Appears he is a Charlton fan. In an article in the Sunday Times today he mentions childhood sporting heroes as Ricky Ponting, Tiger Woods and Darren Bent - "How could I forget Darren Bent, Charlton hero, whose goals kept us up for a couple of seasons".
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Although Terry grew up in Orpington his family originate from Bermondsy.
Terry is a proper millwall fan as was his father who was a Docker.
I can only assume that years of hanging about with me has forced this happening.
I claim all the credit 😁
Zac has been in the same Kent side as Joe Denly (Charlton youth) plus fans massive fans Adam Ball and Adam Riley. And of course Derek Ufton and Stuart Leary played for both Charlton and Kent. Can't think of any Kent fans/players who have a Millwall allegiance. I'm sure there are one or two but they have probably kept that very very quiet!
The cricket ball is hit hard and fast by his friend and catches the schoolboy flush on the face before he can turn away. The result is a fractured cheekbone. This kind of incident can test a friendship between 12-year-olds but the injured party brings it up with a grin rather than a grimace when we talk about it ten years later. “That sums up his batting — powerful,” Zak Crawley says of Ben Earl. “By the time of our last year [aged 13] at prep school, he was bowling pretty quick too.”
The paths of Crawley and Earl have intertwined for more than 17 years, starting in 2002 when they entered the reception group at New Beacon school in Kent. Born 15 miles and four weeks apart in 1998, their England debuts came within ten weeks of one another. It was Crawley who made the breakthrough in cricket, appearing in the second Test against New Zealand last November. Earl, the older of the two, had to wait until February 8 when he came on as a second-half substitute in a Six Nations rugby match at Murrayfield.
Today, they sit within a few miles of one another. Both have retreated to their family homes for lockdown — Crawley near Sevenoaks, Kent, Earl in Westerham on the Kent-Surrey border. Now they are reconnected through Zoom.The 6ft 10in former Lion Martin Bayfield has launched many an after-dinner routine with the line, “rugby’s f***ing great when you’re 13 and this tall”, and Earl enjoyed a similar advantage. He cheerfully admits he was the same height (6ft 3in) at 14 as he is now. This had its drawbacks, though, as Crawley isn’t slow to point out. “Ben wasn’t allowed desserts at school because they were worried he wouldn’t make the weight to play in the sevens tournaments,” he says.Laying off the apple crumble offered no guarantee of coming in under the limit, however. “I remember not eating two days before one competition,” Earl says. “When you got there, they’d always get the big lads off the bus and say, ‘Come on, we need to weigh you.’ I think I drank some water on the way which tipped me over and I couldn’t play.”From New Beacon, the pair progressed to the nearby Tonbridge School where fees, if you have the spare change, will set you back just over £42,000 a year, and alumni include the novelist EM Forster, the actor Dan Stevens and the pop group Keane. More pertinently for Crawley, the school has also produced two England cricket captains, Colin and Chris Cowdrey, and the national selector for the senior men’s team, Ed Smith.Smith made his debut for the first XI as a 16-year-old, a year older than Crawley. Earl, too, played “above” his years, making the same team at 16. By then he had already represented the school’s first XV.“It was a real learning curve,” he says of that experience, “because for so long you’ve been bigger than everyone, then you get to your first game — I think it was Epsom away — and you realise you’re average build, if not on the small side.“Kyle Sinckler had left Epsom a year before, which was probably a blessing for us.”Earl might have been lucky to avoid facing one of his future England team-mates but the same cannot be said of Crawley, who had periodic run-ins with the Curran brothers, then at Wellington, during his teenage years.“There was one school match when Tom Curran was getting stuck into my batting partner, Chris, sledging him the whole time. Chris had no idea who he was but kept coming back for more: ‘You think you’re so tough, why don’t you come on for a bowl?’Zak Crawley I know he’s an Aussie but it was Ricky Ponting. I always wanted to bat like him in the nets. Outside cricket, I loved how Tiger Woods went about his golf. And, of course, how could I forget Darren Bent, Charlton hero, whose goals kept us up for a couple of seasons?
Of no interest to anyone, but thanks for listening ;-)