Bye bye cricket, for now.

 

Me getting out, which is symbolic for me leaving cricket.

As mentioned in a previous post, one of the things I'll miss the most about here is playing cricket. It's been my "thing" for about 15 years now, and even though there are cricket clubs in Memphis, I'm not so sure it will be the same. As much as I've enjoyed the actual playing of the sport, it's the camaraderie, the friendships, and the fighting that have kept me dusting off the spikes every summer.

If you don't know what cricket is, it's baseball in white pyjamas, without gloves. Two batsmen play at the same time, and they are allowed to miss the ball as many times as they like (sometimes deliberately), and bowlers are  totally allowed to hit the bastards.

Scottish cricket is a little different though, we play in the rain and swear more.

Boroughmuir 2001
I'm top left. I'd put on some weight by then.

 The honest reason I took up cricket in the first place is that I was shite at everything else. In conjunction with my PE teacher I realised that being left handed gave me an advantage in some sports, particularly ball-throwing ones, and with a little encouragement from the teacher and my mate who was also keen on cricket, I started to enjoy playing, and soon joined my local club, Boroughmuir.

We went to indoor training, and I started to really enjoy bowling. I fucking hated batting though, really fucking hated it. The ball is made of wood, I'm made of bits that hurt when hit with balls made of wood, and no level of padding equipment is going to make me less shit scared of cricket balls. I really started reading up on the game, and with both me and Ian going to every training session, I was desperate for the season to start. The week of the first game came, and I wasn't picked. What the fuck? There was barely ten guys at training, and I couldn't find a place in two teams of eleven. So that was the cricket career over. Until Ian phoned me and told me he wanted to go shopping instead of playing, so sent me along instead.

howzat?

Sending your own replacement isn't the done thing, but the Boroughmuir 2nd XI made me welcome anyway, and my cricket career had been revived. We played against Holy Cross 3rd XI, and both teams were utterly shite. I was wearing Ian's white joggers and white t-shirt, which were about 2 sizes too big for me, and someones tatty cricket sweater which was even bigger. They had a guy that looked like Gandalf, who bowled underarm (poofy, and banned now). The only action I can remember from the game is me dropping a catch for the match winning wicket. We won anyway.

I kept plugging away, but it wasn't until a change in captaincy in my second season that I consistently got to bowl. I started to get wickets regularly and I managed to convince myself that it was nothing to do with everyone else being shite. I was also handed another responsibility that year - umpiring.

See, with amateur sports here we tend to umpire our own games. In cricket this means that a member of the batting team umpires when his team are batting. Sounds fucking stupid doesn't it? That's because it is. I don't know what's more absurd, cheating to benefit your own team when you're umpiring, or not taking the opportunity to control (and probably win) the game by cheating when umpiring.

Cricket was fun for the first four years, but you're not playing real cricket until you're old enough to drink, and it was my club captain who took it upon himself to initiate me to the world of legal alcohol, by challenging me to a pint race. The pint consisted of cider, blackcurrant, Midouri, sake, vodka, schnapps, gin, and other stuff. I downed my pint in seconds, whilst my skipper just held his to his mouth and took a sip. I remember taking it in my stride, and ordering a beer, the resulting calls of "iceman", then waking up in bed at home the next morning.

Real cricket.



With my club being rather successful at the time, there was a lot of drinking going on. We'd tend to go for a post-match drink with the opposition, usually to gloat, and then follow that up with drinking until closing time at the Nova Hotel, and on many occasions take things to the late-opening bars, or Will's house for darts. Then there were the league-winning occasions, which involved locked-doors at the Nova, hen-parties bringing us food, leprechauns with big foam cocks, and drinking as much silly shit as possible.

But all good things come to an end, and after eight years, a couple of broken noses, being thrown out of a bar by a teammate (because if you're going to be cheeky, it's probably best not to pick on rugby players three times your size) , three league promotions, arguments with umpires, accusations of theft by umpires, a relegation or two, and plenty of Becks, it was time to move on.

not a knife

After my brother and I staged a mass walkout from Boroughmuir, my new cricketing home was Westquarter & Redding Cricket Club , a club with a bit of a reputation. Everyone seemed to have a story about these guys, and it tended to be about how they liked cheating, and a fight. They seemed like a nice bunch of guys to me, and Stuart and I seemed to fit in pretty well. If nothing else, they seemed like a rather easy going bunch. Then the actual games started.

It's not unusual for teammates to argue a little, but when they start punching (slapping) eachother it's not good. A captain standing up for his players is a good thing, but a captain threatening to stab a member of the opposition isn't good. Even if he qualifies this later by stating he meant to say he'd stab him with a stump, not  a knife. Throttling an opponent isn't allowable by MCC rules either. Every umpire was a cheat, and every team seemed to hate us. So every game was eventful, but we were finding wins hard to come by, and narrowly avoided relegation once or twice.

