There was much more at stake than mere first division survival during Middlesex’s titanic struggle with Lancashire a week ago. For both of them this year is the 150th since their foundation, each of them marking the season’s finale with a gala dinner. Lancashire held theirs on Saturday at Old Trafford and Middlesex two days later at the Honourable Artillery Company, that institution with its magnificent playing field right in the heart of the City of London. Can there be a more valuable piece of undeveloped land in the world? So, as Glen Chapple hauled his team to their precious bonus point and Middlesex then crept excruciatingly to eventual safety, it became clear that for one team or other the weekend would be marked by not so much celebration as a wake.

Such events usually carry with them the predictable sideshows of raffles and auctions and this was no exception. A number of diners paid a hefty sum to take central place in a group photograph consisting of the couple of dozen Middlesex internationals who were there (near the middle of the front row for me, which was a mark more of seniority than of celebrity).

Earlier in the evening we had been introduced one by one to the gathering, polite applause for the most part as we stood up, but the spontaneous cheer that greeted Wayne Daniel was of a different level. He is 58 now, with a glistening head, but still looks 10 years younger, his muscularity as undiminished as his popularity.

It was the late and lamented Mike Smith, Middlesex’s opening batsman with his idiosyncratic crabbing across the crease and the silky offside play, who first called him The Black Diamond. He was, said Smudger, our rent and rates, the fellow who would pay the way for all of us, and he was not wrong. Wayne came along at precisely the right time for Middlesex, if perhaps the wrong time for his international career.

We had heard about him in the mid-70s, when pretty much every county seemed to employ what we would call a whizz-bang. He played in the Middlesex second team in 1975 and, so the excellent Cricket Archive website tells me, marked his debut, against Leicestershire seconds at Lutterworth, with eight for 54 in the first innings (DI Gower b Daniel 12) and 12 wickets in the match. Much can be read into a scorecard and the string of “b Daniel 0” references that marked the end of the innings is eloquent enough about retreats beaten hastily towards square-leg.

He was 19 years old then, raw as an onion, but the following year he formed, with Andy Roberts and Michael Holding, the first of the most formidable wolfpacks of pacemen that the game has ever seen. It was his foray into World Series Cricket that ultimately put his Test career on the backburner but ensured his standing as one of the greatest of county cricketers for, while he was earning the dollars that set him up (invested shrewdly in Barbados, it is said), West Indies was mass-producing pacemen of the highest quality. Quite simply he was no longer needed. It was seven years until he played another Test and there were only 10 matches in all.

Former Middlesex cricketers at the club’s 150th anniversary dinner. Wayne Daniel is front row, far right; Mike Selvey front row, fifth from left. Photograph: Matt Bright

Some of the happiest years of my life were those spent bowling in tandem with Wayne. It would be foolish to deny that his presence at the other end helped buy wickets for me, for he was a ferocious prospect compared with the light relief at the other end. But we did complement one another (on a windy day he would bitch about having to walk into it back to his mark).

The fact was that Wayne did not know how to bowl slow, such was his power. Before he began his run he would take a few small steps on the spot, snorting, as a bull might paw the ground, and then came a surging approach, a good leap into the crease, a front arm thrust so high that he might have been grasping at clouds, and a follow-through in which his bowling arm all but grazed the ground. His default length was nasty, the sort that tickles ribs, and he possessed that rare quality that really does encapsulate the term “heavy ball”. Only for a few weeks one season did he veer from that, as a consequence driven repeatedly back past him by disbelieving batsmen in receipt of straight half-volleys. It transpired that the Sun was offering £500 as a “demon bowler” award to whoever shattered the stumps most often. In response we offered to have a whip-round to top that and happily he reverted to type.

The pinnacle may have come in 1980, when we were joined by the gigantic but gentle South African bowler Vintcent van der Bijl, who with Wayne formed a partnership that would be the envy of any side in the world today, international or otherwise: Big Vince, arguably the finest bowler never to play Test cricket and the equal of most who did; and The Diamond, who would be worth a king’s ransom now. Only we knew how truly lucky we were.