I am going to write about Steve Lamb the cricketer and I apologise to anyone reading or listening to this who doesn’t understand cricket or finds it boring, but Steve the cricketer was in many ways the key to Steve the person. I played cricket for more than forty years with Steve. He was an excellent fielder, a good – if slightly under-performing – batsman and a terrific bowler. It would be a mild understatement to remark that he was a much better player than me; I knew it, he knew it, everybody knew it. It is one of the charms of amateur cricket that these things are known and accepted. And yet, I was often the captain: those who can, do; those who can’t, manage.
As a captain you learn a lot about people, but especially in cricket and especially about bowlers. I have captained bowlers who, faced with a surface they didn’t like, a Warwickshire pitch that was low and slow, tossed me the ball and sulked in the field, remarking, “I can’t bowl on that heap of mud”. And bowlers who had to be made to set a fielder for a shot to a bad ball because they claimed they weren’t going to bowl bad balls. Whereas I knew – and they should have done – that they were. And bowlers who, having been hit for a couple of sixes, went to pieces and could barely finish their over.
And then there was Steve. He was as capable as anyone I ever played with of frightening batsmen with his pace on certain wickets, but if he found no pace in the wicket, he would consult me, ask me to set a defensive field and bowl meanly. Very occasionally he would be hit for a couple of sixes and he would remark to the effect that we had found a shot the batsman could play so now we must find one he couldn’t. It was always calm and gentlemanly, without any aggression other than that in the delivery of the ball and without histrionics. His run-up was legendary: big, blond athletic man, running at three quarter pace, then a hitch kick, then flat out.
Steve could have played cricket at a much higher level, but he preferred to be with his friends and colleagues from the university staff. I like to think that our conversation was more interesting. In any case he – along with a few of our contemporaries – was responsible for the University of Warwick Staff and Graduate Cricket Club playing at increasingly high levels of the game.
Steve’s virtues on the cricket field were also his virtues in life. I admired and respected him enormously though we were very different as was often remarked. He was a “belt and braces” man and I tended to have an”It’ll be all right on the night” approach to life, believing that at least a fair proportion of gambles would come off. Sadly, his caution and pessimism were rooted in his experiences of life.
Sitting here, writing this, I can feel an intense nostalgia. Steve and I are standing on a sunlit field. He is busy polishing one side of the ball while explaining to me the field he thinks we need to frustrate the batsman he is about to bowl to . . . Happy days, we will all miss him.
Lincoln Allison
(I went to visit Steve in early December at Jubilee House where he was being cared for only to be told that he had been taken to hospital. He died before Christmas and his funeral and memorial were held on Tuesday January 13th 2026. Sadly we were abroad and could not attend and I sent this cricketing memory to his son Chris with whom I had also played cricket many times.)