culprit in this case is known to be someone with access to the Yorkshire dressing-room. He (or she?) waits until the dressing-room is deserted, then quickly seizes his (or her?) moment, moving in with a pair of scissors and snipping the toes off a sock belonging to the intended victim. When the victim goes to pull his sock on after the game, he pulls it up to his knee and realises, to his horror, that he has become the latest victim of JACK (OR JACQUELINE?) THE SNIPPER.
Understandably, nobody has ever owned up to these crimes, so the mystery remains unsolved. Police now suspect that the culprit may have multiple identities.
Not the most original of practical jokes, perhaps, but most of the Yorkshire players have seen it as a mildly amusing, relatively harmless gag if they happened to be a victim. But one season the Snipper targeted David Byas so many times that he no longer saw the funny side. Gadge, as he was known (for his extraordinary Inspector Gadget-like extending arms in the slips), was our captain at the time and, after his socks had been snipped for the umpteenth time, he decided the time had come to put an end to the tomfoolery.
In the build-up to one Sunday League game at Headingley, Gadge told us that we all had to be at the ground by 10 o’clock in the morning, even though the match wasn’t due to begin until 1.30 in the afternoon. It seemed a strange request, but Gadge was keen on punctuality, so everyone dutifully turned up at the appointed time. At which point the skipper took us all out to the middle of the ground at Headingley and asked us to sit in a big circle. He sat down with us and then told us why we were all sitting there looking as though we were about to play Pass the Parcel. ‘Right, you lot,’ he said, ‘nobody is moving from this circle until I find out which pillock has been snipping my f***ing socks. I just want to know who it is, then we can have a quick chat, move on and all go for some lunch.’ Nobody said a word. For a good few minutes there was complete and utter silence.
‘Come on,’ said Gadge, after a while. ‘I’m not joking here. We’re going to get to the bottom of this nonsense. Whoever has been snipping my socks is sitting in this circle and I want to know who it is.’
Still nobody said anything. There was another long, uncomfortable silence. After we’d been there for about half an hour, Gadge became more insistent—still reasonably calm, but the tone of his voice raised slightly. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘If nobody has got the balls to own up to doing these stupid stunts, it’s a piss-poor effort. All you need to do is be big enough to own up, then we can move on.’
And still nobody said anything. We had probably been there for around an hour when Gadge started to get angry. ‘For f***’s sake,’ he said, ‘will somebody PLEASE tell me who has been snipping my f***ing socks?’
Once again, there was only silence. And I kid you not, we were sitting out on that field, in that circle, for three hours. THREE WHOLE HOURS! Eventually, at one o’clock, the opposition captain arrived out in the middle, asking if we were ready to toss up, and Gadge, as captain, had no option but to get up and leave us. So Jack the Snipper had slipped off the leash again and he remains at large to this very day. If you ever find yourself having to spend a day in or around the Yorkshire dressing-room, it may be worth your while packing a spare pair of socks.
The same season as that unfortunate incident, there was an outbreak of a similar—but unrelated—crime in the Yorkshire second team. At the time, I was in and out of the first and second teams, so I saw some of the events first hand and have called on extremely reliable witnesses to fill me in on the bits I missed. Again, this spate of crimes involved some tampering with the kit of a senior member of the dressing-room, but this time socks were not involved. This time the crime was theft and the stolen items were underpants belonging to Steve Oldham, Esso, the second team coach.
Pinching someone’s underpants might, again, seem like a fairly low-level jape, causing brief hilarity in the dressing-room, and mild irritation to the victim. But if you’re playing away from home for a four-day match and you have four pairs of undies stolen, it can be more than a little frustrating. It’s difficult to replace the pants, for a start, because you have to be at a cricket match all day while the shops are open, and a week without undies is, I imagine, not much fun.
And if, like Esso, this happens to you for seven four-day matches in succession, that’s twenty-eight pairs of underpants that have gone missing. Boxer shorts, Y-fronts, briefs; you name them, Esso lost the lot.
As you’d expect, Esso grew more and more frustrated as his stock of underpants became gradually depleted during the season. But he tried hard to keep his cool, to make it seem as though the thefts weren’t getting to him, to deny the prankster the satisfaction of seeing him upset.
That pretence of calm became harder to maintain once his pants started to reappear in increasingly unusual ways. The first pair was returned during a game at Bradford Park Avenue. Esso was sitting watching the game, when he casually glanced up at the flagpole and noticed a pair of his Y-fronts billowing in the breeze where the Yorkshire flag should have been. Nobody would own up to hoisting the offending item, so Esso made us all run around the ground for an hour in the pouring rain at the end of the day’s play.
The next second team game was at York and we travelled to the ground as usual in three or four cars. I was in one of the middle cars and Esso was in one of the cars further back. When we turned off the A64 for the last leg of the journey, we saw the road sign saying ‘Welcome to York’, but hung over the corner of the sign was another pair of Esso’s undies. I’m not sure whether he stopped his car to retrieve them or not, but at the end of the game at York we found ourselves running round the outfield again as punishment.
Perhaps the thief was starting to take pity on Esso by now, because the underpants were being returned to him on a regular basis. Never in a straightforward way, but at least he was gaining pants rather than losing them. I wasn’t around to see the next pair returned, but I heard that they were discovered during the second team’s next home game at Bingley, where the groundsman had a dog. At some point during that game, the groundsman’s dog was spotted running onto the field, wearing what looked very much like a pair of men’s briefs. I missed out on the post-match laps of the boundary that time, but by this stage Yorkshire’s second team must have been the fittest side on the circuit.
It was now getting towards the end of the season and, whether or not the thief was running out of ideas, he was running out of time to return the rest of his loot. Our final home game of the season was at Castleford and, when Esso drove into the ground, he was finally put out of his misery. Strung around the railings of the car park, like bunting at a school fair, were the remaining twenty-one pairs of underpants, good as new, ready to be reclaimed by their rightful owner, and Esso’s torment was at an end. Isn’t it nice when a crime story has a happy ending?
I don’t want to name names here in case anyone’s lawyer gets onto me, but there were strong suspicions that Alex Morris, our gangly all-rounder from Barnsley, may have been involved in these pranks. And Gareth Batty, the off-spinner, was also considered not to be beyond suspicion. But once again, the crime remained unsolved. For some reason, Alex left Yorkshire a couple of years later and moved to the other end of the country to play for Hampshire. Similarly, Batts soon departed to play for Surrey. I’ve never found out whether their departures were related to the case of Esso’s undies.
Once I had finished my A-levels in 1995, I spent most of the summers of 1996 and 1997 playing for Yorkshire’s Second XL I made my first-class debut in July 1996, against South Africa A, but didn’t get a run of games
