Chigwell and Hainault CC vs. Tetherdown Trundlers
Date: Sunday 18 May 2014: 14:00.
Match: Chigwell and Hainault CC vs. Tetherdown Trundlers CC
Venue: Metropolitan Police Sports Club, Chigwell
Status: Single Innings, Thirty-Five overs, One Day; Full Test Status
Result: Tetherdown Trundlers CC 192 all out beat Chigwell and Hainault CC 148/7. Match Won.
Skipper: Frais.
Ducksman: Gordon.
Full scorecard may be viewed here.
Newman’s New Men
WHAT A DIFFERENCE a fortnight makes. A spectator at the Trundlers’ last outing (and yes, there was one) might have longed for a sou’wester and galoshes; but as the Muswell men saddled their jalopies for the short trip to Hainault this Sunday just gone, the weather was properly crickety. The sun beamed, local birds frolicked and a gentle southerly breezes ruffled cowlicks across Essex.
Hainault and Chigwell CC play at the pleasure of Her Majesty’s Constabulary in the grounds of Chigwell Hall, a handsome 19th century homestead set amongst lush rolling acres near Epping Forest. The acres do roll, though, and the wicket presents with a pronounced list to starboard. It falls a good fifty feet between its midwicket boundaries. This promises batmen of an agricultural bearing – of which we have a number – an invitation to swipe from one end, but thin gruel should they try at the other.
Hainault won the toss and thought we should bat. Skipper Frais had been thinking that too, and it was with this kind of consensual disposition that both teams comported themselves throughout the whole affair.
As you know there is a renewed resolve about our lads in 2014, and on the way over our master tactician had aired a plan. We should insert an uncultured striker of the ball – he nominated Buxton – at three. The idea was to hurry the run rate along, and to create a wave which following strokesmen could catch. “Hang ten,” said Mr Grainger: so often have our innings become becalmed in early overs.
In this caper, the worst case would be to lose a Tail-End Charlie, but at least it would be quick, and he might do some damage while he was at it. Buxton has never shown more than a passing familiarity with the idea of defence so, whatever happened, our remaining playmakers would have plenty of time to weave their willowy magic.
Frais acted on his deputy’s recommendation. A sacrificial New Zealand lamb it would be.
Trundlers’ Innings
COLLEY AND BONFIELD took their guards. From the first ball the omens felt good: short of a length and a little wide, Colley rocked back on his haunches slapped it briskly to the fence in front of square. Already a run rate of 24 an over, although you won’t be surprised to hear things promptly calmed down a bit.
Hainault selected their bowling attack from the alphabet. Jay opened up the hill, Kaye (whom it is not unkind to describe as the more experienced of the pair) down it. Jay unleashed his deliveries with a youthful vigour; Kaye did not. Nonetheless, both quickly found their range, and with bounce a little variable, a familiar circumspection set in to the Trundlers openers. After a couple of overs Bonfield played over the top of a diabolical yorker from Jay, and so it was our Kiwi canary found himself heading out to the coal mine.
As regular readers will know, Buxton’s thirty-five-year batting career is as long as it is feckless. Unused to the rarefied, first-class air one finds up the order, his home is the farted-in, back-end-of-steerage atmosphere in which a lifelong number ten flogs his tawdry wares, scratching singles from inside edges, hoping like the devil to benefit from overthrows and thanking the Lord for each ball he survives as his innings wends to its customary farcical conclusion.
So, plied with 100% proof top-order oxygen, the New Zealander became light headed, especially when the first couple flew pleasingly off the blade. Before long he was swinging wildly at everything. At square leg, old Trigger Gordon – likewise used to life at the back of the plane and a bit giddy even umpiring this far up the order – tried to calm his countryman down. He would jump up and down and flap his arms wildly whenever the Cantabrian should look in his direction, as rotational momentum propelled him to do at each hearty swing. Frais, officiating at the bowler’s end, could not bring himself to watch, which doubtless accounted for a couple of generous L.B.W. decisions in the batsman’s favour.
It was Colley who took it upon himself to administer some sedating words. Mid-way through an over, the warhorse marched down the track to have a word to his gibbering colleague. Buxton assumed he was backing up and bolted straight past him to the non-striker’s end. Eventually Colley caught up with his man and put his peacetime skills as a quantitative analyst to good use.
“There are,” said he, “one hundred and seventy three balls left in this innings.”
“Really?” Buxton bore the look of a pioneer cresting a bluff in Utah who had been hoping to see California.
“Well, one hundred and fifty six regulation deliveries: based on their current rates and an implied volatility of 0.57, I’m factoring in three no-balls and fourteen wides. So, yes: really. Let’s make sure we use them.”
This was the tonic Buxton needed. The pair settled down to compile runs at a pleasing rate. They had added 36 and just brought up the team’s 50 when Colley was snookered by an unplayable seamer from Mr Salador, just short of a length, jagging viciously away and clipping the top of his off stump.
This brought Mr Phillips to the crease: as you’ll recall, one who has recently found the fountain of youth a little further down the list. He had lost none of his high-scoring touch and was briskly into action; at first picking up singles, getting his eye in and allowing the scoreboard to mind itself, but before long flashing his balls to all parts of the ground.
