HHCC vs Bank of England

Back in 2004, Andrew Flintoff gave a piece of friendly advice to West Indian all-rounder Dwayne Bravo: “This game's got a funny way of biting you on the arse,” he said, before continuing, worldly-wise: “I've seen it all mate. Let's see where you are in three years time.”

The irony is that in three years time, Bravo had cemented his place in an (admittedly ropey) West Indies team, while Flintoff, the big man, had just led England to a disastrous 5-0 whitewash against Australia, and been fined for drunken pedalo -bothering. When the teams met next, Bravo performed creditably while Flintoff was nowhere to be seen.

If only Flintoff had realised at the time that his words could also be applied to himself. If only Hyde Heath had realised that too, as we made the most straightforward of run chases somehow into the most nail-biting of farces. Although Bank of England bowled tidily enough, it was over-confidence that nearly did for us. Charlie was so confident that he had showered and changed; I batted like a was still not out from the week before – attempting to drill my first ball back over the bowler's head, missing comfortably, and pottering back to the pavilion.

That, it turned out, was the second dismissal in a hat-trick as Liam got himself LBW first ball; Dom – who had earlier continued his fine recent form with another half-century, and alongside Shrimpie, scored the bulk of the side's runs in another excellent partnership – was the first of the trio. It meant that within just two runs of our target we lost no less than four wickets. It may have been embarrassing cricket but it made for entertaining viewing. I've never seen a changing room laughing so much as the wickets tumbled. There's something hilarious sometimes about inevitability.

Thankfully we weren't chasing many, and it was Charlie's earlier canniness that was to thank for that – especially as several of his batsmen, brimming with (over?)confidence were requesting we “give 'em a few” to make a game of it.

We found ourself in such a position thanks to probably the tightest hour of cricket I've seen from the Heath. The pitch – the same as last week – was a little slow and low but played very true, and we were never going to blast through them. But Sohail was as full and straight as ever, Ben hit that perfect, miserly length, Fiddy found his rhythm, and even my first two overs were pretty tight (obviously the next five were total rubbish). We also fielded brilliantly: Dom made a very difficult chance (coming down over his left shoulder as he ran backwards from mid-off) look easy, while I, ambling forwards from mid-on, made a very straight-forward catch look exceptionally tricky. “I've never seen a thirty year-old look more like a seventy year-old,” said Shrimpie, encouragingly.

Perhaps all those teas are finally taking their toll. Devilled eggs, smoked salmon, chikken tikka wraps.... Mmmmm cricket.

Return of the Mack (HHCC vs Gamecox)

Ah it’s good to be back! I have to confess that, as much as I enjoyed reading the match reports while gallivanting around South America, it was not without the odd pang of sadness: to be unable not only to play cricket each week but also to write half-baked rubbish about it afterwards. I’m afraid this season’s residence in the realms of factually accurate reporting must take a brief soujourn back into vagues-ville, at least for this week.

One number, however, will be etched in my memory for some time: 71 (with a little star after it for good measure). Yes, I scored my career-best, a match-winning (no need for modesty here) unbeaten innings of 71 (71!) that, in partnership with Liam, saw us chase down what had at one point looked like an imposing target of 198 with several overs to spare. “Hell, yeah!” is, I think, the appropriate phrase.

In pursuit of such a total we needed a quick start. And we got one courtesy of an extremely impressive opening partnership of 90(ish) between Dom and Shrimpy. Shrimpy played some gorgeously timed drives, while Dom was typically severe on anything short and/or leg-side. I’ve forgotten how Shrimpy was out, but it precipitated the all-too familiar Hyde Heath collapse. Will Cousins came and went; Wade was given out LBW by Tim Barnsley (which led to a distinctly unedifying dressing room tantrum); and Dom was dismissed for 50(odd) after a firm lofted drive saw the bowler dive full stretch into the air to complete a stunning one-handed return catch.

I came to the wicket at number 6 just in time to see Fiddy and Jez depart for not much. All of a sudden we were 118 for 6. But I managed to hit a couple of boundaries and their captain responded by setting some truly atrocious fields: at one point, their (very) slow left-armer had only two on the off side. With the pitch a belter (thanks Mikey!) and the outfield quickening up in the summer sun, it felt almost impossible not to score runs. Meanwhile Liam never looked like getting out (apart from that one ball where he looked like getting out) and we cruised home surprisingly comfortably.

