Cricket: a cruel and beautiful game
Social cricket may be low stakes but it can spark strange passions and sometimes, literally, fireworks, as Steve Kilgallon discovered.
Given the loose brief of writing an essay about summer, this was originally intended to be a discourse on the seasonal curse of the domestic dog, and more specifically, the lawlessness of many of their owners. The owners who let their charges run off-leash at parks, off-leash on beaches, and quite often, to excrete on public parks and blindly ignore it.
But I’ve endured 1000 Stuff commenters railing against me before, and it’s not the most pleasant of experiences.
So for a summer smell stronger and more evocative than that of lightly-baking dog faeces beside a children’s playground, let us turn to that of freshly-mown grass. That smell can only mean cricket.
How bizarre it is that seeing a pile of grass clippings and a tubby council contractor painting a white stripe on a public park can inspire such a feeling of anticipation?
Growing up in Yorkshire, with five clubs within a mile radius of home (and I played at various times for three of them), cricket was something most kids played.
But like most, bar a few games at university, life and work meant it was something I didn’t pick up again properly until my thirties, although I always watched it.
For Saturday club cricket is an unforgiving love. No other social sport makes such a demand on its participants.
With the typical game commencing at 12.30pm, you’re out of the house as early as 11, depending on your captain’s level of fanaticism about fielding practise.
And with the unpredictability of a sport where you’re as likely to get no result and spend the afternoon sitting indoors watching the rain radar as actually doing anything, you’re not back until some unspecified time in the evening. That’s not even accounting for a post-match ale in the clubrooms.
I can remember one distant away game where a commitment to take my partner to the theatre that night meant my Yorkshire birthright of grudging, nudging batting was dispensed with, in favour of a cavalier disregard in the hope of fast runs or early dismissal, followed by a bolt from the field to the car.
When neither happened quickly enough, I ended up changing from my whites by the roadside then perspiring through a dull play, a deeply unimpressed partner sat alongside me.
The bloke sat on the other side probably wasn’t impressed by the tang of stale sweat either.
The net result of this time-sink means the make-up of the average lower grade cricket team is a curiously unreflective mix of society: young blokes with nothing else to do before going out that night; still-single older blokes living the traditional bachelor lifestyle; and the much older blokes who’ve popped out the other side and are trying to eke one final season from their dodgy knees by fielding at first slip and bowling gentle offies. There’s a huge scarcity of well-adjusted chaps in their late 20s.
Once the game has somehow persuaded you to devote such a huge percentage of your hours free of The Man to its cruel embrace, it can punish you harshly.
Few other pursuits exchange a willingness to spend eight hours without shade at a sun-baked oval deep in suburbia with the reward of facing two unplayable deliveries from a devastating swing bowler playing five grades lower than he ought to be.
The pay-off is finding that one moment of pleasure that’s retained in your cortex and lives in the personal highlights reel just long enough to persuade you back out there the following week, and to fork out $200 in fees the next season.
As a wicketkeeper, the chemical rush of the moment when the ball glances off the batsman’s outside edge and spirals lazily through the air into your gloves is deeply addictive.
Cricket can spark unusual passions. With independent umpires a foreign concept to the lower grades, you are relied upon to police yourself. Cheating is endemic. Arguments regular.
I stood at square leg once on one field, but found myself ignoring my own game in favour of the action on the adjoining oval, where one team began shooting fireworks from the boundary at the other, and their opposition responded by ripping out the stumps and charging with them outstretched like spears towards the fireworks-chuckers.
Bizarrely, the game continued once the sparks had settled.
I’ve seen a grown man throw his bat in anger at being dismissed, then his son come in to bat directly afterwards and behave just as childishly.
Inside that white painted circle, I’ve said unconscionable unpleasant things to people I’ve never met which I’d never dream of saying to them in the street.
My partner, a fine (and far superior) cricketer in her own day, understands this complex equation only too well.
But regular weekend cricket with three young dependents is too selfish a bargain to make with your own morals, leaving only the low-alcohol substitute of midweek 20-20 thrashes available to sate the cricket passion.
This year, I saw another way. My faded club cap is on semipermanent loan to Mr Seven, tempted to sign up for junior cricket following a school visit by one of my former teammates.
The first game nerves were a tough hurdle to overcome for us both. But eventually we found ourselves parked up on the boundary, waiting for his turn to bat and slightly wishing he didn’t have to, right until the moment he faced his first delivery and swept it calmly to the boundary.
He didn’t know what a four was right then, but he knew it was something pretty good.
When later on, he copped a cricket ball to the throat, he bravely shook it off.
The player of the day trophy came home with us and for days after, we practised catching in the garden.
If Saturdays can no longer be about my cricket, I don’t mind if they become about his cricket.
Saturday club cricket is an unforgiving love. No other social sport makes such a demand on its participants.