Medium pace Scott Drabble, perhaps medium slow nowadays. Photo: Merle Cave
It’s his other skin. The skin he’s most comfortable in.
Cricket gear trimmed in yellow and black, coat of arms bearing bats, stumps and sabres. And that staunch heraldic banner: Greerton, Established 1974.
“I put it on as soon as I get home from work.”
Greerton shorts, Greerton shirt, Greerton cap.
“Pretty much what I live in, who I am.” Year in year, year out, for about 35 years.
“I” is Scott Drabble – doyen, patriarch, servant, chattel of the Greerton Cricket Club. A charmingly hopeless devotee of the noble art of cricket.
“Absolutely an obsession. A healthy one…for a beautiful game.”
Cricket, it’s said, eats into the soul like an insidious disease. Drabble can attest.
“The most skilful of games – played over a long time and always demanding mental and physical awareness. But - I don’t want this to be all about me.”
Understood. Because Greerton membership talk of Drabble being one of those self-effacing, deeply caring, kind, loyal, one-of-a-kind, larger than life “good bugger” – their words – who would rather this story be about the “tight supportive family” that is his cricket club. One he pours heart and soul into.
“He absolutely deserves to be celebrated,” vouches Bay of Plenty MP Tom Rutherford, who keeps wickets when Drabble is trundling down his stock, medium pace deliveries for the Greerton reserve grade team.
An intensely annoying delivery, difficult for batsmen to work away, to score off. Forces rash shots, and frustrated batsmen get out. “I get a lot of wickets bowled, because I bowl straight.”
Drabble’s a wily operator. He sniffs wickets.
Every ball he ever bowled was aimed at just one bail perched on off stump. “Line and length mate” is the mantra.
“Part of his charm,” said Rutherford. “Why we love having him, and other teams hate facing him.”
So sorry Drabble, this story is all about you. Because today, weather Gods and a “dicky” knee permitting, his decades-long innings for the Greerton Cricket Club will pass a significant milestone: “My 600th club game.”
What a servant indeed. “I do it because I love it.”
And many of those 600 games at God’s playground, if He played cricket, and we’re sure He did, Drabble’s hallowed and beloved home ground, Pemberton Park on Fraser St.
Every summer weekend for 35 years. “That’s a chunk of one man’s life.” He ponders it. “And then a lot more time in the bar.”
It will take magical balm to get him across the line today.
“Deep Heat’s the most important thing in my kit.”
Those bones have taken a pounding at the bowling crease. “I’d bathe in it if I could.”
Also because he damaged himself diving to field a ball.
“I thought I was 22 when I dived.” Old men pretending to be young men. “But when I stood, I was definitely 49.” He hurt.
Forty-nine – just shy of his maiden half-century. Mind you, years have been easier to accumulate than runs. The best he can brag is a 32 against Te Puke. But with the ball, several six-fers.
“But never more than six.” Five or six wickets in an innings is likened to a century for a batsman. And 1000 wickets all up… perhaps. Who knows? But one memorable scalp.
“I had Kane Williamson caught on the boundary.” What? Drabble waits ‘til the end of our chat before dropping that 24-Karat nugget. Kane Williamson!
“But he was just 15 at the time and had already scored 180,” said Drabble. But still worth dining out on.
Drabble has a Masters in Psychology, so he’s well qualified to apply the dark arts of sledging – getting inside and messing with a batsman’s head, goading, annoying, and unsettling them into getting out. Chirpy as all hell, always a quip, always looking to outsmart the smart.
A colleague lets slip that Drabble is a “real sh***er” on the field – meaning, I suppose, he’s an “edgy” uncompromising competitor. But that gamesmanship stops when back in the pavilion, with convivial glass in hand, he plays a straight bat. He reverts to cordial, courteous and eminently likeable.
“Can’t help but love it,” said the true-blue Rutherford from Pāpāmoa, who plays his cricket in very red Tinetti territory.
He suggests Drabble would have slotted well into national politics once upon a time. “Would have fitted right in with the drinking and smoking.”
But Drabble fits in best in Greerton. Born and raised there, educated around there, athletics there, rugby there, cricket there. Entrenched. “Loyalty is a large part of who I am,” he said.
But this is not “Taps”, not lights out, on Drabble’s career. “I hate thinking of not playing any more. So fighting the inevitable drives me on.”
But if some young upstart with the skillset and mindset comes along, Drabble will happily step aside, maybe run the water, or park in the sun on the bank at Pemberton Park. “Just fine by me.”
There he could sit watching, reminiscing, sledging, bitching and debating about cricket and the world with a couple of other distinguished elder members.
Perfect.
After he’s lugged a few boxes to replenish the bar for the after-match function. “My most important work,” he laughs.
Congratulations. Nice knock, Drabble.