The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
Life on the crease with Kerry Cricket Club
Tadhg Evans spent a few hours at the Oyster Oval recently where he spoke with some of those involved with the revival of cricket in the Kingdom
THE welcome at The Spa’s Oyster Oval is reason enough to call in for an afternoon’s cricket; if you add sunshine and the presence of the world-famous Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), it might even be the perfect alternative to a day’s office work.
A Kerry flag and the MCC’s red and yellow stripes hang from a practice net, rippling in the sea breeze. With two wickets already captured, County Kerry spinner Kashif Khan skips uphill and bowls to Zimbabwean international PJ Moor. Stepping towards the delivery, Moor swings bat to ball; his technique and timing are spectacles in themselves. Willow cracks against leather; the ball clears the fence and glides to the shoreline.
“Thank God the tide is out,” County Kerry Chairman Dave Ramsay quips with a shake of his head. “This guy is killing us.”
When the Zimbabwean came to the crease, the MCC was in a world of trouble at 16 for three; since fastening his bottle-green helmet, he and Fiachra Tucker have combined for 53 runs.
They’ll add plenty more – but they won’t quench home spirits.
We are many miles from the Carribean or Karachi, but while Kerry’s cricket history is lean by the standards of those heartlands, it’s neither short nor insignificant.
County Kerry Cricket Club came into some form of existence in 1872 when players padded up at the Military Barracks in Ballymullen. Indeed, the sound of leather on willow was familiar to many parts of the county until the mid20th century.
“It was quite a big game in Kerry,” Joe Revington says from a plastic chair on the pavilion’s timber decking. “But it kind of died in wartime and became a banned game.
“It wasn’t immediately banned; they played for many years at the barracks and places such as Waterville and Valentia. There was a lot of cricket here.”
Its decline in Kerry seemed irreversible for much of the 20th century – but cricket reignited here in the late 1980s, Ramsay says, when Tralee Rugby Club’s Eric Lye asked teammates if they fancied a game.
“I went to school in Gonzaga College, Dublin, where cricket was a big thing, so that’s how I got into it,” Ramsay says. “Since 1988 we’ve come a long way; today, we effectively have four teams and 50 playing members from the Munster Premier Division down to Division Three.
“We also play in the Munster Senior, Junior, and Minor Cups. We’ve made the quarter-finals of the National Cup for the last two years, and we’re playing against DLR, an amalgamation of south county Dublin teams, in the second round on June 17.
“We’ve some nice players. Yaqoob Ali is our senior captain; he played with Ireland ‘A’ and represents Munster in the inter-pros. He recently took four international wickets against Leinster. If you look elsewhere, Usman [Khan] has started the season well with bat and ball. The quality is there.”
At the mention of quality, Moor offers another glimpse at his timing. Pushing away a Kashif delivery, he connects with the ball’s sweet spot; it rolls like a tumble-weed to the boundary rope.
His partnership with Tucker has long raced past 50 runs, soothing any early worries for the world’s best-known club. Founded over 230 years ago, the MCC has 23,500 members who own Lord’s Cricket Ground and all its assets. With around 2,000 playing members to choose from, it dispatches teams throughout the UK and overseas for some 500 matches annually.
“We gauge the opposition and line out based on their ability,” says the MCC’s Peter MacDonald, joining Ramsay for a natter by a picnic table.
“The ideal scenario is to give the supporters a decent game; we’re about developing cricket.
“PJ over there has played for Zimbabwe at the highest level. But you’d have a lot of guys out there who’d have never met each other before today – and that’s quite common for us.
“We played here last year at the official opening. It went well, so we said we’d do it again. And when you get to look out at that bay – it’s stunning, just stunning.”
Finding a home was the realisation of a long-held ambition for Ramsay – but to acquire a ground of such beauty would have been beyond even his most vivid dreams.
The club’s more nomadic days saw them wander from one temporary shelter to another; prior to acquiring the Oyster Oval, players kitted out at the Tralee Sports Complex.
But for all the progress and idyllic scenery, Tralee Bay has seen cloudy days and will encounter several more – unimaginable as they may be on a day as sunny and spirited as this.
“We’ve lost our local Twenty20 league,” Ramsay says ruefully. “Dingle had a very handy side; they had about five Aussies who came over during the boom. Killarney and Tralee had some good teams. But the recession bit hard, and a lot of clubs couldn’t keep it up.
“It could start again. Killarney is a sleeping giant; they have a significant population of Bangladeshis and others of Asian descent. The main problem is we don’t have the qualified personnel to go into schools.
“We do junior cricket, but you need two or three people to oversee it. You have to be interested in doing it in the first place. Secondly, you need to be Garda-vetted. It’s very difficult when you’re reliant on volunteers.”
Several members express similar opinions throughout the afternoon. The club has a high number of Asian players, but while their importance is undoubted, there’s no sense amongst the patrons that Kerry is overly dependent on them. It’s not the main conundrum.
“We’ve a wide range of nationalities involved, and there are Irish players coming on stream,” Vice-Chairman Richard Rutland explains.
“We have a former Kerry hurler, Ian Brick, for example. He’s not at the top level yet, but he got into it through playing Twenty20, and he’s been with us for five or six years now. His son, Jordan, and brother, David, have also been involved.
“Youth is a problem. We had a team from Valentia who would travel here every week religiously, but they were an ageing outfit and couldn’t keep it up – and that wasn’t an issue confined to them.”
At the highest level, cricket authorities take a snootier attitude than most to emerging nations. Ireland recently became just the 11th nation to acquire test status after more than a decade of decking giants such as England, Pakistan, and the West Indies on the one-day scene.
Played over five days, test cricket is the game in its purest and most brutal form. New Zealand had to wait 26 years for its first win; only Australia won its first test. Almost 150 years later, Ireland nearly emulated ‘the baggy greens’; but for a fifth-day revival, Pakistan would have left Malahide to humiliation.
While such status comes with financial gain – some 20 million people in Pakistan watched the Malahide test, generating massive revenue – Ramsay is sceptical that it will inspire Ireland’s youth at grass-roots level. The game unwinds too gradually for an era of dwindling attention spans, and without free-to-air coverage it’s hard to see how youngsters will fall for its ways. Since Sky acquired the rights to England tests, the five-day game’s exposure has nosedived in the UK. A 2016 poll found that more English children recognised wrestler John Cena, the star of a scripted sport, than the legendary Alastair Cook.
“Tests are important from an economic point of view and holding on to our top internationals, but when it comes to attracting youngsters – I don’t know,” Ramsay says, as agitated by the mound of sandwiches left over in the pavilion as he is at Moor, who has just cannoned another ball to the shoreline.
“Not qualifying for the World Cup was a bigger deal, because it would’ve been on in the UK, right next door. We messed up in the qualifiers in Zimbabwe; it was a bloody poor effort, if you ask me.
“I’d fancy Kerry to be stronger if we get into the schools – but that’s an ongoing saga.”
Moor tops the score-sheet with 86. At the close of play, Kerry trailed by 77 runs in reply to the MCC’s 225 – but the MCC failed to bowl Kerry out, leaving the match drawn.
County Kerry hopes to see the MCC return in 2019.