Father’s
Day; the perfect day for a nice bit of slow-matured, four year-old, prime beef.
Not the beef you can eat in copious amounts at your nearest Toby Carvery,
sadly, but the kind of beef anonymous twentysomething rappers indulge in over
Twitter and through song lyrics. And, four years ago during this very fixture,
I savoured my first – and hopefully, only – taste of cricketing beef as a
captain.
Firstly,
though, the preparations through the week had been mixed; player numbers,
although healthy as always, saw four players I wanted to select for my team
drafted in to the other two Sunday teams, the Wolves and the Rhinos. There
wouldn’t be any real pace in the bowling attack, and the batting wouldn’t be as
ardent as it had been in recent weeks. This left me hoping for two things: that
the Old Wimbledonians team we were to face would be the Campions, as they are
called, who – from their Play Cricket scorecards – appeared to be nearer to our
level. If it was to be the Fishers, their stronger team, I knew we’d be in a
bit of trouble, certainly with the ball. Regardless of all that, we would
always have our indomitable Boars spirit; that unique part of my team’s DNA
that has the ability to endure long stints in the field, chasing the ball, and
end the game with a laugh and a shrug of the shoulders.
The Father’s
Day present my daughters got me was an unlimited supply of grief and bitchfits;
I can’t recall ever hearing the words “Happy Father’s Day” escape from the lips
of either of them. No ironic “Beer Hunter” or “Six Pack/Six Gallons” T-shirts
that you find every year in supermarkets, that are always code for “My Dad Is A
Fat, Lazy, Useless, Out To Seed B****rd”…how I used to chortle, back in the
day, when I used to receive those. No Status Quo ‘Greatest Hits’, no ‘Top Gear’
DVD’s, no cards featuring a cricketer playing a dreadful shot. Such is life.
All I wanted was a win. Just one win. Is that too much for a fat, lazy,
useless, out to seed b****rd to ask for?
And so we
made our way to Raynes Park, on what had become an unseasonably cold day; the
skies were permanently grey and always threatening to dump a river of rain on
us, and the wind was strong and biting. The Boars welcomed a new player called
John R, who’d described himself to me as a guy in his forties who can bat and
bowl a bit…to which I replied, “you’ll fit in just nicely”. Of the two pitches
at Old Wimbledonians I’d hoped to be on the front one – the show pitch – as it
is nearest to the clubhouse and has an electronic scoreboard. As soon as we arrived,
however, we were pointed to the back pitch – which, upon inspection, was in
pretty good nick with plenty of short green patches up and down it, and
surrounded by what looked to be generously short boundaries. Seating on such
pitches is always something of a rarity, that’s the downside of playing on
‘back’ pitches – you’re open to the elements if you aren’t fully prepared for
all eventualities. Freeze or fry – you do what the weather wants you to do.
A familiar
face came out as OWCC skipper – Dean, who I’d played against when he was a
player for Graces, warmly welcomed us and we went out to do the toss. He knew
that we weren’t at our strongest and had made efforts to mix up more of their
two teams, which was nice of him to do. For the first time this season, I
didn’t want to win the toss as I didn’t know what to do first; with stronger
batting I’d have taken first use of the strip, especially when I learned that a
certain Will Markham was playing for OW. More on him in a minute, but it would
have been a good toss to lose; unfortunately, I won it. That means I’ve won six
tosses out of six so far this season, so if nothing else I am the best tosser
at Merton Cricket Club. Call me that, and I’ll simply smile and give you the
thumbs-up – you aren’t offending me, just stating a fact. At least I’m winning
in one respect!
Yes, Will
Markham. I was hoping very much that he wouldn’t be playing, simply because
he’s one of the best batsman I’ve come across on Sundays. According to Play
Cricket he’d scored a hundred the previous week, and four years ago scored 119
against what was a decent Merton team with almost effortless ease. Will is a
batsman who isn’t violent or a risk-taker, but strokes the ball for four and
never seems to hit the ball too hard. And it was he, unbeknown to him, that was
the cause of my beef four years ago. On that day, in 2015, we bowled first with
only ten men (nine for thirty minutes, while Richard Ackerman changed his
trousers in the car park), and had OW pinned down. Only Will stood tall as we picked
away at their top and middle order, who resorted to wild swings for runs and
were top-edging the ball to us for catches. The first flashpoint came when
Sohaib bowled the only short ball of our innings, but as the pitch was flat it
didn’t get above hip-height. The batsman was fifteen years old and playing the
bowling well. But that wasn’t good enough for Garfield, their umpire, who came
sprinting over to me from square leg full of fire and fury, admonishing me for
letting my bowlers bowl bouncers at a kid, as he called him. For a moment I
calmly debated the fact it hadn’t been a bouncer, before suggesting that we
agree to disagree and get on with the game. Will had been making serene
progress until Sohaib had him caught and bowled, on 91, with a low full-toss. A
full two seconds after Sohaib takes the catch, the umpire pipes up: “No ball”.
It had, according to him, been an above waist-height full-toss. By now I was
feeling sore, and after Will had notched his century and added the rest of his
runs, he was run out by half the length of the pitch. Not according to the same
umpire, who said he thought Will had made his ground. Everyone erupted,
including normally-placid characters such as Tony H and Richard, until Will
took matters into his own hands and left the pitch of his own accord. And so
the innings ended with them on 209 all out and on a pretty sour note; Will,
having scored all but 90 of their total runs, had made 28 more runs after his
reprieve. The margin of our subsequent defeat? 28 runs. As our final wicket
fell, Garfield sprinted over to me as I umpired at square leg and was first to
energetically shake my hand. How I didn’t tell him to sod off, I don’t know. Next
year, seethed the voice inside my head, next year. Only next year didn’t come;
OW only had eight players for the 2016 fixture, and pulled out on the Tuesday.
