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Last September, on a glorious afternoon late in the half-summer, I was playing for the Forty Club Eastern Counties against British Tamil in Romford - just about the furthest I’ve been from my home in the last 12 months.
The skipper had brought along with him an umpire. During the game, the umpire gave away no inkling of the number of runs he had scored or the catches and stumpings he had pulled off in his own playing days. If I’d known I’d have been a bit more sheepish when I went out to the crease or pulled on my keeping gear.
Luckily I stuck around afterwards for a post-match pint in the warm sun – it made sense to lap it up before the depressingly inevitable return to lockdown – and discovered that this man, John Stuck, had no scored no fewer than 209 centuries in his life.
Last summer was the first since 1957, when he played his first match for Sudbury Grammar School Under-14s, that ‘Stucky’ did not play a game of cricket. Else he might well have brought up century No. 210.
After I met him, I came across an interview he did with Scott Oliver last winter in which he claimed to have retired in 2019, at the age of 75, due to an arthritic pelvis. He didn’t have to test his abstinence last season because Essex Over-70s, his main team now, didn’t play any matches in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
It seems he’s having second thoughts though when I call him at home in Clacton-on-Sea. He may well be digging his kitbag out of the attic this spring just like the rest of us.
“I’ve still got an appetite to play. I haven’t fully retired!
“Umpiring’s fine – I did about 30 games last summer. I was in regular demand because of the rush of fixtures from July onwards.
“I’ve still got the bug, so I might try to play some over-70s cricket for Essex this year. I played right at the end of 2019 in three games and Essex won the Over-70 County Championship.
“I can still see the ball – there’s no problem with that. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have taken up umpiring! And yes, I am familiar with the old umpiring joke ‘I’m struggling to see the ball out there, so I’m taking up umpiring’…
“I’m happy to keep wicket too, but it depends if they want me to. I’d prefer to do that. I stand up to the stumps to all the bowling now. I can’t move around much standing back. I can’t really bend down anymore, but oddly I can keep wicket without bending too much. But the arthritic pelvis makes fielding elsewhere very difficult.”
Doesn’t he have any other aches and pains? Wicketkeepers’ knees are supposed to go, aren’t they?
But he says: “I’ve got surprisingly good knees considering all the crouching. Around 2010 I found I could hardly walk, although there was no pain.
“I assumed my knee was the issue after all the wicketkeeping, and I was about to have keyhole surgery to remove some cartilage, but at the pre-op the specialist suspected something wasn’t right and he X-rayed my hip. It had totally disintegrated. So I had a whole hip replacement and I’ve been fine in the 10 years since then.”
Stuck was born in Ipswich in 1943, and played for local clubs in Suffolk before joining Clacton in 1963 in order to bat on a plumb pitch then used as one of Essex’s multiple outgrounds.
Though Stuck played 64 Minor Counties Championship matches for Suffolk between 1969 and 1979, and scored more than 43,000 runs for Clacton – including 73 hundreds, 50 of them at their Vista Road ground – he freely admits that the majority of his centuries have been scored in over-age or veterans cricket, for county over-50s, 60s or 70s sides, the Forty Club and the like.
“Oh, I wouldn’t have scored 200 hundreds just playing first-team cricket. I have played a lot of vets cricket and that’s where I’ve scored most of them. One or two bowlers retain their pace once they get to that age, but most of them get slower and so it’s easier to bat.
“I did have to work out a new way to score runs when I first came into vets cricket, though. Instead of just deflecting the ball down to third man as you could against quicker bowlers, I found it hard to break the infield.
“I’ve always felt I have to count my runs up to 20 and then after that I can press on. It does have a bit of an effect on the opposition and if they've seen me before they tend to feel they have to get me out early.”
Stuck has great memories of Alvin Greenidge (R) - pictured here in Cape Town
Although he has record of 209 hundreds and 110,000-plus runs, Stuck knows he has scored more, but can find no evidence of them.
“I have 209 on record, but I know there are more out there that I don’t have proof of – a couple of midweek hundreds I scored for Chelmsford for starters. And you can’t count ones you don’t have proof of…”
No.200 came for East Herts Cavaliers in 2008, and No.209 at the Sudbury Festival in 2019. The way old scorecards are being dug out and uploaded onto Play-Cricket, there’s still a chance he could find that number boosted a bit.
Just one of his centuries was scored in the Minor Counties Championship, he says because of the breakneck pace of the games, in which four-innings matches were played over two days with plenty of declarations and contrived run-chases. He often ran out of time.
“It was almost two separate games. You would try to get a lead on first innings, which gave you three points. But then you had to sort of win the game all over again by trying to set a target or arrange one.
“Funnily enough, the teams that made opposition follow on almost never won, because there just wasn’t the time to take 20 wickets without the carrot being there for the other side.
“You had to gamble to lose in order to win. Bedfordshire had a captain called Jack Smith [who died last year] and he won them the Championship twice in three years, and in between they finished virtually bottom. That summed up the gambles he took.”
Stuck says he was picked by Suffolk because of the way he put a price on his wicket, and his usefulness on the sticky uncovered wickets which prevailed when the weather was iffy. But he could attack and innovate when needed.
