The day’s tea lady would be me, and I ensured that the
players would be well-fed and offered loads of variety by hitting Lidl like a
hammer. I know my shortcomings, though; the ladies that do our teas on Sundays
offer levels of care and attention I can only dream of owning, and so my
sandwiches reflected my Midlands upbringing: no frills. My ham sandwiches had
nothing in them but ham: you want cous cous and rocket salad with that?
Waitrose is a mile away; jog on down there, mate. The only reason I put any
pickle in the cheese sandwiches was because my first batch were so crumbly the
sandwiches were barely staying together. The second batch needed some binding. I had visions of players tucking into
my cheese sandwiches, only for them to watch as the cheese tumbled from between
the slices of bread and fall all over their trousers, like clouds of dandruff
from an itchy man’s scratched head.
Needless to say, most of my sandwiches went uneaten.
Friday’s forecast thunderstorm didn’t arrive, and so this
part of the world was still plugged into a heatwave that meant you started
sweating at 10am and didn’t stop until 11pm. Game day was sultry and hot from
the moment the daughters and I clambered into an Uber to take all the tea stuff
to the ground, which was by now bleached white by the relentless heat in
certain parts along the boundary. The only water being used on the ground was
to water the square, and that now looked like a green postage stamp stuck on a
manila envelope, such was the lack of greenery around the rest of the ground.
The sandwiches were done, and the other players had arrived to take all the
equipment we needed, convoy-like, down to Abbey Rec: tables, chairs, scoreboard
and stumps etc, all the water I’d bought, and of course the tea. It was twelve
o’clock, we were an hour away from the first ball of our game being bowled, and
we were ahead of schedule.
Then came one of those incidents that can either define your
day or destroy it. If you’ve followed this blog from day one, you’ll know I’m a
single parent, and my two daughters come with me to cricket every week – much
to their often-disguised ‘delight’. Sometimes, when you’re rushing around with
a thousand things on the go, it’s easy to leave one ‘I’ undotted and one ‘t’
uncrossed…and that’s what brought me my one and only brush (to date) with the
law. I’d asked daughter #1 to take a stack of chairs to Joe’s car, but she
misheard and brought them to Kaleem’s instead, which is where I was with
daughter #2 and Kaleem. I took the chairs
to where they should originally have gone…not knowing that daughter #1 had
followed me. Kaleem, meanwhile, had let daughter #2 in his car and made sure
she was seatbelted in…then he followed me too. Minutes later, when I got back
to Kaleem’s car, I was confronted with the sight of daughter #2 crying and
upset and being spoken to by an irate-looking lady who soon made a beeline for
me. Her vitriol was off the scale as she demanded to know what kind of father I
was for locking my daughter in a hot car, berating my lack of proper parenting skills,
and generally heralding my existence as the biggest, dirtiest turd she’d ever
laid eyes on. Every one of her machine-gun sentences started with “How dare
you”. When she then hectoringly demanded that I give my daughter a hug,
forty-five minutes of preparing enough egg mayo, tuna and ham sandwiches to
feed a small army followed by readying tables and chairs for convoy led me to
boil over and snap back at her. After berating her in turn for her lecturing,
holier-than-thou, busybody attitude, she then told me – despite daughter #2
telling her I was just around the corner, which I literally was – that she’d
called the police. Kaleem was extremely apologetic but I wasn’t having any of
that;I’d got caught in such a rush and he’d done what he thought was the right
thing to do. Perhaps the Busybody would have been happier if he’d just left
daughter #2 standing on the street corner where she could have come to some real
harm.
After fifteen minutes of waiting for the police with my back
turned to the Busybody and fantasising about finding where she lived,
defecating in my hand and smearing it all over her windows, I left my details
with her to give to the Police and we headed off to join the rest of the team
at Abbey Rec. Daughter #2, incidentally, was absolutely fine, but the Busybody
– who was by now very quiet indeed, especially as her own kids were demanding
to know why they were being held up from playing with the other snowflakes in
the park – was only interested in her own sense of self-righteousness. I imagined
her to be the kind of person who’d shout at a Muslim for not wearing their
burkha properly.