It was quite a turnaround from the first half of the game. Perhaps it is tea that should take the credit. Chicken tikka wraps were a clear highlight, and it was excellent work by Spencer to spot several going uneaten on the oppo’s table. It showed the reactions of an athlete and great presence of mind to nip over there before anybody else had noticed and bring them back to the Hyde Heath table. If only we’d showed such commitment in the field…

After Sohail failed to turn up, we were left very light on bowling. Ben was tight early on, and returned at the death (in an excellent piece of captaincy from Charlie) to strike immediately, but he deserved more than his one wicket. Spence struggled with his run-up and was a little erratic, and it was left to me and Shrimpy to get through a sizeable chunk of the overs. I bowled ok-ish given the long lay-off and was happy to finish with 2 for 60 or so off 12. It would have been better had I not been hit for two massive sixes in my last over and dropped a fairly straightforward caught-and-bowled chance.

That drop was not the only one. As the batsmen began to accelerate, the fielders wilted and chances began to go down, including a couple of missed stumpings. I forget how many we dropped but it must have been somewhere in the region of four or five. What I don’t forget is Charlie juggling, and then dropping, a nice loopy dolly at mid-off. Always hilarious. As I said, it’s good to be back!

Bogota vs Cali

Long-standing readers of Cricket Tragics (is there any other kind?) will be aware that your erstwhile correspondent is away in South America for the vast majority of Hyde Heath's 2014 season. You will no doubt have missed his heroic exploits on the field, and no doubt the more, his impressive feats of recollection and reconstruction of it, on these very virtual pages.

Our replacements have done sterling work in our absence, and – the occasional barb directed this way notwithstanding – it has been a pleasure to keep abreast of goings-on at Fortress Heath and beyond through the perhaps less jaundiced, and certainly less self-concerned, eyes of Dom and JC.

Men. Cricketers. Heroes.

That said, we note in passing that the last match report on the Hyde Heath website is from 1^st June, a whopping 24 days ago. We'd have received at least four or five increasingly direct emails from Mrs Capper by now if such negligence had occurred under our watch...

Anyway, onwards, to more preamble! As already touched upon, and as these same long-standing readers will also be aware, Cricket Tragics, tends to focus on the deeds of the narrator – despite our/my/its/their slightly confusing oscillation between first person singular and plural (and even worse, the third person – see above). So they/you should not be surprised to learn that little will be said about the historic fixture between Bogota and Cali that we were so privileged to have umpired earlier this month. (Besides, it was a boring, one-sided match, and WE ONLY BLOODY WENT AND WROTE ABOUT IT FOR CRICINFO.)

Instead, we'll tell you all about how we got on in the next day's Twenty20 match by means of bullet points and subheadings and things (such flair for the bureaucratic style is sadly missing from HHCC's match reports):

Our ride: sure, the driver was armed....

1. The Arrival
Our ride to the Bogota Sports Club, on the outskirts of Colombia's capital city, was befitting of such a valuable cricketing asset as yours truly: yes, an armour-plated Land Rover laid on by the Ministry of Defence, aka the British taxpayer (thanks Dad!). Fret ye not, however, Bogota is not that dangerous (any more); no, we hitched a list with the British defence attaché – an affable Brummie fellow with an obsession with sporting celebrities and a tidy line in medium-paced outswing.

2. The Venue
You can read more about the club itself in the PIECE WE WROTE ON CRICINFO, but, in truth, it was a weird, soulless place: vast and brick and adorned with silly bits of English memorabilia (Wills and Kate above the mantelpiece: *gags*). Also, apart from the cricketers, it was populated solely by a few very rich fat men and their tennisy wives.

The pavvy: not a patch on the Heath's bucolic idyll. Probably nicer than The Plough though...

3. The Pitch
Matting on concrete. Chances of spin? Zero.

4. The Teams
Bogota vs Cali. Both nice folks by and large, except for the odd massively competitive Australian, but then that can happen to the best of us.

