When he had scored seven Gooch edged a straightforward chance to me
When he had scored seven Gooch edged a straightforward chance to me. Kent, having won the toss, made 400 for seven declared in their first innings, pretty formidable in those early days of longer games In reply, Essex were in a bit of trouble at 33 for two This could have been a bit bigger still. It was our first four- day match; Graham Gooch scored 275, which was then his career best; Graham Cowdrey and I both got our first hundreds; and it set a record for the total number of runs, 1,570, made in a game in the history of the competition The bare statistics tell but part of the story. Earlier in the day, Ross Brawn had said: "People stay in this area because there are four or five good teams here, and if they are not happy with one team, they can often find a position with another fairly easily." Good luck, Charlie.. THERE will always be something special about our County Championship match against Essex at Chelmsford in April 1988.
"Who's going to buy those?"In the design office, where Nick Wirth drew the cars he hoped would take his team to glory, the auctioneers had been around with their tags: a steering wheel was Lot 72, an office fan Lot 79 The cars were the saddest sight. Pristine in their purple livery, they looked magnificent on the track. But sitting driverless in the garage they seemed pointless, absurd Nick Wirth's overalls hung on the wall. On the blackboard, between scribbled diagrams, someone had scrawled: "It's all turned to bollocks."The sport's organisers and the establishment teams shed no tears for Simtek.
They respect Wirth's talent and Moody's diligence, but suggest that their enthusiasm got the better of them. "If they didn't have the money to get through the season," a marketing man with one of the biggest teams said, "they shouldn't have started it." But even now Charlie Moody can't understand why no one was prepared to step in to save the team: "I can't believe that there's nobody in the world who wants to go Formula One racing."Simtek were the victims of a particularly vicious circle: little teams can't attract big sponsors; if you don't attract big sponsors, you won't get to be a big team.Charlie Moody doesn't know if he'll be around when his little team is sold off in bits: he's got one or two other jobs to look into. We did everything as cheaply as possible." Now and then he'd stop by a box of bits and reminisce about where they were made, trying to summon again the energy which once drove the team. "These are the parts we fabricated when we were in trouble in Brazil," he said softly, turning the little oblongs of metal over in his fingers.