaston.

We packed a picnic box into Dad’s car and met up with everyone else in Birmingham. The weather was against us though, and a lengthy rain delay threatened to turn the day into a huge disappointment. The fathers wondered how they were going to keep their restless children entertained. As the wet weather settled in, one of the dads had the brainwave of driving us up the road to Cadbury World in Bournville. Chocolate heaven beckoned. After a few hours and a factory tour later, we memorably returned to our seats at Edgbaston clutching a bulk box of 48 Curly Wurly chocolate bars.

Never mind the cricket or Curtly’s two wickets that helped bowl Warwickshire out for just 149. That day is forever remembered for extreme consumption of confectionery (thinking about it now, I can’t believe we didn’t think to start calling them ‘Curtly’ Wurlys).

The bulk purchase caused quite a stir among spectators around us, who naturally urged us to share with them when we sat down. And so, as rain brought an early close to our day with Northants 47 for 2 and Lamb and Nigel Felton due to resume with the bat on a reserve day, we kept spirits up by supplying damp spectators with chocolate-coated fudge bars. We ate a heck of a lot of them ourselves too.

Over the course of six seasons between 1989 and 1996, he took over 400 wickets for Northants. He had Leicestershire for breakfast in a Championship match in 1990, taking 7 for 89 in the first innings and 5 for 66 in the second. He twice took 10-wicket hauls against Derbyshire, including a first innings 7 for 48 in 19.4 overs in 1994. Good times.

The spells of Test bowling have gone down in folklore, such as his 7 for 1 run against Australia at Perth, and his devastation of England in Trinidad. I was 14 when he and Courtney Walsh rolled Atherton’s England for 46 to win that third Test in 1993/94– another formative memory that helped cement an affection with this beguiling game.

The other Curtly story to enter folklore that year – albeit across Northamptonshire rather than the cricket world – was Curtly’s return to the county scene following what he found to be a draining five-Test series. The tale went that Curtly decided he needed a break before flying to the UK, but had neglected to tell Northants. Chief executive Steve Coverdale duly travelled to Gatwick to meet him as scheduled, but there was no sign of Curtly getting off the plane from Antigua. This despite reports that Coverdale had spoken to him only a couple of days earlier.

The story still irks Curtly. He insists he told Northants that he wanted to arrive later than planned, but when he eventually flew in, he arrived to newspaper headlines accusing him of going AWOL. It didn’t matter to me whether Curtly had gone AWOL or not. The point was, he came back. He kept coming back. He was ours.

This article was published in the July 2019 edition of The Cricketer - the home of the best cricket analysis and commentary, covering the international, county, women's and amateur game

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