It isn’t often you get to play cricket at a venue that
reeks of grandeur and splendour. The moment I heard from Mat Flint, the
long-standing member of the Sopwith Camels Cricket Club, that our game against
them was to be played at a place called ‘The Warren’, also known as the
Metropolitan Police Sports Ground, I did what every club captain does: I hit
Google, and it looked like we’d hit the jackpot. An aerial image of a former
stately home, surrounded by the kind of lush, leafy greenery that offered more
than a hint of a miniature Downton Abbey to the image beaming out from my phone
screen, was swiftly shared around the Sunday Boars WhatsApp group. “Cor, look
at this!” was the underlying message, “we’re going to Bromley for a slap-up
game of cricket”. No council estate park this, with pigeon feathers and dog and
fox shit littering the square, and an outfield about as level as a corrugated
iron roof being thrown around Alabama by the latest oddly-named hurricane. The
kind of creatures you see only in zoos these days would be patrolling the
boundaries and beyond, grazing on the grass, making all sorts of strange
noises; Freddie Flintoff’s voice urging “Mind the peacocks, Tino” came into my
head. I imagined chairs cushioned with something other than a thin layer of
plastic to sit on, none of those dark green garden chairs we have at the home
ground that my arse, which this year is roughly the size of a shire horse,
would demolish in about five seconds with a splintering crash. I visualised, in
days gone by, butlers bringing out drinks on a tray, glasses clinking against
each other with every precarious step taken by Jeeves, or Hudson, or whatever
butlers were called in the twentieth century. I don’t think even Coronavirus
would have stopped the Bromley set from enjoying a glass of something sparkling
– reading through tales of cricket during the Edwardian era, players weren’t
satisfied with a plastic beaker of warm orange or blackcurrant purchased four
months previously from the cash and carry. Those that had survived the First
World War were only too happy to stick their middle fingers up to anything that
wasn’t as horrifying as mustard gas attacks and walking into a hail of bullets
at the Somme, and so only something fizzy and alcoholic would have passed
muster, and consequences be damned. Apparently, the England bowlers Sydney
Barnes and Frank Foster took a sip of champagne every time either of them took
a wicket on the 1911/12 tour of Australia; seeing as England won that series
4/1 and Barnes and Foster took a stack of wickets between them (Foster,
apparently, invented Bodyline on this tour, not Douglas Jardine twenty years
later), they must have spent most of their days on the field pissed out of
their minds.
Fast forward to the 2020 season, and if the Boars had
celebrated every wicket with a drop of alcohol we’d be virtually tee-total. To
say that we’ve found it hard to take wickets on pitches bone dry, un-rolled and
starved of moisture would be an understatement; the drier the summer, the more
the bowlers toil, and the less rewards they reap. This truncated season has
begun to mirror 2018, when a heatwave baked the home ground so hard that 1990’s
football pitch markings rose to the surface when the outfield hadn’t been cut
for a while, whereas last year was not as warm, with more rain during the
summer weeks, and we as a team bowled other teams out on a regular basis. This
season, so far, we’d taken three wickets against Cheam, six against Trinity
Oxley, and seven against Banstead in a combined total of 122 overs. Discounting
extras, that’s a wicket every 46 balls. Rob Turner, Suj Romalojoseph, Shakil
Ehsan, John Smither – all have bowled well and with distinction, for virtually
zero reward.
Come the morning of the match, and for a brief period the
game was in real jeopardy. Injury and illness had struck the Camels, and they
were down to just eight players – including one that had apparently fallen down
the stairs. My mind travelled back to last year, when we played the Camels at
the Roebucks ground, and Killer had blown away their top order on the way to
the Boars greatest-ever performance with the ball, dismissing them for just 64;
blimey, I thought, they’ll do anything to get out of facing Killer a second
time. But no sooner had Mat given me the grim news, he was back in touch to say
replacements had been found and the game was still on. A collective sigh of
relief swept across the team; with more great weather forecast and the clock on
this mini-season just starting to tick down, the prospect of losing a Sunday
had been too awful to contemplate. I, for one, had cleaned the oven enough
times during lockdown, thank you very much.