5. The Altitude
2,600 metres above sea level means running anything further than three yards is a nightmare. Even for a well-honed athlete such as ourselves.

6. The Batting
We (Bogota) won the toss and batted first and I came in at 4 (or 5) after a steady (or shaky) start. Wearing borrowed trainers and *gasp* tracksuit bottoms, with a broken thigh-pad and a box slipping down to my knee upon every minor movement, it's along time since I felt this amateurish with the bat in hand. (“Since last season you mean, mate?” “Yup, hilarious.”)

I somehow survived my first ball despite an entangulation of bat and pad, saw off their threatening Aussie quick, and began to really prosper through a combination of gritty blocks, mistimed straight drives, and the odd almighty nurdle. Then I got run out following a mix-up with my partner, despite being forewarned by the umpire that the batsman in question was “a headless chicken”. Oh well. The team made 111 for 7 off 20 overs, my contribution an attritional (some might say counter-productive) 10.

Your correspondent surveys the pitch: flat as a concrete pancake. Lovely Colombian-themed stumps though.

7. The Lunch
Huge plates of burgers and chips were admittedly pretty tasty, but of course lacked the charm and finesse of the Hyde Heath tea: cucumber sandwiches, pakoras, slices of melon, chicken tikka wraps, scones, cakes, scotch eggs... not to mention the bloody tea! No tea. Unbelievable. Fortunately there was plenty of cheap Colombian lager instead.

8. The Bowling
I have it on good authority (I definitely did not just make it up) that nobody has spun a single ball on the Bogota pitch in all its years of use. So even as prodigious a ripper as yours truly (3000RPM as standard) was unlikely to get much out of it. Needless to say, I didn't turn a thing. But I bowled my two overs tidily enough, didn't go for many, and even got the crucial wicket of a man in blue tracksuit bottoms who hadn't ever played cricket before. Bowled leg stump. Oh the glory! Oh the adulation!

9. The Fielding
In customary fashion, I made my presence known in the field by dropping a catch. It was actually quite difficult though – running in from mid-on and diving forwards, I could only get one hand on the ball and it didn't stick. Irritatingly I had just been moved ten yards back by the captain the ball before. You'd never catch Charlie making that mistake...

10. The End

Anyway, it didn't matter. Cali never looked like threatening our total and were all out for 54. Victory! For cricket and for cricket writing too. And the pen remains sharp for August's eagerly anticipated return to Fortress Heath.

Cricket and Empire

Just came across this amazing description of a version of cricket played off the coast of Papua New Guinea:

"Trobrianders played cricket according to a number of rules which departed from the MCC-defined game. These included no restriction on the number of players per team (as long as the sides were even), throwing rather than bowling, a smaller-sized wicket, the incorporation of elaborate dances at the fall of each wicket and feasting at the end of the game (though of course all international cricketers now seem to have their own versions of each of these), and a convention whereby the home side always won."

from Dominic Malcolm's fascinating Globalizing Cricket: Englishness, Empire and Identity

Pages Of... cricket!

In another departure from the hallowed turf of this here blog, we also had a piece published in a fantastic magazine called Pages Of (which, incidentally, is co-edited by Mrs Tragics). It's loosely about trying to explain why cricket is awesome to people who probably don't care, with some half-baked stuff about social history and national identity.

Oh and there's some excellent pictures of Hyde Heath cricketers. Chris, remind me to send you your copies!

Here's the opening bit:


I find it difficult to say when exactly I fell in love with cricket, or indeed why. I remember the first time I really followed the sport obsessively: it was 1997, I was 12, and my father had recently taken me to Lord’s, the “home of cricket” to watch a one-day international between old foes England and Australia. The match has since become famous for the sparkling debut performance of the 19 year-old Ben Hollioake, who died just five years later when he crashed his Porsche into a wall outside Perth in Australia. But for me, it was the series that followed – The Ashes – that marked the origins of my near-obsessive passion for cricket. What is strange is that, recently rifling through an untouched drawer in my childhood bedroom, I came across imaginary scorecards and team selection lists that included players from years before that – players I don’t remember having even seen, live or on the television.