Me and Shibby, I'm on the left.

Then out of the blue we started winning games, which was absolutely nothing to do with the appearance of Hamad, Shoeb, Arzak, Sajid and Abdul, who were all good players and great guys,  but were a bit to fancy for my liking. They had no appreciation for the drama of a close game, and more importantly weren't up for a fight. More importantly, we were running out of guys who could drink, and without drink it was getting a bit too much like sport. Two league promotions later and we're playing at a higher level than most of us are used to. We've managed to hang around in division 2 mainly through luck with the weather, and other teams fuck ups (ha ha), but it's been fun.

Because this is my blog, and barely anyone else is reading it, I'm going to list my top ten cricket moments, that I have been a part of, and therefore will not be on TV. Channel 4 may be picking up the countdown show though.


10 - My debut for Borougmuir 1st XI against Fauldhouse. Getting the call up to the first team was great, and I ended up getting a couple of wickets. The best part of the game though was a member of the opposition going mental for being given out, and driving his car on the pitch. I'm starting to question whether this happened or not (much like Dermot hitting a cow on the arse), but it's my favourite story anyway.

I could never get that aftershock out of my shirt, or the
cricket ball stains out of my hands.



9  - Winning promotion with Boroughmuir without playing a game. It was the last game of the season, and if we avoided defeat we were sure to be promoted. So, when the opposition called off due to bad weather we were suddenly all at the Murrayfield Hotel at 11am, with eight hours to spare, and the celebrations started immediately. It was the first time I'd won anything, and the drunkest I've ever been.

8 - Nigel Binne winning us a close match against Dunfermline Carnegie - Back in my Boroughmuir days we had a wee rivalry going with this team (which then somehow followed my to Westquarter). Both sides were riding high, and we were in serious trouble, losing our first 4 wickets for next to nothing. But the Binnie took it upon himself to spank the bowling all over the shop to keep us on course for promotion.

Brothers of destruction

7 - Our debut for Westquarter. For most of our cricketing career my brother and I played in separate XI's, so it was pretty cool to debut for the club together, and also take 9 wickets between us. I also got my one and only hat trick that day. It's a shame I read the match report just there, we got humped that day.

6 - Sajid hitting 3 sixes to tie a game. Sajid is the nicest guy on the planet. He's my honorary grandad. But he could probably strangle an elephant to death. This was just a meaningless friendly, but the atmosphere on the sidelines was great when Saj started tee-ing off. I also enjoyed writing the slightly over exaggerated match report.

5 - Stuart captaining and bowling us to a win against Stenny. My brother was thrown into the deep end that season and asked to captain the side, and this was a pretty big match for us against our local rivals, who we hadn't beaten for a long time. So, for Stuart to get four wickets and also get us the elusive win was pretty sweet.

4 - Taking 7 wickets against Dalgety Bay. In the East of Scotland league 7-15 is hardly a record breaking haul of wickets, and plenty of shite bowlers have chalked up better figures. But for some reason or another these were my best. It's a shame that I took my best figures the day after nose surgery (#3) and still high on pain killers and suffering the after effects of anaesthesia, but couldn't replicate them when 100%.

3 - Breaking my nose against Edinburgh Uni Staff. Not just so that I could tell the story of how I re-broke it a year later, but since someone needed to replace me on the field when I went off to the hospital, and my wee brother (15 at the time) just happened to be on hand. He stepped in to play in the field, and took 2 catches on our way to winning the game. This led to him playing regularly, and

You can't have my axe.

2 - Scoring 67 runs against my former club. As noted above, I can't bat. Before that game my highest score was 33, against a bunch of kids, and I had never hit a six in my life. So it's fair to say a few people were shocked when I hit six of them on my way to my highest ever score.

The absolute best part of it though was the fact that my former team mate and cricketing fairy godmother, Doc, was enjoying it and was visibly proud that I had finally done something with the bat. We did lose, so who know what he'd have been like if I'd actually won us the game. I followed this up with another 59 against Leith the following week, and then my bat was never seen again.

 

1 - Winning the Presidents Trophy 2010 - This was great for a variety of reasons. It was the first cricket trophy most of us had won, we defeated a team who we had trouble against earlier in the season (and they bloody cheated in the final too), and it was great to get something positive out of a relatively shite season. However the main reason I think this is the best moment in my cricket life is that the team is starting to break up, with new guys coming in and the oldies doing their own thing. So this was a great way for the group who came up the leagues together to have a defining moment.



championeees