Albion veteran knows the score

Long-serving Albion scorer Helen Simpson is clocking up her 50th season for the club.PHOTO:...
Long-serving Albion scorer Helen Simpson is clocking up her 50th season for the club.PHOTO: GREGOR RICHARDSON
Who has scored the most runs for Albion?

If you guessed Glenn Turner, Jamie Glenn or perhaps one of the McCullums, you would be wrong, wrong and wrong.

Helen Simpson has outscored all of them put together.

Remarkably, the 68-year-old is in her 50th season as the club's scorer.

She has spent countless hours at Culling Park and the various grounds around the city faithfully recording the score.

That is 49 years, in case that fact slipped you by - almost half a century of skipping a summer holiday just to make sure everything adds up.

All the counting and careful recording has its rewards. There is always a glass of bubbly to look forward to at the end of the match.

Occasionally, someone will turn up with "a bunch of flowers or a bottle of wine".

She has a team jacket with a very warm lining. And when Albion has made it to the national club championships, Simpson has gone with them to Auckland to keep the score.

But what has kept her returning each summer has been her passion for cricket and the simple enjoyment she gets from a job well done.

"I enjoy it. It is that simple, really," she said.

"There is something actually quite satisfying about sitting there with your book and it all adds up at the end. You look at some of the other books and you wonder how they ever work out the averages at the end of the season."

Simpson played cricket while at Bayfield High School. She will tell you she was not very good, but enjoyed the game and wanted to stay involved.

A family connection suggested she might like to score for Albion. That was in 1970. She was 18.

She remembers her first day vividly. New Zealand cricket great Glenn Turner was the captain of Albion at the time and he picked her up in his grandfather's Ford Prefect and drove her to the ground.

"[Former Otago Nuggets coach and Otago spinner] Carl Dickel was playing in the opposition and he was given out lbw. He was renowned for doing his scone and he came off with expletive, expletive, expletive.

"It was quite memorable."

She has had many highlights during the decades. Albion has won four titles since 1970 and she scored the first-class game when Neil Wagner captured five wickets in one over - her scorecard made the newspaper the next day and there was lots of red ink.

But it is the people she has got to know who have delivered the greatest pleasure.

Simpson's contribution has not been limited to unpaid club cricket work. She has scored first-class cricket since 1973 and international cricket as well.

She also did some scoring for various radio commentary teams, including Iain Gallaway.

"That was quite a privilege to work with Iain because I spent my summers listening to Iain and Lankford Smith doing the commentary from Carisbrook. He was just fabulous."

While Simpson, who worked as a bank officer from 1974 until she retired in April last year, has spent endless Saturdays keeping count, she neglected keeping her own statistics. But a conservative estimate would put her tally at about a thousand games.

That tireless contribution has not gone unnoticed. She was made a life member of Albion in 1992 and the Dunedin Cricket Umpire and Scorers Association in the early 2000s.

She won the Dunedin Cricket Association services to cricket award in 1991 and the Otago Cricket Association acknowledged her service with the outstanding contribution award in 2013.

There could be more awards in the future too, because Simpson has no plans to retire.

"It is what I do on a Saturday," she said.

 

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