Apologies for the absence today, but I’ve been out playing cricket again – in what will be my last match of the season, which fitted in beautifully between London’s increasingly tropical-looking rainstorms.
And the groundsman – who was there to be congratulated, deserved it for delivering, despite the conditions, a grass pitch on which more than 500 runs were score between 1pm(ish) and 7pm (ish). That it all ended in a draw after that – well that’s cricket.
But then I came home and read this piece in the SMH about the shortage of sporting fields in Sydney – one “problem” apparently is that more women are demanding access to fields, so that there is less space for the me.
Which reminded me of the cricket fields on which I used to play in Sydney – which were barely deserving of that name. Probably the worst was one out in the shadow of the Kurnell Oil refinery at Botany Bay, which was grazed the rest of the week by horses. Indeed they had to be chased off the field before the game could begin. The chasers being followed, of course, by several women wielding shovels. Still, if you were unlucky enough to be fielding in the deeper reachers of say, deep midwicket, you were all too likely to find a patch of horse-shit that the shovellers had missed.
That was women’s second division, but I also spent a fair bit of my teens playing in the first division, which meant grass pitches, but on our home ground at north Sydney ridiculously short boundaries at each end of the pitch. So most of my time playing first division was spent standing at either very fine leg or very third man, desperately hoping to stop balls the keeper had missed from the bowler then considered the quickest woman bowler in the world.
I wonder if the women’s first division still plays on that ground? Sadly, I think ’tis highly likely.
And as for the lovely white sightscreens at each end of today’s pitch – well they would have been an unimaginable luxury.
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