This too Shall Pass

Tonight, we lay our cricket club to rest.

9,936 days since we played our first, tentative match on a Winchester College ground in the summer of 1986, we played our last. Same opposition. Same weather. Same result.

Statistics can’t tell stories but, to a cricketer, they provide the architecture for them, meaning that all cricketers are statisticians at heart. Those that say they aren’t are liars. And those who say that the scorebook never lies know not the arcane magical world of the scorer.

So here it is, then. 436 matches in 101 locations (including 5 stately homes), against 112 oppositions and involving- just on our own side- 402 players. Some played once and ran for the hills. Some played a match or two a year, much as they might visit the dentist. Some stayed until their ability lagged so far behind their ambition that they could bear it no longer whilst a few, just a select few, saw it through to the bitter end. Three of us, to be precise.

Of those matches, we won 148, lost 221, drew 45. God knows what happened in the other 22, except one on that bright sunlit Wednesday evening when someone died. For a few minutes, everyone thought that he was having a little catch-up of sleep, but it turned out not. Our lowest score was 32, and our highest 298. Our biggest victory was by 176 runs; our biggest defeat by 193. About 15 people had a go at captaining the team, mostly just the once. For there is truth in that old expression that the higher the monkey goes, the more he reveals.

Four of us have passed on to the great square in the sky, much missed but genuinely not forgotten. And most of what we have done we have done on one of the most beautiful grounds in Hampshire by permission of one of its loveliest and most long-suffering couples.

And tonight, we will lay it to rest. At the Pub with No Name, we will gather, break bread, drink beer, tell stories and clean out most of that is left in the account. The stories will improve as the evening wears on, in excitement and volume if not in accuracy. We will agree to do a match or two in the future, but as a loose confederation of like-minded souls, rather than as a club with a fixture list and a membership structure. And then we will drive home and wonder maybe, as we turn off the bedside light, why it is that we did it.

Richard and I wrote a book about it a dozen or so years ago, in the last chapter of which we tried to answer that question.

‘Perhaps,’ we said, ‘our cricket provides us with a tiny window onto a world that is disappearing as fast as grains of sand run through cupped hands.

‘Our cricket gives us laughter. Even the direst of matches, the most forlorn pitches, and the grimmest oppositions, make us smile. We laugh equally at our successes and failures. Most often, we laugh at ourselves collectively and, as we do, we marvel at the sequence of tiny genetic miracles that threw us all together in the first place, and then gave us enough fun to keep it all going long, long after its best-before date.

‘It gives us space when so many things in life crowds in on us. Space to move around freely, and to watch time drift past without feeling guilt for it. Space not to feel bad about the absence of deadlines. A match allows a rare opportunity to be nothing more than a harmless part of someone else’s view. Sometimes, there needs to be space in life for doing next to nothing, and cricket provides it.

‘Our cricket also provides us with a shameless piece of escapism from this age of the information super-highway, the 24 hour convenience store and the endless subliminal messaging of the marketing men. It drags us away from the tyranny of the waiting email, and the guilt of the ‘missed calls’ register on the mobile phone. To field idly at long-off in in the evening sunshine is to peep back over the wall to when things moved slower, cost less and didn’t always need to signify something. At a time of digital abundance, the whole glorious point of cricket is that so much of it is utterly pointless.

‘In the age of screens, where the mainstream of human ingenuity seems to be directed at creating virtual- as opposed to real life- experiences, activities like our cricket come as a powerful antidote. After all, what could be less virtual than to stare behind yourself at three splattered stumps and a grinning wicket keeper? Afternoons spent among friends in a shared endeavour, be it ever so creaky and aimless, provide a tiny but important stretch of mental greenbelt to the stresses and strains of everything else that goes on. Whatever your activity might be is not important. It is just life enhancing to have one at all.’

Quite. And I would write it all again today. So you may ask ‘if it’s that good, then why call it a day?’

It is simple. In a country where the aim of healthcare sometimes seems to be all about prolonging life at whatever cost, Richard and I instinctively knew when it had ran out of steam. Timing is everything. Volunteers were getting fewer, bodies creakier, bowling slower, balls harder, defeats heavier and the summer rains more frequent. How much better than to eat and drink together tonight and then see what a new tomorrow brings? How much sweeter to go out smiling?

Ave atque Vale!