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The letter - ``Dear Henry, Aggers and Co'' - has had the Test Match Special radio team seething. Becky House, 18, writing from Bradfield in Berkshire, is full of praise, and that is the point. The BBC's postbag every week contains letters lauding their coverage from listeners across the spectrum, male and female.

The usually affable Jonathan Agnew, BBC Radio cricket correspondent, has been raging at the constant puffing of Channel 4, newcomers to cricket broadcasting, at the expense of the BBC.

Aggers said: ``It has been fashionable to knock BBC Sport, and the most absurd accusation is that Test Match Special alienates women. That's patently untrue. Half my mailbag comes from women of all ages.''

Becky House praises the TMS team, especially Henry Blofeld, adding: ``There is a radio in most rooms of our house during Test matches, and so my whole family laugh at your witty remarks.''

A postcard from Anna Daley and Suzie O'Keeffe thanks TMS for getting them ``genuinely interested'' in cricket. Newly converted, they attend Lord's every summer with their husbands. ``Even living in Nigeria hasn't stopped us this year,'' they write.

New Zealand were the opponents when Brian Close became the youngest England player in Test cricket 50 years ago at the age of 18 in a drawn match at Old Trafford.

A single-figure handicap golfer left and right-handed, he made a duck and took only one wicket but proved to be a most durable cricketer, career-wise and physically.

'Closey' became renowned for his suicidal silly mid-on position for Yorkshire, hoping catches would ricochet to team-mates; David Young, of Gloucestershire, was once caught at slip off Close's forehead. Off a fielding helmet, such a catch would be illegal.

Jeremy Coney, on his first visit to England since his last tour as captain of New Zealand's 1986 series-winning side, has made his mark on Test Match Special with

his analytical style and chummy microphone manner.

He warmed up for Lord's with a week's walking in the hills

of Derbyshire, Cumbria, Northumberland and Yorkshire, a northern odyssey as he called it.

Coney especially enjoyed experiencing the pantheistic feel of Wordsworth's poetry, wandering lonely as a cloud in the Lake District, before finishing at Stratford-on-Avon to take in Othello. At 47, he is taking a Phd in English literature at Auckland University.

The Valley End batsman Mark Tomlinson scored an all-run eight off one ball at their Woking ground in the Fuller's Brewery Surrey League Division Two recently. The Croydon Gas bowler and his fielders left Tomlinson's straight drive to each other, and the ball stopped a foot short of the boundary.

The best at Test level must be Michael Atherton's all-run six against Pakistan in 1992. As for overthrows, Jonathan Rice's ace-value paperback Curiosities of Cricket mentions the ball struck by Brian Lefson, a South African playing for Romany against United Services in Portsmouth in 1962. His drive to mid-on resulted in three chaotic overthrows and eight runs, reduced to seven by a run short.

Colin Bateman, cricket correspondent of The Express, took the day off from Lord's on Thursday to watch his son Tom make his Kent Under-11 debut against Glamorgan, but his county were scattered by an innings of 145 not out from a slightly built 10-year-old by the name of Tom Maynard, son of the former England batsman Matthew. Tom Bateman ran himself out second ball for nought.

Colin Bateman, with his practised eye, said of Maynard: ``He was on a different level to everyone else on the field - and a nice lad too.''