For the Boars, there were three changes: back came
Saurabh Bhargava and Richard Ackerman for the unavailable Ian Bawn and
Rhino-for-the-day David Floyd, and in came Jack Ayling, Saturday 1st
XI captain (and, happily for me, wicket keeper for the day) for Tom Allen. In
normal circumstances, Jack is too good (and, alongside Suj, too young) for the
Boars; when he’s played on Sundays previously, he’s played for the Rhinos, but
having played all his cricket to date at the home pitch – which has offered the
kind of playing conditions to justify the club paying for the square to be
blown up in September – he was keen to get away from the place and have a game
on a better wicket. We were a tad light on bowling but only playing 35 overs a
side, which was a blessing, as surplus overs were to come from Dave Barber,
Andrew Counihan and myself – none of whom had bowled since indoor nets in
March. I prayed that the Camels’ stand-in players weren’t league ringers.
On arrival at The Warren, the place didn’t disappoint. A
long driveway through wrought-iron gates led to the sumptuous, red-brick
country pile from the photos on Google. A rumour went around that Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, had once owned the place, but that
turned out not to be true; he was certainly mad on cricket and once played for
the same team as W.G. Grace, but he lived not too far away in Sydenham instead.
No, the Warren was built in the 1860’s and it’s last owner, an MP by the name
of Preston, was so supportive of the Metropolitan Police that he bequeathed the
place to them in his will. For the last few decades, it has been a place for
retired officers to come and relax, have a few drinks and watch the cricket. In
more recent times, The Warren has become a venue for weddings and functions. Young
families were at their cars, unpacking scooters, fold-up chairs and picnic
baskets from the boot, ready to find a spot somewhere on the other side to
relax and enjoy what was a lovely, warm, sunny day.
Our first view of any greenery was the bowling green,
positioned to the side of the building. It looked like a luxuriant green
postage stamp, as level as a snooker table; if the cricket field was anything
as well-curated, I’d be tempted on winning the toss to announce the Boars would
break first rather than bowl first.
Alas, the cricket field was not like the bowling green.
Given that newly-married couples regularly celebrate
their nuptials at this venue, The Warren and its other surroundings were more
like the marriage of David and Victoria Beckham or Kim and Kanye whatshisname:
glamorous, eye-catching, something to murmur about, whether for good or ill.
The cricket field was more like the marriage of Stan and Hilda Ogden from
Coronation Street of yesteryear: grim in appearance, attritional-looking, not a
hint of joy in sight. Two strips looked like they’d be cut and marked at some
point in the last year, but not recently; they were barely distinguishable from
the rest of the field. One of them had three large fungal-looking black stains
at one end, just on a length, that covered the width of the wicket, and my mind
was instantly taken back to a game we’d played at Wandsworth Common in 2018 –
that pitch looked like it had been dropped in from the moon, with a crack the
length and width of the San Andreas fault running across the crease at one end.
These pitches had clearly been played upon at some point as well. The lack of
rain, and also - it turned out - of an appointed groundstaff, meant the wickets
were a Colombo-style dustbowl starved totally of any watering (it hadn’t rained
heavily or extensively for weeks either), while the outfield had that
burnt-brown hue and was as hard as concrete, pitted with hundreds of bare patches.
The ground also sloped from top to bottom, with the square on the kind of gradient
that gives learner drivers reverse-parking nightmares. A lovely old scorebox was positioned in the
shade of some trees alongside the pitch, but next to it was, I presumed, the
pavilion – or rather, had been. It clearly hadn’t been used in several years;
the windows were smashed and its wooden boards rotten and peeling. This being a
ground hosting retired coppers every day of the week, it wouldn’t surprise me
if this dilapidated old hut wasn’t housing
the dead body of one of those secretaries that had been the local
doctor’s bit on the side in an Agatha Christie novel, or a flighty shop
assistant who’d flirted with the local psychopath in an Inspector Morse story,
her life extinguished by a sharp pull on the neckerchief swathed across her
windpipe, sending her dreams of finding Mr Right and settling down to the grave
with a choke and a gasp (a bit like the Boars innings, sometimes). And with Killer
Smither in our ranks, as kindly and sociable as any other person but apparently
a real wiz with a boning knife, a supply of gaffer tape and a shovel, and
proficient at – to quote Ebeneezer Scrooge – decreasing the surplus population,
anything was possible. I half-expected the Camels to produce Miss Marple as one
of their guest players.