I’d been stoked up, pumped up, I’d drilled the players and wound them up. We
would’ve been taking a wrecking ball to Old Wimbledonians; a juggernaut of a
cricket team in ability and attitude. Then, it was cancelled. In the time it
took to read an email, twelve months of rolling thunder was transformed into a
wet fart.
And so all
my beef had been consumed by the time this match had started. Upon winning the
toss, I decided to field first. I didn’t trust the batting to be as malleable
as in recent weeks, so I thought it best that the bowlers got a proper bowl -
especially after the previous week’s Southfields blitzkrieg. Sam W and Rob took
the new ball and soon discovered that the pitch had absolutely nothing in it
for them; Markham and Parker opened the batting and were soon scoring at seven
an over. A sharp catching chance came my way at mid-off from Rob’s bowling but
I couldn’t hold on to it. The boundaries came briskly as Sam and Rob gave way
to Killer and John R, and it was John R – on his Boars debut – who finally got
the batsmen guessing. He was getting the ball to turn, and suddenly top-edges
were being drawn from both batsmen. Disaster struck when Rob, chasing a ball to
the boundary, pulled up limping, and confirmed that his hamstring had gone. The
rest of us proceeded to field as if our hamstrings had gone as well, although
they hadn’t. Rob had only bowled four of his allotted seven overs and would
need a runner while batting.
On the
stroke of drinks, and with the score around 150 already, Will went for a big
drive and sliced the ball high to where I was fielding. This time I held on,
and we had finally broken through. That brought skipper Dean to the crease, and
although we managed to slow them down a little over the remainder of the
innings they were still scoring at around eight runs per over. Dean was
steering the ball both sides of the wicket to the boundary, and respite came
when the much-improved Johnny M – with a smoother, sleeker run-up – got Parker
to hole out to Sam W at a deepish mid-on. Despite a quick juggle that included
the use of his jumper, Sammy held on and “The Steriliser” had cleaned up for
his wicket. That was our last breakthrough, as Dean and Rory saw them through
to 264-2 after 35 overs, Rory finishing the innings with a six.
We trooped
off to the clubhouse chastened and disappointed; our fielding hadn’t been
great, resulting in us taking more than two and a half hours to bowl our thirty
five overs. In a way, we’ve become the Merton cricket equivalent of FC Barcelona; they keep the ball on the ground,
and so do we – when we’re passing it between ourselves, and back to the bowler.
Tiki taka cricket: you don’t see the ball in the air when we’re fielding. Maybe
we should start bowling pea-rollers too.
And then we
ran into something on the tea table that made us all forget the fetching and
carrying we’d just been doing: warm fish finger sandwiches. To say we dived in
would be an understatement; we attacked them with the kind of gusto Jack the
Ripper used to treat prostitutes with. Like piranha fish stripping a victim to
its bones, you could see the pattern of the tray beneath the sandwiches in
about twenty seconds flat. Mexico were playing Germany on the big screen, and
only those people backing Germany in their assorted sweepstakes didn’t cheer
when Mexico scored what turned out to be the only goal of the game. Alas, we
lost John R at this point: an emergency meant he had to leave the ground and
miss out on batting. It was a shame, as he’d been the pick of the bowlers and
had, indeed, slotted in nicely with the Boars.
Richard and
I opened the batting, against Baksh and Ali who opened the bowling for OW.
Realistically, we weren’t in the game, but that didn’t stop us putting away the
bad ball until Ali – fast and bouncy – got a full one to breach The Earl’s
defences; a shame, as Richard is in good form this season. We’d put on 27 in
even time, and OW had also lost a player to make it ten apiece. Aleem came out
to bat and instantly played a cracking pull shot to the boundary, which we were
finding quite regularly. We took no chances with Ali’s bowling and saw him off,
but now Aran from the other end – after a couple of expensive overs – had found
his radar, getting full balls to swing dangerously late both ways. It was he
that struck next, getting Aleem out with a carbon-copy of his previous weeks’
dismissal, a bottom edge that lifted the bails from a ball that didn’t get
above knee height. Aran then bowled Alex M with a peach; extra bounce pierced
Alex’s defence and gently lifted the bails, as delicately as you like, off the
stumps. Drinks came and we were 74/3, rattling along at four an over. The pitch
held no demons provided you took notice of the bounce; could a couple of extra
batsmen have put OW’s score under real pressure?
Aran was
well into his rhythm now and bowled The Steriliser and Hassan with identical
balls, either side of me bringing up a fifty. I was enjoying a tussle with
Ryan; tall and skiddy, getting it to lift into my gloves or forearm, but giving
me some half-volleys outside off to drive to the boundary. Sujanan came out and
survived some scary moments, and together we added another twenty runs. Scoring
was now much harder after Will Markham entered the attack; suddenly, he was
getting turn and bounce with no bad balls to take toll of. At the other end,
Josh bowled me a half-tracker that kept low; I greedily went to pull it for
six, only to top-edge it into my mouth instead. Maybe I’d thought he’d bowled
me a pork pie instead. After checking that all of my teeth were still in one
piece, I had a rush of blood at Will, hit high enough but not long enough, and
departed. The end came shortly after, as 102/5 slid to 103/9 and all out.
And so,
another heavy defeat for the Boars. A stronger team would have posted a stiffer
challenge, but OW were worthy winners and were a nice bunch as well, and
well-captained by Dean. We’ll return there next year, and I was pleased that
any lingering bad smells from the 2015 encounter had been expunged and
dispersed, and a game of Sunday cricket between two friendly teams had been
played without incident or controversy. The beef will simply have to go back in
the freezer – for now. There’s always an idiot or two lurking around the
corner, and there’s still a lot of the season to go…
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