Shoaib shares new world of fun and fantasy

If you arrived at your local golf club to the news that Tiger Woods was joining your foursome, you get some idea of the reaction of the Kent village sides that turn out against the pub team Lashings Cricket Club.

Yesterday, Shoaib Akhtar was on the team sheet (albeit as 13th man) for Lashings, a Tex-Mex bar in Maidstone, in a 40-over match against the Lords East Kent League representative XI. The Lashings team sheet is a veritable Who's Who of cricket: Brian Lara, Richie Richardson, Jimmy Adams, Junior Murray, Stuart Williams and Franklin Rose pad up with pub locals to take on schools and village sides in what could be John Major's fantasy English idyll.

"I pulled out of the tour because I didn't feel able to play international cricket," Shoaib said. "It would have taken a week or more to get better and then I would be short of match practice. So I have come here, where it is a relaxed, friendly atmosphere to build myself up gradually."

Still unwell from the gastroenteritis and blood spitting that caused him to leave the Pakistan tour after last week's one-day international against Australia in Cardiff, Shoaib bowled a few looseners in the nets for the cameras and the kids. Thus it was that 20-year-old Kevin Moore, a student at Salford University, faced Shoaib Akhtar, the "Rawalpindi Express".

Shoaib, who clocked the fastest-ever delivery at 97.7mph with one ball at Sophia Gardens last weekend, said he would only bowl at about 85 here. "I was a bit worried when he said that," Moore admitted. "It came so fast, there was no way I could have made a shot."

The Lashings team has become the Harlem Globetrotters of English cricket. But depending on your point of view, Lashings is either a cynical marketing front for an internet gambling company, or a team of superstars that brings enthusiasm and fun to village cricket.

David Folb is the chairman and driving force behind a team which is bankrolled by the millionaire businessman Simon Noble. He is chairman of Intertops.com, an online gambling site based in Antigua, hence the heavy West Indies contingent. The Test players are not paid to play for Lashings, but they receive hefty endorsements to use the "Rude Boy" bats produced by the Intertops.com Bat Company. Lara is reported to be receiving £100,000 for using the bat in international matches and for turning out for Lashings.

By bringing Shoaib into the team, marketing opportunities into Asia begin to open up for Intertops and Folb now has his eye on the Australian captain, Steve Waugh, to break into the lucrative Australian gambling market.

Balanced against the match-fixing furore in which cricket is still deeply entrenched is Folb's view that the Test players come to Lashings to remember why they started playing cricket in the first place. "There is no pressure here. Cricket is fun again," says Folb. "People always remember when they saw Freddie Trueman play. Well, we take these superstars out to the schools and village cricket grounds and they will remember the time they bowled out Richie Richardson for a duck for the rest of their lives."

The 21-year-old Matthew Wooderson is a Lashings regular and has no doubt that opening the batting with Jimmy Adams is the stuff of dreams. "They make you believe in yourself, to back yourself against anybody. You just don't get that at schoolboy level." And, frankly, if Intertops.com bats are bought by the truckload by a public who think it will improve their Sunday averages, and internet gamblers choose to spend their money on a website that finances half the West Indies Test side to rub shoulders with the up and coming cricketers of east Kent, then why not? And so it was that on a sunny afternoon in Sutton Valence, Junior Murray was dismissed for a duck to a two-handed diving catch by Kent's Dave Masters in the slips off a lively delivery from the Kent Third Division bowler Matt Barnes. "It's a privilege to play these guys and I'm stoked to get Junior for a duck," he said.

With Lara engaged on international duty and Richardson withdrawing through illness, it was left to Adams and Williams. The latter was caught for 13, which left Adams to notch up 63 of Lashings' total of 144, but the representative side reached 145 comfortably to win by six wickets.