The car park at Norton Cricket Club was, for a time, a hazard zone. Drivers refused to leave their vehicles there on match days — not because of traffic or crime, but because Garry Sobers kept hitting sixes into it. That detail, small and comic and completely true, tells you something large about the man. It is 1964, and the rules of English county cricket are rigid.

Overseas players cannot simply walk into a county side, no matter how gifted they are. So Sobers, already a West Indies legend who has toured England in 1963, does the logical thing: he signs for Norton Cricket Club in the North Staffordshire and South Cheshire League. He stays for three summers — 1964, 1965 and 1967 — playing in the gaps between West Indies tours. His brother Gerry, a wicketkeeper, joins him.

Down the road at Great Chell, the ferocious fast bowler Wes Hall is doing the same thing, giving the whole league a quality that nobody in it will ever quite forget. For the young players watching from the junior and second teams, it is an education that no coaching manual can replicate. Sobers does not arrive as a distant celebrity. He is approachable, engaged, generous with his time — as comfortable in the dressing room as he is at the crease.