Finally, we got to Abbey Rec to meet the rest of the team
bar Andrew ‘Suggs’ Suggitt. Two years ago he’d played here and ended up waiting
for ages on the front pitch while the rest of the team were on the back pitch,
wondering where he was…surely the same thing couldn’t have happened, only with
the pitches the other way round? Oh yes, it could! We all looked over to the
top of the Rec, to where a sturdy metal fence separated the two pitches, to see
Suggs waving at us, and wondering how he was going to get to where we were. In
the meantime, and to the disbelief of some, the Police arrived. I welcomed them
and volunteered my statement, only to be met by one officer’s first sentence of
“Have you been arrested before, Mr Simpson?”…I calmed replied in the negative
despite my brain asking “Am I about to be arrested now?”. The third officer –
yes, it took three of them to come down and see what kind of tooled-up monster
they’d been told about, while somewhere someone was probably becoming the
victim of an actual crime – took daughter #2 to one side and spoke to her, and
after a five-minute discussion that took in my side of things, I was told I’d
passed the “Attitude Test” and there’d be no action taken. I felt sorry for
Kaleem, who couldn’t have done right for doing wrong, as he was given a stern
lecture about the perils of locking someone else’s child in his car whilst
going to pick up a bag of stumps and bails for a game of cricket.
Right, shall we get on with the cricket?
Hang on, not yet; as the police exited the Rec car park, I
turned to see Suggs now inexplicably hopping from garden to garden of the
houses on the other side of the bushes from where we were, looking like a
burglar (albeit a well-spoken one) trying to find an escape route. God only knows how he'd got there, and I was just waiting for the police to come and arrest him for trespass to top off an eventful morning. He finally
managed to join us, but I wondered if the day’s quota of bizarreness had been
fulfilled before a ball had even been bowled…
Mahesh, the Sutton Challengers captain, and I went out to
toss, having been advised to bowl first
by my senior players if I won. Well, if I won, it’d be ten won tosses in a row
– La Decima; the pitch was, like all the others in the Surrey county, a
dustbowl covered in a thin verdant layer of grass. Mahesh called correctly and
my run was over; he decided that the Challengers would bat first.
The team had a good balance to it; we welcomed Matty Holmes
to the fold, one of the finest batsmen at the club, and someone I’d wanted in
the Boars for a couple of weeks. Him only playing Sundays this year, when he is
usually a high-standard League cricketer, was Saturday’s loss and our gain.
Kaleem and Rob returned to Boars colours too, to complement a bowling attack
that retained Joe Gun, Ian “Treadstone” Bawn, and the Sams Wyld and Egan. And
so, after rebutting the Challengers’ attempts to have leg-side wides as part of
the game – no thanks, I said, I don’t fancy being here at nine o’clock at night
having racked up a hundred wides in the day – we took the field. The heat of
the day wasn’t going anywhere, but we did have a sudden, welcoming breeze
descend upon the ground as I handed the new ball to Rob and Kaleem. Thulasi and
Sai were the openers, and they found life very hard going against some
excellent bowling; Rob had not long returned from the hamstring injury he’d
suffered at Old Wimbledonians, but his run-up was smooth, his pace was good and
he was looking sharp. It was Rob who made the breakthrough; with only a few
runs on the board, and with Sai looking to hit big, he bowled a straight one
that Sai tried to hit into Wimbledon and had his middle stump rocked back
instead.
After ten overs, the Sams came into the attack and it was
the Wyld one that struck immediately. Thulasi seemed to be caught in two minds
over how to play his straight one and ended up turning it to square leg; Joe
Gun took a couple of steps to his left and, to his utter astonishment, held
onto the catch. "Oh my God, I've taken a catch!" he was heard to cry. His face was a picture, like someone who’d been paid a visit by
the people in the Postcode Lottery commercials. You know how it goes, Joe:
“Someone’s knocking at the door…”
We were ticking through the overs but runs were starting to
flow a little easier now; edges and nicks were evading our fielders, and the
outfield wasn’t helping either, the ball in danger of spinning two feet past
you after landing. I prefer my cricket grounds to have some grass on them, and
none of us were enjoying fielding on what amounted to a cracked concrete floor.
Sam Egan then got his first wicket in classic Sam fashion. Vinayak cut outside
off-stump to Sam’s sharply-rising ball and it looped just over Rob’s
outstretched hands at deepish gully and ran away for four. Next ball, and Rob
had moved about a foot to his right: Sam bowled the same ball, the batsman
played the same shot, and this time Rob gratefully and gleefully took the
catch. Sam’s trap ball had worked again: that ball plus that shot plus that
field equals wicket. Almost immediately, his fiery pace cleaned up Bhasat’s
stumps to leave the Challengers four down, and that became five down as Sam
Wyld got Hemmant to bottom-edge one that rolled slowly onto his stumps. The
bails tumbled to the ground, and as drinks were taken we were halfway through
their batting with only seventy-odd runs on the board.
