"Anyway, what do you want to talk about?"
Desmond Haynes, I had been promised, would be the friendly one. But we seem to have got off on the wrong foot.
"So we do an interview with All Out Cricket," he had said, "we get nothing for it, you get our knowledge and you make money?"
I hesitated to say that "make money" was a somewhat optimistic description of what I would do.
"We never played T20 cricket and we find it sometimes… I don't think it's fair to be quite honest with you… I believe that if it was for charity, it is OK to have interviews, but I think it is wrong for you to use the players for the company to make money."
Passing over this flattering accusation of profit-making once more, I had asked instead: is that feeling stronger for the sense of - despite their generation's brilliance - having missed out on cricket's big-money era?
"It's nothing to do with missing out." Gordon Greenidge was talking now. "You make contributions to certain things. But that magazine or whatever interview becomes a commercial thing - yet the people who contribute receive nothing. We're just voicing our opinion…"
"Anyway, what do you want to talk about?"
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