COUNTY RULE No.1: IT ALL HAS TO STOP FOR LUNCH

There are certain things in life which are best not attempted for the first time without having an experienced adult by your side to offer helpful hints and tips. Such as potty training, bungee jumping, lion taming, or your maiden visit to a County Championship cricket match.

I was reminded of the latter when a chum from my golf club took his wife to Edgbaston for a day’s play between Warwickshire and Yorkshire in the traditionally Arctic weather of mid-April. A more severe test of a relationship would be hard to imagine, but I’m pleased to report that Mrs Jane Russell, from the small Herefordshire village of Kingsthorpe, not only survived the experience, but was sufficiently moved by it – or perhaps confused might be a better word – to write it all down when she got home.

‘Two men with bats stand at opposite ends of a small pitch. Another man throws a ball to one of the batsmen. Sometimes he can’t be bothered to hit it. Other times he does hit it, then both men run backwards and forwards between two lots of sticks. Apparently, this is called scoring runs, but for some reason, only one man’s runs are counted, so if I was the other man, I wouldn’t bother to run.

‘After the man has thrown the ball a few times, he gets bored and it’s over. He stops throwing to these two guys, which is the end of the over (cricketers seem to have a very limited vocabulary). If the batsman hits the ball to the boundary, or over it, then he doesn’t even have to bother to run, he gets the points regardless. I suppose he is reserving his strength for when he is fielding, and has to run after the ball whether he wants to or not.

‘After one side had lost all the wickets (those are the white sticks) they had been given, they walked off in a huff, and the opponents followed them, because they had no one else to play with. As soon as they had gone, a load of gardeners appeared with wheelbarrows and forks. They were obviously quite cross because the cricketers had made a mess of the sandpit area between the white sticks. The gardeners raked it all smooth again, and an extra gardener rolled over the grass that had been disturbed.

‘However, as soon as the gardeners left, the cricketers reappeared. They must have made up their differences over a cup of tea and decided to play on. But would you believe it, they only hit a few balls (digging huge holes in the sandpit, which must have really pi**ed off the gardeners), then they disappeared again. The commentator said they had gone for lunch, which I think shows a total lack of dedication to their sport. But by this time, it had started raining, so I could understand their point of view.

‘But then the game got really interesting.With a drumroll of clanking and grinding, a huge hovercraft appeared on the pitch, accompanied by a whole army of gardeners (obviously concerned about the safety of their sandpit area). It hovered over the pitch before eventually deflating with a satisfying fart, which sent sand and gardeners scattering to the far corners of the field.

It was at this stage I decided the game wasn’t going to get any more exciting than this, especially as the rain was becoming more persistent, so we left.”

I think we can see from reading this the dangers of not having an experienced companion on hand to explain some of the finer nuances of the game, especially when it comes to making it clear that of all the things that are holy and sacred in sport, nothing is as sacrosanct as county cricket’s luncheon interval.

No matter that they’d only been playing for a few minutes when everyone trooped off for large helpings of roast beef and jam roly poly. When it’s time for lunch, it’s time for lunch. And tinkering with it is an emotional business. When they moved it from 1pm to 1.15pm shortly after the war, the Nottinghamshire batsman George Gunn looked up at a pavilion clock reading 1.01, deliberately hit his own wicket, and added further emphasis to his protest by making it rhyme. His parting shot as he left the field being: “Gunn lunches at one.”

Mrs Russell might have been mildly confused by her first, and by the sounds of it, last day at a county cricket match, but if hadn’t rained, her account of the experience may well have stretched to several thousand more words. Such as why the people with the bats spent so much time tapping down imaginary worm casts, and even more time punching each other on the gloves.

She was, however, exceptionally fortunate to attend a county match in which the “commentator”, as she describes the public address announcer, told her that it was lunchtime, or indeed said anything at all that could possibly help spectators understand what was going on. The first rule of cricket is that spectators should be kept in the dark at all times, and only if the members’ pavilion is on fire, or we’ve declared war on Europe, is anyone to be alerted to the fact.

Mrs R might also have wondered why everyone occasionally leaves the field when it’s not even raining, especially after the two older chaps have had a prolonged stare at their smart phones. Again you need a companion to tell you that they’re not checking their tweets and emails, but peering at light meters, gadgets which are cleverly designed to inform you that visibility is down to five miles and it’s time to go off and play cards for a while.

Then there is the question of when those spectators who have not yet nodded off suddenly start clapping even when nothing has happened. Again, a first-timer like Mrs R needs someone to say: “It’s because that chap there has bowled a maiden over”, and when she replies: “Can’t see how. He’s a bit sweaty, and not very good looking”, they can put them right with: “No, no, it’s because he’s bowled six balls without conceding a run.”

There isn’t a game like it for having to explain what’s going on when nothing is, in fact, going on. No wonder you see so many people fast asleep in deckchairs at county cricket matches. It’s not because they’re tired; they’re just taking half an hour off from all those daft questions.

After one side had lost all the wickets (those are the white sticks) they had been given, they walked off in a huff, and the opponents followed them, because they had no one else to play with