Brian Halford: Village cricket stirs from its winter hibernation
It’s that special time of year. It’s the time when temperatures start to lift and days lengthen.
When you look outside first thing in the morning and, instead of cringing from another dark, glowering day, are kissed by soft sunlight and inspired to fling open the window and join the blackbirds and goldfinches in hearty song.
Mother Nature, that mean, cold, old moose of the recent months, is renewing herself.
Snowdrops emerge. Buds burst forth. Trees dress themselves once more. Deep down in darkness, under sheds, compost heaps and ancient tree trunks in redundant churchyards, hedgehogs wake.
And, timelessly, inexorably, around the villages of this nation thoughts turn, just as they have done for centuries, to cricket.
Idle through the winter, hundreds of lovely plots throughout this sylvan land see activity again. On village greens, on meadows generously donated by the farmer (as long as he bowls his overs during the season), on implausible hillsides up narrow, muddy tracks, the grand old game breaks out again.
Kit is fished from wardrobes and lofts, sniffed with a wince and thrown in the wash. Bats are brought out and shaped in off-drives the technical perfection of which they have never executed on a field of play. Senior team-members pose themselves the age-old questions: Shall I buy a new pair of boots or retire?
Musty pavilions stir again. Curtains are taken down and rubbed through. Tables are scrubbed. Ancient carpets are swept, hoovered and denuded of dead mice. Have we got gas for the new season? Sawdust? What’s happened to the scoreboard numbers? Where are the umpires' coats? Socks, discarded after the final game last year are gathered up and gently, with dignity, taken to their final resting place.
Players re-emerge. “How’s the family?” “Jack playing this year?” “Been up the City much? “How are the knees?”
Strange friendships, close every weekend from April to September, barely extant the rest of the year, re-engage.
Nets resume. Eager fingers wrap around cricket balls they will never in a million years be able to propel accurately over 22 yards.
Bowlers, stiff-limbed as action men, lumber in to batsmen snug in gloves and pads, dusting down the forward defensive and the alehouse smite. The noble groundsman has long emerged, mowing and rolling, measuring and planning, pruning and painting so that, once more, white-clad figures can spend six months shuffling in their great gamut of guises over the lush grass.
Ah, yes, it’s that time of year.
Heaven knows, this cynical, recession-ravaged, weather-beaten old country has problems but it has its treasures too. The Library Service. The NHS. Canals. Restormel Castle. And hundreds of cricket fields, glowing little sanctuaries of green in villages all over the island.
From Stoneleigh, set magnificently among the meadows of Warwickshire right here in the Midlands, to glorious Scroggie Park up in Fife (is there a prettier cricket-related spot in the world?) to lovely Oakhill in deepest Somerset, where the rough, rolling field is today much as it was a century ago.
In these places and so many others once again in 2010, as has been so since 1910 and, in some cases, 1810, it’s time for men who labour all week to head for their summer sanctuary.
For here, in the villages, is the home of cricket. The heart of cricket.
Not a stump camera in sight. Nor a sponsor’s logo or a name on a shirt. Not a fitness coach setting out cones or public address system hard-selling or suit with a microphone sticking keys in the pitch. Just tranquillity, a fusion of greens, birds, sheep, the rustling of trees, raucous appeals, the clack of bat on ball, the joshing, the timeless peace and languid pace and the irrelevance, the glorious irrelevance, of the score.
Far from the tumult of daily life it’s time once again for village cricket.
Proper cricket. And, if you are lucky, one day you’ll be fielding at mid-on, not really concentrating on the game but just taking in the scenery, when a butterfly meanders past and you make as if to catch it then watch as it rises across the sky as butterflies have done away from dozing fielders on beautiful English cricket grounds for centuries.
