Washing’s great strides
LAST year I entered the world of cricket via my son Harvey, who played under-11s for the first time. I did so reluctantly.
Every woman I know cautioned me against stepping across the threshold.
“It will consume your life,” they said.
“Do you now that in under-14s they can play all Saturday and sometimes Sunday as well?”
Contrary to expectations, the first year was delightful.
We have a great club that has equal parts of tradition and ambition and great coaches who have played at a high level themselves but, much more importantly, enjoy coaching a bouncy group of boys.
We also get to spend time in the sunshine on a Friday with a fantastic group of parents we’ve known for years through school and other sporting endeavours.
The beginning of this year’s cricket season has started a conversation among friends about how to keep our sons’ cricket whites, well, white.
This may not sound like a conversation that women should be having in 2017, but we are, in earnest.
I have no idea why a game that started in England in the 12th century, which was imported into Australia with the First Fleet, hasn’t yet worked out that requiring 10-year-old boys to wear white long pants to play sport is ridiculous.
After every game last year, Harvey’s pants were grass- and mud- stained. Not only on the knees of his pants, but thanks to his off-field antics, such as skidding with mates on the grass while waiting to bat, the lower leg of the pants, their hems and his behind were all covered.
It should be noted that the club had ordered some newfangled material, which is apparently stainresistant and allows for the easy removal of stains.
None of this was in the cricket brochure, nor was it reasonable.
By the end of the season I had concluded one thing: the people who have been playing cricket and putting the grass and mud stains on their white pants in this country since the 1700s are not the same people who are scrubbing those pants.
If they were, the uniform would have been changed long ago.
Whenever I hit a conundrum of this magnitude I caucus.
I have asked several friends in their late 40s who have played cricket for most of their lives why the uniform includes white long pants.
The response was that white reflects heat and tradition requires the pants to be long.
When I queried what their cleaning routines consisted of, they conceded that they had never washed their own cricket pants.
This had been done by their mother or, since leaving home, their girlfriend/fiancee/wife.
When I made the suggestion that black shorts may be more appropriate for 10-year-old boys to play cricket in, all of them conceded that it would be much more practical, but dismissed the suggestion on the basis that they are not what cricketers wear.
Those conversations were ultimately not helpful and reinforced my view that much work still needs to be done to ensure women permeate the practical decision-making aspects of the game of cricket in the same way grass stains permeate my son’s white pants. Indelibly!
In the interim, I have also caucused with many experienced cricket mums about their methods to keep cricket whites white.
By way of a community service, I have permission to share the method used by a close friend to whom I often turn for practical parenting and domestic advice.
In this area she is truly an expert. Her son is a very accomplished cricket player who has been playing Saturdays and Sundays for years, as well as playing representative and state level matches.
His whites are eye-blisteringly white.
To follow is the text message she sent me this week:
“My friend . . . As to the cricket whites, I use a large bucket of hot water with two caps of Napisan (pink), dissolved into the hot water and then add in the whites and aim to soak them for 24 hours. That’s for grass stains. If there are mud stains too, I tend to spray the mud with a pre-stain remover, wait the required five minutes and then add to the bucket . . . I keep Napisan on the go all the time anyway, but it is always a fresh hot batch for whites — good luck ;) and yes, it is a nightmare!”
Let the season begin. Rachel Schutze is a principal of Maurice Blackburn, wife and mother of three. (Ed’s note: Ms Schutze is married to Corio MP Richard Marles.)