“I was a big hooker of the ball as a kid and I used to love facing quick bowling. But then when I was at Woodbridge School [on a scholarship] an Australian who played for Northamptonshire called Jock Livingston came down to coach us, and within an hour’s session he turned me into an offside player, cover driving properly.
Allan Border Field - scene of Stuck's most satisfying century
“I became a good cutter and had a fairly solid all-round game. When I got in I could hit the fast bowlers over the top too.
“In order to get away in Minor Counties cricket I used to sweep the quick bowlers, though I didn’t realise I was actually playing a sweep until Ken Suttle, the former Sussex player who came to play for Suffolk, said ‘never in my whole career have I seen a batsman sweep as much as you do’.
And bear in mind Suttle played more consecutive County Championship matches, 423, than anyone.
Stuck adds: “I became known for that shot. But I have never attempted a reverse-sweep or lap or anything like the stuff they do now…”
Of all the bowlers he ever faced, among the toughest must have been Sonny Ramadhin, the legendary West Indies mystery spinner who played five seasons for Lincolnshire during Stuck’s era.
“In one match he bowled two deliveries that I thought were rank long-hops outside off stump. They fizzed back, hardly got off the ground and bowled me. So I had to tell myself ‘OK, he doesn’t bowl a long-hop’…”
Stuck has toured all over the world: “Australia, India, Sri Lanka, UAE, Barbados about eight times, South Africa, Holland about 50 times, and been to New Zealand to watch. I’ve even played in Estonia!”
His most satisfying hundred was for England Over-70s against Australia Over-70s at the sumptuous Allan Border Field in Brisbane.
“The conditions were wonderful, superb for batting, but goodness me it was hot. I retired after my century with severe cramp and then had to get back on the field to keep wicket for 50 overs! But they had all the physios and medical staff there that you needed. They play hard cricket in Australia but they’re great people, great entertainers, off the pitch.
“And I must have achieved some kind of notoriety in Holland because once when I was fielding for Suffolk in a two-day match against the full Netherlands side, someone shouted ‘Well fielded Stucky’ from the crowd in a Dutch accent!”
Club cricket has changed considerably during Stuck’s life. Before 1971 there was no league cricket in the south, but friendlies on Saturdays and Sundays, all with the draw rule. Midweek cricket, where he scored plenty of his runs, has almost died out in recent years, mainly due the demands of modern work practices and the ease of taking holidays abroad. The Forty Club are one club who keep the midweek flame burning.
There was so much cricket around it’s no wonder that – discounting the likes of Jack Hobbs, who must have scored the lion’s share of their 200-plus hundreds in first-class cricket – Stuck believes there are (or were) five other people who have scored a double-century of centuries in recreational or amateur cricket.
He knows of two from Essex active in the interwar period. Tray Grinter of Frinton-on-Sea, whose left hand was rendered useless in the Battle of Loos in 1915, but still came back from the Great War to score another 100-plus centuries by the age of 50. Another was Len Newman from Chelmsford, who scored many of his runs for Alexandra Park.
Stuck says: “When I played for Suffolk I just took my holiday and pretty much used it all up on cricket. In the end, it interfered with my married life so I had to step away from it, plus I was coming near the end of my time anyway.
“When I stopped playing first-team cricket regularly in the 1990s I’d say club cricket was about as strong as I’ve seen it.
“But I’m not one of those people who say that club cricket was always better in my day. I’ve seen a lot of Premier League cricket and the standard of first-team cricket is very good, especially with money not being short in club cricket these days and overseas players being around. It’s almost county standard sometimes.
“I’ll never forget watching Grant Flower bat for Burwell one day against Vauxhall Mallards [in the 2010 East Anglian Premier League]. Paul Bradshaw, a very good bowler, was all over him and when they got to the meal break Grant was 19 not out and should have been out several times.
“I had a beer with him and arranged to go and watch him a few days later in Essex’s Sunday League game [against Gloucestershire]. He scored a brilliant hundred. It just shows the difference in the quality of the pitches – even though most Premier League pitches are good – and the bowling perhaps being just that touch slower.”
Helmets became available only in the 1980s, and while Stuck usually wears one to bat, he never does to keep, as he can’t see the ball if it’s skied in the air. (I agree on that.)
The theory was tested to its fullest when Alvin Greenidge – the former West Indies and Barbados opener who would have played many more Tests were it not for his namesake Gordon – came over to play for Clacton after being banned for joining the rebel tours of apartheid South Africa in the mid-1980s.
Sonny Ramadhin had Stuck's number
“My God, he was some batter,” says Stuck. “He’d played club cricket in Holland before that and had discovered there that he could really get the ball through on their matting wickets. I’d say he could crank it up above 80mph.
“But because he was a part-timer and only came in off three paces he insisted I stand up to him. Luckily he mostly pitched it up…” Remarkably, Stuck says he’s never suffered a bad blow to the head while keeping, just once in the mouth.
As if Stuck’s cricket wasn’t impressive enough, he was the BBC’s first full-time computer software engineer and finished his career working in defence for BAE Systems.
And, given all that John Stuck has seen and done, it’s no surprise he’s written an autobiography. What did he call it? Well, Stuck in the Middle, of course.
Maybe if you’re playing a match in 2021, you’ll be lucky enough to run into him.
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