But it’s 1997 that stands out. The Ashes that year was a six-Test series (six matches of five days each, taking place over the course of eleven long summer weeks). It was a rarity then; unheard of now, as the game begins to change irrevocably. What, I think, struck me then about cricket was a sense of slow unraveling not seen in any other sport that I know of. 


To read the rest, buy the magazine!

The Architecture of Cricket Grounds

Cricket Tragics recently branched out by having a slightly peculiar piece of writing about the architecture of cricket grounds published in an amazing quarterly magazine called The Nightwatchman. It's published by Wisden and has articles by real writers like Marcus Berkmann, Mark Rice-Oxley, and Dileep Premachandran. Plus, it's made of paper rather than internet.

Naturally, we were pretty excited. Here's the first few sentences by way of a taster:


If, as Nevile Cardus wrote in 1930, “cricket is a game which must always be less than its true self if it is taken...out of the weather of our English summer”, then what are we to make of The Oval as it stands, wet and empty, on a cold November morning? The cynic, or the Englishman, might point out that the wet and the cold are both integral parts of the summer sport in this country, just as likely in August as they are in November. And, indeed, the fourth day of the Ashes test match here was a total washout, with the match ultimately ending in a draw despite Michael Clarke's aggressive double declaration. I was there on the opening day, when Shane Watson made the most of a close LBW escape and some nervy bowling from Chris Woakes and Simon Kerrigan to post a big and belligerent hundred.

But it feels an age away now, as water drips slow and sad from concrete overhead to soggy concrete underfoot. As an art critic by trade, I'm used to visiting museums and galleries when they're closed to the general public. No hordes of schoolchildren, no frazzled parents, no tired tourists: just a white-walled calm, and the time to stand and look and think. It's quite a privilege. But a cricket ground, on the other hand, becomes a kind of ghost, or theatre of ghosts – an empty arena reverberating around the silence of past events, glories, players, public.

And yet, this emptiness and the absence of cricket starts to focus the attention on the ground itself...


To read the rest, buy the magazine! 

HHCC vs Goodwill Wanderers

A win! A bloody win. After a joyless August, the (no longer) mighty Heath registered our first victory since July 28th. With Abbots Langley dropping out on the Thursday, much conferring took place and it was finally agreed that Goodwill Wanderers would be the day's opposition. And what an aptly named cricket team - for they proved a most entertaining bunch, full of abuse directed (as it should be) relentlessly towards their own players.

But before we get to the report proper, first, an apology. Last week's match report was written after a very boozy evening and I'm afraid it all got a bit Mark Nicholas in places ("Stephen Harmison, with a slower ball, one of the great balls. Given the moment, given the batsman, and given the match…" Yep, sorry about that one, chaps.) So this week, a review in strictly rigorous fact-based fashion:

1. Hyde Heath fielded first. (I can't remember if we won the toss.)

2. We bowled. Ben sent down a very tidy opening spell to pick up one wicket; at the other end Spencer picked up three, but was expensive in his second spell. Ateeq took two (or one) and I took one.

3. I bowled the best I had in some weeks but proved expensive as one of Goodwill's batsmen made an inexplicable 60 or so, in which he looked like he might get out any second but periodically timed the ball, much to our surprise.

4. Sohail bowled well, although his figures were ruined by a sole death over that cost 16, and Goodwill finished on an eminently threatening 179 (later upgraded to 180 for reasons that never became entirely apparent).

5. My fielding was ghastly.

6. Tea was belting, with jam and cream bedecked scones the stand-out performance in a strong all-round display.

7. After being horribly dropped offering one of the simplest caught-and-bowled chances you could imagine, Dom proceeded to compile a second consecutive half-century, and along with Capper, finding form after a couple of low scores, put together an increasingly authoritative opening partnership of 120 that effectively sealed the match. Both timed the ball well, with Dom particularly strong on the cut, and Capper timing the hell out of it off his legs.

8. Jez and I then came in to steal some glory with a few boundaries against a demoralised opposition (who have clearly never witnessed a Hyde Heath collapse before).

9. We went to the Plough.

10. The end.