As has happened so often in the past, however, the drinks
break seemed to sap our strength. The breeze disappeared, the mercury inched a
little higher on the thermometer, and Jay and Afif tucked into our bowling.
With there being bare, grassless patches at both ends of the wicket, I was
confident that Joe and Ian's slow bowling would profit, but although Ian bowled a beauty of a
maiden over, the pitch was suddenly flat and lifeless and gave them nothing.
The backside suddenly fell out of our fielding too as fatigue took hold; one
attempt to stop the ball on the boundary looked like a move (complete with jazz
hands) from a “Chicago” number and the bowling figures suffered. I include
myself in that category; one particular ball – a standard pick up and throw –
dribbled along the ground past me, as my three bellies compressed together like
an accordion and denied my hands the ability to reach the floor. Poor Joe and
Kaleem, on the other side of the wicket, were running so often to beyond the
boundary to fetch the ball, we wondered whether it was worth hiring a Ring
& Ride van from square leg to help them on their fetching missions.
Jay was seeing it, and hitting it, very well, and after the
pair had posted a fine century-plus stand, Sam Egan came back with his leggies to finally
break the partnership, bowling Afif as he tried to make room and hit to off. A
couple of balls later, he got Chetan to do the same thing, and he suddenly had
four wickets from five overs. Despite having eighteen balls to notch a five-for, another wicket eluded him, but the returning Kaleem finally got the reward his bowling
had deserved by having Hardik trapped lbw; and, as I ran off to rip a tonne of
tin foil from those sandwiches I’d lovingly sweated over, Rob took the last
over and bowled Prudeep. I didn’t see it as my back was turned to the action,
but I’m reliably informed it was a 110 miles an hour snorted that moved along
the pitch like a racer snake, sat up, waved its middle finger at the batsman,
and knocked all three stumps over like Jonah Lomu bulldozing Mike Catt all those
years ago. The Challengers finished on 238-9 and Jay was 80 not out; a
fantastic knock. Despite our fielding lapses and probably giving them thirty
runs too many, I was pleased with the effort we’d put in. To almost bowl them
out in that heat, and with two batsmen taking the game away from you, was a
great comeback. As it would turn out, it wouldn’t be the last comeback of the
day. Rob and Kaleem were the pick of the bowlers alongside Sam Egan and his
four-for; I felt for Joe and Ian, as they’d bowled at the precise moment the
pitch decided to take a holiday and turned everything they had to offer into
scoring opportunities for their batters.
Tea was taken; for some reason, I didn’t feel like eating my
own sandwiches. Neither did anyone else…the only attention they received was
from the wasps that descended upon the tea table once all the mozzarella sticks
and popcorn chicken had been scoffed. I could’ve murdered a cup of tea, but
with no tea-making facilities at Abbey Rec, squash had to do.
Once the break was over, I asked Richard and Andrew to open
the innings. After Richard had copped his lump on the head against Chessington
he’d picked up a helmet from the clubhouse; he ended up picking up the one that
made him look like Robocop. It didn’t take away from his form, though; he may
not be getting the big scores he’d undoubtedly like to post, but he’s hitting the ball hard this year and
the timing is good. It wasn’t easy to score quickly for the first few overs –
the odd boundaries were counter-balanced by Prudeep’s maidens – but the guys
were hanging in there and not looking too troubled. The first wicket didn’t
fall until the 15th over, when Richard was caught at mid-on trying
to hit over the top, and the opening partnership had yielded 47 runs. That brought me to the crease and,
maybe imagining that the ball looked like Miss Busybody’s head, I proceeded to
smack it the boundary whenever I could. I was only out there for just under
five overs but hit a breezy nineteen and added 38 with Suggs, who was looking
in great form, until adrenalin – and a horrid pull shot to a good-length ball
keeping low – did for me. That was drinks and we were 83-2; at this point, I
hadn’t envisaged a serious assault on their score, but the pitch was lifeless
and we still had a ton of batting in Matty, Aleem, Ian, Joe, Sam and a few
others. Crucially, we had more wickets in the bank at drinks than they did.
Could we give it a real go?
As Matty and Suggs continued untroubled for the next few
overs, taking their partnership past fifty, we caught our first sound of the
Sutton Challengers’ version of Monty Python’s Black Knight. Fielding deep near
long-on, you heard this voice, time after time, urging “Come on boys, one more
wicket and we win!”, despite the fact that we had only lost two so far. Suggs
reached an excellent fifty of his own; watchful when required, attacking when
required. Soon after, however, he was lbw to Chetan and Aleem was in. From the
first ball, Aleem knew the run-rate and came to the crease with the handbrake
off, crashing Chetan straight for two fours in two balls. This attitude had a
sudden liberating effect on Matty, and an extraordinary series of overs
followed; this was the end of the 29th over, and with eleven left –
or 66 balls – we needed 95 to win.
