Where's Bobby Dawson when you need him?

There is a great little story in one of Simon Hughes' books that concerns Gatting and Gooch. Gatting is preparing for one of his final seasons as he desperately tries to hunt down his hundredth hundred. Gooch is encouraging him to put in a bit more effort with his sit-ups by quipping, "Come on Mike, I don't want you to have to get them against the universities". Gatting responds with something along the lines of, "That's not fair Goochie, you scored about 10 hundreds against them". When the Jessop Tavern was younger they use to peruse the Cricketer's Who's Who every season and a surefire sign of a shit player was someone who's highest score was against the universities. Bobby Dawson springs to mind.

What we are getting at is that a game against the universities is a time to fill your boots. Get stuck in and pad that average with cheap runs. In other words, we had Hamish Marshall nailed on for a hundred.

Instead Gloucestershire were rolled over for 227. The good news. Well, a couple of injured players are welcomed back. Dan Housego and David Payne come back after a few weeks out, where as Liam 'Lazarus' Norwell is back from the dead. Norwell hasn't played since a game against Middlesex this time last year. He only played 3 games last season, but he did potentially look like an exciting prospect.

We wrote recently that last week's game against Yorkshire would teach us a lot about this Gloucestershire team. What we learnt was that there was a lot of heart in this bunch of youngsters, and a great willingness to keep plugging away. Yorkshire were clearly a team with a lot more quality. That's fair enough. Despite a slow start to the season, it's hard to not see those miserable gits getting promoted straight back to division one. Whilst it is fine to be outclassed by Yorkshire, to be outclassed by some posh buggers from Cambridge is slightly harder to swallow.

We are perfectly happy to soak up all the talk of 'learning experiences', 'improving youngsters' and 'naivety'. However, we are only happy to take all this talk if we can see the potential in the youngsters. Now we are not saying there is no talent in this team, and we are hoping that yesterday was just a bad day at the office, but we would like to see the potential in these youngsters to become good county players. We don't expect all of them to make it as county pros. But if we are going to have to build our future on the back of these youngsters, then a couple of them have to go on to be consistent performers.

Let's hope for a few Bobby Dawson-esque performances over the next couple of days!

Heroes of the Jessop Tavern: The original Monte. Monte Lynch

I know what you're thinking. How can a man who made 3 England one day appearances, long before he joined Gloucestershire to wind down his career, count as a hero. Well, quite simply, because, in a nutshell, Monte Lynch summed up Gloucestershire in the mid 1990's. A player signed with no pretensions of developing. A  man signed to do a job for a couple of years, happy to steer a steady course through the mediocrity that was the bottom of half of the county championship.

But we loved Monte Lynch, a man who won England caps because when captain Mike Gatting was asked what he thought of Lynch, he thought that they had said lunch and thus gave a hearty, 'yes'!

Monte Lynch joined Gloucestershire the same year that I became a member for the first time, 1995. One of my first memories of going down to Nevil road was of Monte wandering around the boundary boards during the interval of a one day game and asking me and and some of mates to give him a couple of chuck downs. It wouldn't happen these days, although if captain Gidders is reading this, I am available to chuck down a few with a windball if he wants to get some confidence back.

His record for Gloucestershire was mediocre to say the least. 2000 runs, at 32, over 3 seasons. Good enough for many of the current team, granted, but for a man who spent most of his career scoring a thousand runs a season at Surrey, pretty poor.

Despite this the Jessop Tavern View has come to realise, in its slightly older age, that Monte represented the glory years of county cricket. The 1980's. The years when the very best players in the world played week in, week out on the county circuit. The years when Desmond Haynes could be heard bantering through the dressing room wall that he was going to give Malcolm Marshall "some drives, boy". Only for Marshall to chunter back that he had better bring a step ladder. These were the glorious years that the jessop Tavern View never got to see. Yet our memories of Monte scoring a quickfire 50 at Cheltenham batting on one leg, refusing to run, makes us realise that this was what it was like in the 80's. Great characters. Great cricket. Great fun.

For giving us a taste of this, Monte is our hero.