The Camels themselves were hard at work undergoing their
pre-match conditioning and hydration: relaxing around the tables, waiting for
us, beer in hand. The stalwarts were instantly recognisable - JP, Merton’s bete
noire on so many occasions in the past, was shaggier of hair but heartier of
laugh; Hughie, the Camels’ wily old fox, looked ready to unpick us again with
his wobble-seamers, Al was wearing his traditional white vest and shorts (he
wore it to bat last year, and umpired topless); Scooby looked as cool as ever
in his trademark shades; Ed was sat like a coiled spring, ready to leap into
action. Also with them was young Sam Meakin, flying the flag for the younger
generation, but missing was Harry Deans – an emerging talent – and Vinay, who
appeared to be the one who’d picked a fight with the stairs and lost. That was
a crucial loss for them, as Vinay is another who has done us a lot of damage in
the past. In to the team, as the short-notice replacements, were Duncan and his
young daughter Emily, fresh from a game of age-group cricket in the morning.
That still left them one short, but they were playing the Boars…a numerical
advantage on our part, no matter how great or slim, counts for nothing.
With everyone present and changed, ready to play, Hughie
and I tossed up. Yet again, heads won it for me, and in to bowl we went. Rob
“The Typhoon” Turner and “Killer” Smither, still buoyed by the memory of
slicing and dicing the Camels a year ago (5-26), took the new ball, and as I
watched Jack keep wicket to balls lifting shoulder-height or threatening to
shoot along the floor, I was thankful I was back in the field and not wearing
the gloves. JP and Ed were opening the
batting, and JP in particular was merciless on anything short. Rob was bowling
down the hill into those ugly spore-like patches and they simply sucked the
pace out of every ball he bowled, enabling the batsmen to play anything outside
off-stump as late as possible. The pitch was ridiculously slow, with the kind
of uneven trampoline bounce at both ends to destroy a batsman’s form and
confidence. Killer was arguably bowling better than he did when he took all
those wickets, but this time around JP and Ed were equal to him; we were, for
the first time in a very long time, very ordinary in the field as well, and
Killer’s figures suffered through some dubious attempts to stop the ball. The
outfield was like a sheet of glass too, which meant if a defensive prod went
past a fielder it usually resulted in a boundary.
Rob was unlucky not to snaffle the adventurous JP when he
pulled a ball straight to Suj at midwicket; the speed of the ball surprised
Suj, who got both hands around the ball but couldn’t hold on. Ed kept finding
the fielders with his cuts and drives but JP was scoring freely, and not long
after the fifty partnership had been notched his innings came to an end. Suj
and Shakil replaced the luckless Rob and Killer, and Suj got JP to top-edge a
ball straight back to him. Drinks came on 18 overs with the Camels at 74-1, and
Suj and Shakil had really put the squeeze on: the pressure to start scoring at
more than three runs per over had increased to an extent that, as soon as the
drinks break was over, Ed called for a single to Saurabh at mid-off that really
wasn’t there; Saurabh fizzed the ball expertly back to Suj, who threw the ball
behind him and knocked down the stumps. Prashant had been the unlucky batsman,
run out for 1; next in to bat was Ash, the Camels wicket keeper, and he too
found batting very heavy going – one good-length ball from Suj zinged three
feet over his head and flew to Jack behind the stumps. But, as the score slowly
crept past the hundred mark and with Suj and Shakil – wicketless again - bowled
out, it took a fresh batch of left-arm pies from me to save the scorebox
wickets mechanism from rusting up totally. My first over, a maiden, was tidy
enough, and at the other end, Dave Barber was having his first-ever bowl for
the Boars – it went for just two runs, and he really looked the part with ball
in hand. Then, in my second over, I hit Ed on the front pad as he tried to push
me round the corner to leg. Whether it had pitched in line or not, I was
certain it had hit him in front (I could see leg stump as the ball made
impact), and so I loudly asked the question of Al, umpiring topless once more.
He had a think as the ball ran down to fine leg, then – to my delight, as I
kept my eyes from being distracted by his nipples - raised his finger. That
brought Sam to the crease, who’d heard me moaning earlier in the day that I was
having to bowl a few overs without ever wanting to do, and as he pulled his
first ball straight to Dave Barber at mid-on I’m sure he thought I’d been
kidding him. It was the kind of pie Hansel and Gretel’s witch had been
fattening them up to make – I’d wanted it to pitch yorker-length, only to see a
knee-high full-toss leave my hand. Dave swallowed the catch, and as Duncan came
out to bat, the field came in for the hat-trick ball. As Rob positioned himself
at silly mid-off, I saw an enticingly large gap between Duncan’s bat and pad,
off and middle stump beckoning me like a sea siren to an enchanted sailor. I
willed myself to bowl it full and straight but my bolwing hand has long since
stopped doing what my brain tells it to do, and it pitched just outside off
instead; Duncan prodded at it, the ball looped up towards Rob who dived
full-stretch and just about got his fingertips to it, and as we all gasped, the
ball hit the turf. It had been agonisingly, teasingly close, but just not close
enough.
