In the formative years of the Tokyo Wombats, Ian “Curly” Gason was the heartbeat of the club’s social and fundraising activities. His well-intentioned pestering of fellow teammates for loose change that went to raffles and sweepstakes kept the club financially viable. It meant we had yen in the bank to purchase cricket gear and keep club fees very affordable for all.

As a founding member, Curly was quick to put his hand up to fill the role of social secretary. He wasted no time in organizing the club’s annual quiz night, countless raffles, and many other harebrained schemes with the goal of raising money. As part of all this, Curly negotiated and secured the club’s first major sponsorship from Hardy’s Wines. Boxes of wine flooded in to the club…and many members took receipt of a few boxes each for storage over the playing season (much to the chagrin of their Japanese wives—space being a premium commodity in a Wombat’s shoebox apartment in Tokyo).

Despite being a part-time bartender at an Irish pub in Tokyo, Curly somehow fell out of love with drinking alcohol. As such, there was no-one better suited in the club to drive a pack of drunken Wombats back to Tokyo after a long, hot day in the field. Curly was the Nissan Hiace Hotshot. He kept us safe on the expressway, for which we are ever grateful.

After dropping off the inebriated marsupials in the bowels of Shinjuku, Curly would often swap the steering wheel for a keyboard and get straight to work on a magnificent account of the day’s play. Curly’s match reports were second to none. Perhaps 60%–70% of all the reports on this website are penned by him. Many of them are classics to this day. His passion for scribing the on-field heroics of his fellow Wombats was on a par with his commitment to the club’s on-field success. He was a very economical bowler (a metronome in fact), the club’s second-highest wicket-taker, and also holds the record for the most run-outs. Curly’s contributions to the Tokyo Wombats, on and off the field, have been enormous.

Nowadays, this unabashed wearer of Hawaiian shirts organizes and leads a team of Tokyo Dingbats at the Chiang Mai Sixes competition in Thailand every year. He has been back every year since the club first entered a team in the mid-2000s.