Grassroots Cricket

A slight move away from the colours and noise of Twenty20 and One Day International cricket this week with a look at the game at the local level, true cricket. I’m lucky enough to live in Cambridge, so on summer weekends, there is usually a game going on either on Parker’s Piece which is one of the green open spaces in the city as seen below, or Fenner’s which is situated behind the building shown in the background of the picture below.

This was 20 over cricket before Twenty20, 150 odd runs scored in the first innings of 20 overs doesn’t exactly make it a boundary fest. I guess there are many factors as to why that is, daisies in the outfield indicate that the ball may not skip across it and the pitch itself didn’t exactly have the ball jarring the handle.

The other aspect that impressed me at this level was the excellent physical condition of the players. The batsman here is said to have done a sub-12 second 100 metres at one time and I would believe him. If it was freefall out of a plane.

 

But seriously, like all sports, the further away you get from international standards the lower the quality. But then like scarce diamonds in the mud, you really treasure them when you find those quality moments, a couple of nice drives down the ground were worth more than the runs they got. Though for the period I was watching, defence seemed to be the order of the day. This game isn’t just about batsman and there was some admirable bowling too.

 

As a spectator, I treated it like any other game. I nodded appreciatively at the good bits and shook it and muttered expletives under my breath at the not so good bits. Between times a few ales were sunk, so overall a quite relaxing way to waste an afternoon.

The next day I was in London and taking a stroll through Battersea Park while the lunch sunk in, happened upon some more park cricket. Plenty of bounce off the pitch here and short boundaries too, so I loitered and watched a couple of overs. It was 12 balls later that my sister’s boyfriend piped up and asked if we were watching County cricket. I almost managed to say yes.

I thought it would be resolved by now, but the Zimbabwe issue rumbles on. Please ICC make the right decision. Zimbabwe Cricket is closely linked to Mugabe’s government and the ICC has the power to show it condones the intimidating and violent behaviour of those in power to stay in power. Zimbabwe should be suspended from membership of the ICC.