We didn’t take any more wickets, but Dave came close in
his third and final over. We’d effectively abandoned having a slip fielder as
the ball was doing zero off the pitch, but Dave drew a defensive edge from Ash
that would have arrived at a nice height for a first slip. Andrew Counihan also
had a bowl and recorded six dots in his first over, before Rob and John
returned to bowl the final five. They yielded just fourteen runs between them,
and the Camels ended their innings on 144-4. It had been attritional and far
from easy on the eye, but the pitch was to blame for that rather than the
batting style; our bowlers had also been skilful in stopping the run rate from
getting any higher than four runs per over in the face of the pitch and a
lightning-fast outfield.
Having spent the interval wondering whether any
ex-coppers would try and arrest a couple of us for impersonating a bowler –
when it was the pitch, so dead in places, that could have done with a chalk
line around it – Richard “Snakehips” Ackerman and I padded up and went out to
start our innings. From the start it was perilous, illustrated by two balls to
me from Hughie in the same over: one bounced no higher than my shins, but the
slow, trampoline bounce ensured I had time to jam it away, and another cut me
in half whilst driving but bounced waist-high over the stumps. He was bowling
into the ugly black spore-like patches, and every ball was akin to a lottery
draw. Hughie opened with two maidens, with only byes coming from Sam Meakin at
the other end, and it wasn’t until the fourth over that we managed to find the
boundary. Richard and I traded boundaries to get the scoreboard going until I
thought I’d kept a straight one out from Hughie, only to look back and see it
bounce into the stumps. For the second week in a row I’d managed to deflect the
ball onto my stumps, but that pesky Hughie Deans had got me yet again.
Jack Ayling strode out to the crease, and immediately
creamed a short one from Sam down to the deep square leg boundary, but runs
were not being allowed to flow. Richard looked strong at the crease once again,
following his return to cricket a fortnight before at Trinity Oxley, and had to
be at his patient best against the stuff being bowled into the fungus patch,
but once Hughie was bowled out – 1/19 off seven overs, and ten of those runs
coming in his final over – the shackles were loosened, but batting was still
fraught with danger. Like the murderer in a Hercule Poirot story, waiting in
the dark, silk scarf knotted around his knuckles, waiting to strangle some
pretty young socialite for laughing at the size of his willy, the bowling still
had the ability to shock. Young Emily stepped up for what could have been her
first-ever bowl against grown-ups with a red ball, and after using her first
couple of balls to get used to the length of an adult pitch, settled nicely
into a groove. Anything bowled short was got after by Richard and Jack, which
saw the score move past fifty, but when she got the ball pitched-up and
straight, it was gun-barrel straight. A lesser batsman than Jack would have
lost their middle-stump twice during her three overs, and she got better with
every ball she bowled. At drinks, we were almost exactly where the Camels had
been at the same time in their innings: 72/1, and half way to our target. Jack
and Richard were batting well, and although the pitch could be spiteful – Jack was
rapped on the gloves more than once – it was offering no movement at all to the
bowlers. The batters were looking patient, untroubled, and putting away the bad
balls when they came. Jack was showing the qualities that make him a Saturday 1st
XI player, while Richard was hitting the ball hard. We were motoring smoothly
and harmlessly to our victory target.
At the other end, up the hill, Prashant had shown promise
bowling seam-up, but had sprinkled each of his first three overs with a
four-ball; that changed after drinks. He was suddenly finding the right length
and looking a threat. JP, our friend always but nemesis with the ball in his
hand, couldn’t find any rhythm at first and three fours in his first two overs
helped the score past the hundred mark. We were 101/1, with twelve overs left
to score the remaining 44 runs to win.
Ten minutes later, we were 102/5.
Jack, on 45, used his feet to a shorter-length ball from
Prashant; it popped up on him, brushed against the face of the bat like a
tennis ball against a brick wall, and ballooned back to Prashant. Catch taken,
deadlock broken. Jack had batted really well and deserved a fifty; his
partnership with Richard had yielded 76 runs, and he’d seemingly set us on
course for a trouble-free win. But we, of course, are the Sunday Boars, and the
wickets column suddenly started revolving as quickly as the body count in
Midsomer Murders. Oli “The Ox” kept out his first ball, then had a swish at his
second ball and was bowled, and Prashant had two wickets in the same over –
finally, a bowler was getting a bit of luck to go with their skill and effort.
