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Pitching in for Davis

The name of Winston Davis should crop up in conversation during the next few weeks as the only bowler to have taken seven wickets in a World Cup match. The occasion was West Indies versus Australia at Leeds in 1983.

Paralysed from the neck down and needing 24-hour care after an accident, he will be hoping that a fund-raising match at Finedon, near Wellingborough, on Sunday May 23 produces more than simply memories.

Davis, who played 15 Tests and bowled fast for Northamptonshire and Glamorgan on the county circuit, now lives in Worcestershire, having moved from his native St Vincent where the accident occurred last year while he was working on a church project.

Many people on the fringes of the game must feel uncomfortable that able-bodied professional players and the county clubs routinely generate hundreds of thousands of pounds on behalf of themselves and their chums; energetic benefit committees have not been slow to use the World Cup as a money focus.

Yet Davis and Jamie Hood, the Yorkshire second-team cricketer paralysed in a car crash, have had 'benefits' well below an acceptable figure.

Davis, 40, would have been in a serious financial straits last year if readers of The Guardian had not contributed around £35,000, with help from Wisden Cricket Monthly. It would be surprising if readers of the The Daily Telegraph could not match that.

For the Finedon match, Viv Richards has agreed to play for the first time since his retirement seven years ago, and there will be many other famous faces and voices attending. A special fund was set up three weeks ago, with Canada Life making an initial £5,000 donation.

The address of The Winston Davis Fund is: c/o Melanie Henson, 28 Eastfield Crescent, Finedon, Northants NN9 5DJ.

The first official final at Lord's has already taken place - the table cricket national final, an English Cricket Board and Youth Sports Trust project, assisted by the Lord's Taverners.

Table cricket was devised by Doug Williamson, an Australian lecturer in disabled sport at Nottingham Trent University, making ingenious use of a table tennis table.

The batsman uses a mini wooden cricket bat and the bowler runs a golf-size plastic ball down a shute, with the choice of using an alternative weighted one to induce swing. To score runs, any of nine sliding side panels have to be struck, but missing a delivery means the batsman is bowled or lbw if the ball strikes any part of his hand or arm. Other rules refine the play.

The inaugural ECB competition for disabled schoolchildren, attracting 35 entrants, was won by Wilson Stuart School from Birmingham, who beat the Yorkshire finalists Ralph Thoresley School at the new Nursery Pavilion this week.

The occasion was visited by Alec Stewart and six other World Cup captains. The cricket was competitive - the atmospheric World Cup song was turned off when the players complained it was spoiling their concentration.

Tracy Comber, one of the organisers, said: ``The day couldn't have gone better.''

The World Cup is certain to attract many new spectators to the game, which brings to mind Kenneth Hoskins's letter published in The Cricketer some years ago, when he described taking his wife-to-be Audrey to watch her first cricket match, at Southend in 1948, accompanied by her uncle. As luck would have it, they saw Bradman's Australians smash 721 against Essex in one day.

Uncle (proudly): ``Well, Audrey, what did you think of that then?''

Audrey: ``Well, it's all right, I suppose, but a bit slow.''