“Come on boys, one more wicket and we win!” piped up the
Black Knight, still based at long-on. Matty was beginning to open his shoulders
and runs were coming quickly, so – if you’ve seen “Monty Python and the Holy
Grail” – this was the equivalent of him piping up just after Graham Chapman had
taken his arm off.
The last two overs had yielded us 23 runs, the next five
yielded us 61, mostly from Matty’s bat. If you bowled to him on leg stump, he
pinged the ball over or through midwicket for four every time, and if you
strayed outside off-stump he smacked it through cover or long-off. It was
brutal, exhilarating stuff, and as I umpired at square leg, watching Matty take
the bowling apart, I suddenly dared to dream that the win was on. Aleem’s game-management was
brilliant, giving Matty the strike and running so well between the wickets that
misfielding and overthrows became the norm. On one occasion, they took a
comfortable two – only to take two more from the same ball off overthrows due to some shoddy
fielding. The pitch was lifeless, the bowling was flat, and their heads were
dropping. Matty was middling everything, sending their fielders into the bushes
time and again to retrieve the ball. Another cleanly-hit pull shot brought him
a very quick fifty, and the run-rate was now down to six an over. When the 200 came up we were still in the 33rd
over, and now we only needed 34 runs from 42 balls. I began to feel giddy at
square leg as Matty and Aleem continued to milk the bowling and find the gaps.
In desperation they were changing the bowling every over, and their keeper
frantically appealed for a caught behind off Aleem that only he heard, but
still the runs came.
“Come on boys, I don’t give a f*** about the result…one more
wicket and we win!”
Then, with five overs left and just sixteen runs required,
Matty charged at Chetan’s slower ball and was stumped by the keeper. Off he
went to a terrific ovation, but the butterflies in my stomach flittered about
uncomfortably. Could we really see this off, or would we freeze? Being a captain with only four
wins to his name in near-four seasons, and someone who has seen us snatch
defeat from the jaws of certain victory on many an occasion, the doubts crept
in. I envisaged their bowling suddenly tangling us up in knots, and denying us
by the slenderest of margins. The unease wasn’t helped by Joe facing the rest
of Chetan’s over; every ball was right on the money, very tricky to face, and
how the last ball of the over didn’t knock over Joe’s leg stump I’ll never
know. But survive it he did, and after three dot balls of the next over and a
single to get Joe off the mark, Aleem eased the tension with his third and
final boundary – at square leg, I gave myself a fist-pump. We’d done it. Still
came the Black Knight, hooting from the boundary, both his arms and one leg
chopped off. Six was required from 12 balls; Aleem pocketed two two’s, Prudeep
bowled a wide to bring the scores level, and after two more dots Aleem placed
the sixth ball perfectly through a gap and took the winning single to seal the
mother of all run-chases and the unlikeliest of wins.
As I ran towards Aleem and Joe and nearly committed GBH on
each of them in turn, you could tell the Challengers were hurt by defeat. I’ve
been there on several occasions, and you’ll never see me rub victory in
anyone’s faces unless they’ve acted like a bunch of numpties throughout the
match. The Challengers had played the game in the right spirit and were unlucky
to run into us on the day our batting rose magnificently to the occasion; our
four wickets had been worth 47, 36, 68 and 82 in turn. I hadn’t prepared for
winning until Matty and Aleem put their astonishing partnership together in
record time and would have settled, at the time, for getting to within thirty
runs or so; I hope we play Sutton Challengers again in future. We shook hands
with Mahesh and his players and exchanged pleasantries, before I proceeded to
crush as many of my players as possible with a Simpson-sized man-hug. Still, I
expected the Black Knight to nod in our direction and say, “All right…we’ll
call it a draw”…
To be honest, it still hasn’t sunk in. In eight years of
being a Merton player, I’ve never seen a run-chase like that, never been part
of a comeback win like that and I guess I won’t again. And with that, the Boars
clocked up our second win in three games and second of the season. For Ian,
it’s like buses; you wait twenty-nine games for a win, and then two come along
at once. I’d started the day making sandwiches and nearly having my collar felt
by the law; I ended it as the only triumphant captain of the weekend. Still, it
wasn’t all good news at the end; some sod nicked my batting pads. Jeez, man;
where’s the Police when you really need them?
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