JP had found his radar; now he rediscovered his passion for taking the wickets
of Merton batsmen. Saurabh was unlucky to scoop a full-length ball to mid-on,
before Dave – whose birthday it had been the previous day, had had a nice debut
bowl and had even brought us cakes, which made him the perfect murder victim in
any crime story – perished, attempting a
big hit off one that popped up and gave JP a regulation return catch.
The legendary Boars wobble was in full swing. We’d gone
from being HMS Invincible to SS Titanic in ten short minutes. Nine overs
remained to knock off the 43 runs required, and the prospect of a second
straight win over the Camels was evaporating; the ending seemed to be a Camels
win, as obvious as the ending of any murder story containing a shifty-looking
butler. Only a ‘Line Of Duty’-style twist would save us now, and in Richard
Ackerman we had our Ted Hastings – only one that talks of “hitting bent bowling”
rather than “nicking bent coppers”. I was umpiring, and gloomy about our
prospects; he simply said “but Andrew’s coming out now”, and indeed, he was.
Andrew Counihan started with a boundary and never looked back. Each of the next
four overs went at four an over, meaning that – with 30 balls left – we needed
24 to win, or around five an over. Still nip and tuck. I still didn’t have us
as favourites. But then, when it was 23 runs needed off 24 balls, Andrew produced
the moment that finally loosened the Camels grip on us. Scooby dropped one
short, Andrew rocked back, and crashed the ball over the boundary and almost
into Kent for six. You could hear the team sigh with relief; it was the moment
we knew we were going to win.
In JP’s next over, Richard banged one through the covers
for four and the cheers rang out from the Boars on the boundary; Snakehips had
notched his half-century, and what a brilliant innings it had been. He’d mixed
an anchor mentality with an attacking one, to claim his first 50 in at least
four years. Just for good measure, he pulled JP’s next ball for four as well;
not for the first time, JP greeted his own bowling with a cry of “Oh, shit!”
before the ball had even been hit. Typical of the great sport he is, though, he’d
been the first one to congratulate Richard.
Into the 34th over we went, and under
darkening skies, we needed just four runs to win. Richard played out Scooby’s
first ball, then pulled his second ball to the boundary – and we’d won. With
just ten balls remaining in a match that saw just two no-balls bowled on a dog
of a wicket, we’d secured victory by five wickets. Andrew and Richard had put
on 43 in 44 balls, and Richard was 56 not out. What an innings from Andrew, who
now has a reputation for keeping a cool head in a crisis. His 22 not out
contained three fours and that smoking six, and without his unflustered,
attacking approach I doubt we’d have chased that target down. It had been a
pulsating game, with nobody outright favourite until that big six had been hit,
and an absolute pleasure to play in. The Boars have had plenty of these
defeats, but they never hurt: a great day’s cricket has been enjoyed. You don’t
get that when you’re asked to chase 400 in two hours.
Richard Ackerman clearly likes batting at The Warren. The
last time a Merton team had played there had been 2015; I remember the day well
for all the wrong reasons, as it was my first day as captain of the Sunday team
that would soon adopt the ‘Boars’ moniker. We played at home, against Hook and
Southborough, and were bowled out for 53 chasing 170 (we had been 32/9). This
was the days before WhatsApp and Facebook updates, so we knew nothing about
what had happened to the other Sunday team, led by Bob Egan, down at The Warren
against the Camels, until they returned to the clubhouse. As we enjoyed our
third or fourth post-match beer, they wandered in and regaled us with tales of
a ten-wicket win. I thought they were joking; they weren’t. Richard Ackerman
and Graham “Faz” Fazackerley had chased down 164 in 33 overs, Richard finishing
unbeaten on 86. Which meant that, in the two innings Richard had most recently
played at The Warren, he’d scored 142 runs and not been dismissed, and
shepherded his team to victory on both occasions. Additionally, he hadn’t
looked like being dismissed either.
The ex-coppers had all gone home by the time we’d packed
our bags, cleared our rubbish and strolled back to the bar area; those that had
watched some of the game had obviously thought the cricket to be criminal,
supped up and left. Both teams had beers or soft drinks on order, and the air
was filled with cricket talk between the two sets of players (who are, and
hopefully always will be, good friends). Then, via WhatsApp, came the shocking
news that both the Rhinos and the Eagles had lost…meaning the Boars had been
the only Merton team to win over the weekend. There is no competition between
the teams as we want all Merton teams to win their games, but it was a little
smidge of icing on an already-attractive cake. Boars? Top dogs? For one day,
just one day, it was nice to bask in the glow.
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