GEOFF REACHED 200 NOT OUT

Hard-hitting opener Geoff Robinson - one of the finest batsmen ever to appear for Lincolnshire's Minor Counties team - played his 200th match in July, 1986.
It was against Cambridgeshire at Burghley Park, Stamford. And during the lunch interval on the first day, county president Ken Portlock presented him with glassware to mark he milestone.
Geoff and Ken were both key members of Ross Sports Cricket Club in Grimsby (previously known as Ross Group).
I can't share a picture of the presentation with you, as back then sports reporters wrote copy and photographers took the pictures...if one happened to be in the right place at the right time. Which didn't happen on this occasion.
A few years later we acquired a Canon Sureshot camera (using film) and I remember trying it out for the first time to take a picture or two at Bourne during a Lincolnshire match (team manager Terry Bates was one 'victim'). Obviously the Sureshot was only capable of close-ups of players and officials, having no big lens suitable for action shots. Even if I'd had the skills necessary to take them.
These days the rapid growth of digital and phone cameras, with supporting software to "tweak" the images, allied to the internet and websites, means Lincs Cricket Latest can bring you a wide range of pictures.
Some 20 years ago we were amazed when a cricket reporter from a newspaper in Cambridge turned up at a Minor Counties game with portable computer, from which he filed his copy through a modem and the telephone network.
He showed us how he could locate all scorecards from that season to check how many a particular player had made in an earlier match, doing away with the need to keep a scrapbook full of cuttings and take it round the circuit with him.
Being without the help of such new technology in the mid to late 1980s I'm delighted I kept scrapbooks of my writing output, as these days they offer fascinating archive material, a small fraction of which we are sharing with you on Lincs Cricket Latest from time to time.