He was my friend, his name was Peter, and, some years ago now, he died.
We’d played cricket together for twenty years. Sunday in, Sunday out – a friendship forged over time, deep and enduring.
The team’s level was (and is) moderate at best, and Peter was no exception. Where he stood out from the rest of us was in his innate and unshakeable understanding that cricketing success isn’t simply about being good (that would be dull) but about occasionally being shockingly, outrageously bad – a goal only attainable to a dedicated few. Most important to him, though, was to enjoy every second of it, and it was this spirit – the true spirit of cricket so often and falsely trumpeted by professional cricketers – that Peter embodied.
Memory of him, always lurking somewhere in the confused fug at the back of my head, surged to the surface on Tuesday, as I played cricket for the first time in three years. Peter being unavoidably absent, I had to imagine him there. Not because of any inherent lack or failing in those actually present – they are a magnificent and glorious bunch of arseholes and ne’er-do-wells, and I love them – just because cricket with Peter was 10% better than cricket without him.
The ventiquattro, the sightscreen scurry, the cheese roll, the inimitable nurdle, the casual snaffle, the Volvo story, the ‘ah shit sorry chaps’, the tale of the Yorkshireman, the half pint and off to bed. To explain these references to the casual reader would be lengthy, tedious and unnecessary; to explain them to anyone who knew him, redundant. It’s the biggest cliché of all, but you had to be there, every summer Sunday for the best part of twenty years.
The game on Tuesday, from a personal viewpoint, fell into a neat three-act structure: inciting event – compounded and inescapable misery – glorious(ish) and hard-fought redemption.
The inciting event comprised nothing more exceptional than my actual presence on the field. I confess to a certain frisson as I put my hands into my batting gloves and strode out to bat.
‘This is good’, I thought. ‘Why haven’t I done this for so long? I should do it more often.’
‘This is stupid,’ came the rejoinder ten minutes later, as I hauled myself away from the crease, undone by a ball that to my bewildered sensibility seemed to swing one way, jag off the seam, swing three more ways, do a loop-the-loop and a figure-of-eight, pausing only to blow me a raspberry before surging past my clumsy forward prod and delivering the inevitable death-rattle of disturbed stumps. ‘Why am I doing this? I’m never doing it again.’
A gaggle of parakeets chose that moment to tear past the pavilion and take up position in a nearby tree. Their screeches of derision drilled into my head as I took my pads off and hurled them at my unsympathetic teammates laid them gently back in my kit bag.
Pity the batsman. One mistake and they’re done for, condemned to spend the ensuing minutes and hours ruing their bad luck (a dismissal is never their fault). But this game was a two-innings affair, crammed into a single day, so I was able to use the intervening time plotting the exact circumstances of my second visit to the crease, and picturing the humiliation that would doubtless ensue (spoiler alert: it didn’t, and I had a thoroughly enjoyable time scoring some runs in the second innings, but I am loath to blow my trumpet too hard).
Perhaps that introspective contemplation goes some way towards explaining the mind-boggling incompetence of my display in the field. Or perhaps I was distracted by wildlife. The buzzard, mobbed by jackdaws high overhead; the kestrel, briefly hovering over extra cover as if to offer the captain a subtle hint about the naiveté of his field placements; the fifteen fallow deer, gradually wandering ever closer till they encroached onto the field of play and formed a cordon of impromptu substitute fielders in contravention of Law 24.1.1.
Yes, that’s right. I’ll blame the wildlife.
The truth is, it’s remarkably easy to lose concentration when fielding. Cricket is a game of rhythm: nothing–FRENZY–nothing–FRENZY–nothing. If you’re still in the nothing mindset you can easily be caught napping by the frenzy. (Sidebar: there are readers of this space who I know will come back with the witty rejoinder that cricket is ‘all nothing’, or something similar. I hear your complaint and thank you for reading this far.)
The aforementioned mind-boggling incompetence manifested itself in myriad ways, each blunder compounding the last. With my ‘being fair to myself’ hat on, I might concede that the first two balls I made a hash of were hit with an intensity and speed that even in my five-minute pomp of 2001 I would have been hard pressed to counter. The first one came at me so fast it made the air fizz. I felt fortunate to get a thumb to it as it whizzed past me on the way to the boundary; my thumb begged to differ. The second took a wicked bounce just in front of me, jagging past my eagerly outstretched hands and over my right shoulder. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
But thereafter all was desperate floundering and misery, the final humiliation coming as the ball rolled gently towards me along the ground, the kind of thing you might give a five-year-old as fielding practice in the back garden. As it trickled through the conveniently ball-sized gap between my right foot and left knee, and with the mocking guffaws of my team mates and an itinerant green woodpecker ringing in my ears, I imagined Peter’s voice travelling across the years, cheery and sympathetic – the understanding voice of one who knew, who had been there many times.
‘Hard luck Lev old chap. Try stopping it next time, eh?’
Greater love hath no man than for the arseholes he plays cricket with.
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