Who says the cricket season is over? Even snow can’t stop us
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Version 0 of 1. For some cricket is synonymous with summer, the sound of leather on willow, music to the ears of lovers of the game. But by the end of September most cricketers will have packed their whites away, the County Championship will have ended, and football will have long taken over the back pages. But listen carefully and you might still hear the thwack of a ball being dispatched, a stifled appeal, or a catch applauded, whatever the time of year. My side, Pacific CC, a somewhat eccentric bunch, are defying the coming of winter to London. As far as I know, we are the only side in England to host games until the end of October and, this year, into November for the first time. Our persistence has drawn a small crowd of cricket enthusiasts from far and wide, who, though more used to watching a higher standard of the game, seem to enjoy the spectacle of 22 amateurs stretching out the season. Obviously having an artificial wicket has its benefits – even if it isn’t for the purists. On a soggy day, the ball can still bounce as if you’re playing at the Waca, though a graceful batsman will find it difficult to find the boundary, the ball being held up by the damp outfield. As the nights have drawn in we have had to bring our start time ever forward. But bizarrely, despite the chill, it can be easier to raise a side in October than during the August holiday season, so why not keep going? There are, in fact, various games held at Christmas. In Cricket at the Grassroots, Dick Redbourn wrote of the annual Christmas Day fixture played in Preston Park, Brighton, between Noel Bennett’s XI and Yule Logs XI. He described “the surface churning into liquid mud as the match progressed. For batsmen, this meant it became impossible to move the feet, and most deliveries would skid through at ankle height.” If not muddy, the pitch could be frozen hard, which, with the right preparation, could “produce a lightning fast, flat track, worthy of a Test match strip”. More likely, though, was an unprepared pitch, meaning “wormcasts became set like concrete, posing frightening problems to the batsmen”. On the days when it snowed, “the most powerful ground stroke … could end up as a snowball on the edge of the square”. Plenty of layers would be worn “and hip flasks were a useful accessory”. North Leeds CC also play a Christmas Day match and, while Australians are tuned into the Boxing Day Test at the sweltering MCG, the village teams of Threlkeld and Braithwaite have played their own “Test” atop Latrigg in Cumbria in freezing conditions. Brooksbottom CC in Greater Manchester have played a Boxing Day fixture each year since the mid-1960s – whatever the weather. More serious cricket can unfortunately be undone by a spot of light drizzle or the merest suggestion of bad light. Just ask Geoffrey Boycott. When I lived in his native Yorkshire, I remember my first university game, in the cold April of 1999, being snowed off. County games have also been hit. In 1975 no play was deemed possible in Derbyshire’s match against Lancashire at Buxton on 2 June when the ground was covered by a blanket of snow. It had not fallen so late in England since 1888 and came as a particular surprise to Lancashire’s Clive Lloyd, the great West Indies captain, who had never made a snowball before. Many of us amateurs, though, take a bizarre pride in enduring such conditions. Montreal in Canada even hosts a Snow Cricket World Cup each January; and, in Penguins Stopped Play, Harry Thompson recounts setting off with his Oxford University friends of the Captain Scott Invitation XI to play in every continent, including Antarctica. Meanwhile, football seems to keep increasing its dominance of the sporting calendar, and the counties stretch themselves to accommodate ever more limited-overs cricket, meaning a lengthy overlap of the two beautiful games. With global warming, perhaps the seasons will become even more blurred. But that’s another story. In the meantime, with some forecasters predicting what could be the coldest winter for 100 years, the hip flasks could still come in handy as we cricketing eccentrics continue to rage against the dying of the light. |