In the 50 years in which David Foot reported on county cricket, there were perhaps three innings that captured the public imagination more than any other: a blistering 322 scored in only four and a quarter hours by Viv Richards at Taunton, an epic 405 by the young Graeme Hick, also at Taunton, and a world-record 501 by Brian Lara at Edgbaston. It was David’s happy fate to watch every ball of all three.
As a boy, growing up in rural poverty in Somerset, David had dreamed of becoming a cricket writer. “Will I ever become a real, a REAL journalist? Will I have the opportunity of writing ‘specials’, getting to the heart of human nature?” he asked himself in a teenage diary, written while serving a drudge-filled apprenticeship on the deeply conservative Western Gazette in Yeovil.