Now describing a well-compiled partnership in the face of disciplined bowling and a creditable fielding display lacks much of the appeal of writing about Trundlers’ matches. For a time, there was none of the mad-cap comedy that usually punctuates our play: instead, just steady, stolid, dull accumulation of runs. The assembled Trundlers on the boundary began to look listless.
It is just as well therefore that, after long resistance, Buxton finally reverted to mean, playing all around a straight ball from Khan. He departed the arena grinning like a bandicoot with 58 against his name.
Surely, the comedy theatrics could not be far off. The first opportunity presented itself out of a minor tragedy: Phillips, now freely swinging, collected silly mid-off on the knee with a blazing cover drive. We are hopeful Mr Jay will make a full and speedy recovery, but as he lay on the turf incanting sacred covenants, it was clear he would not be fielding in the immediate future. Without thinking – such was the spirit in which the game was played – Frais offered up a substitute fielder, and who should answer his captain’s call, but brave Ulysses!
This promised some ribald fun. What should we expect to happen if the ball were to sky in Colley’s direction? We were disappointed to see our man dispatched to the fence square on the off, but all of us, I think, harboured a secret hope.
Back to the wicket. Grainger, uncharacteristically, failed to get a start. He copped a nasty low bounce and was trapped in front for 4 to Mr Myers, who bowled in a pedestrian but insistent way.
Skipper Frais, enducked for the day, looked poised in clattering a beautifully timed late cut into the scoreboard and another close to it inside the ropes, before he fully lost his will to elegance. The bowler, Frais decided, had the look of runs about him: specifically, runs to the boundary behind square leg. I wish I could tell you what made Frais think that, because from my vantage point – umpire – I am blowed if I could see it: Myers was bowling a consistently good length outside (and, as Grainger might have testified, occasionally on) off.
But the Trundlers’ skipper’s mind was set. When the Hainault bowler again put one in that region, Frais improvised a stroke not seen before on a cricket pitch. It resembled Foucault’s Pendulum, or an upside-down metronome. It involved standing with feet spread wide apart, square to the batting crease, and swinging the bat perpendicular to the plane on which the ball was travelling. Their trajectories did not intersect; the ball carried through to Hainault’s voluble keeper.
You would think Frais had drawn all the conclusions he needed from his experiment and would get back to working on his graceful late cut. Correctly suspecting he had not, Myers bowled another, this time on middle stump. Frais got once again into position to play his inverted metronome, only this time connected, wafting the ball gently to a spot just backward of the square leg umpire.
This spot was occupied by Mr Kaye. But he was seated on the grass with his back to the wicket, engrossed in a complicated hamstring stretch in preparation for a second spell. He seemed in danger. But hark! A guttural bark broke from somewhere on the far boundary, and Kaye’s ears pricked up. Such was the lazy trajectory of Frais’ stroke, he was able to disengage from his warm-up manoeuvre, stand up, turn round and receive the ball in a regulation reverse cup as if he had been expecting it all along. Frais stalked from the crease and was heard, later, claiming he had been “caught out on the pull”.
But Frais’ antics were just an entrée: all that was required was the removal of Mr Phillips and the good old Trundlers’ tail would be popped out and wagging for all to see.
But first, out came Mr Hayward, a fellow who boasts an impeccable sporting pedigree. Some say he once trialled for Partick Thistle. Alongside Mr Phillips, he is our most credentialised cricketer, having recently attained his ECB Level One Fun Cricket, Criminal Records Clearance and Health and Safety Training qualification. This entitles him to pronounce authoritatively on the long barrier, the panoply of fielding positions, the safe handling of scissors and, of course, the fundamentals of calling and running between the wickets. On Saturday Mornings, Mr Hayward may often be heard, across much of the borough, imparting this knowledge to our infants. So it would be most interesting to see the master puts his own counsel into practice. Your correspondent, still umpiring, had a ringside seat.
Now for those who might momentarily have forgotten, the basic tenets of calling in cricket can be briefly stated: the striker calls on balls played in front of square, the non-striker those behind, and there are but three words in the whole lexicon of formal batting communication: “yes”, “no” and “wait”. Calling should be loud, early and decisive.
It sounds so easy. But a man gets keyed up when he wields a short handle, and these things can quickly fly out the window. So they did with Coach Hayward. Even at the non-striker’s end, as the ball was launched into play his usually fluid movements deserted him. He advanced and retreated from home base, lock-jawed and stiff, like a fencer on a bungee. His eyes bulged.
Phillips patiently patted the ball back down the track to the bowler. “GO!” hollered Hayward. “STOP! … HOLD ON! … BACK!” Phillips is as nonchalant a fellow as you will find, and he was unfazed by his colleague’s white-knuckled alarm. Calmly, but firmly, he declared no interest in a run. Hayward scurried back to his ground like a squirrel evading a charging retriever.
When his turn came to take strike, Hayward requested the conventional guard of middle stump, from which he then retreated 18 inches and stationed himself on the return crease. But he has an excellent eye and you can see why his natural timing supposedly once impressed the scouts of Hamilton Academicals, and before Salador finally found the open goal Hayward presented him, the Under 11s coach had smitten a couple of solid blows and accrued five good runs.
In the meantime young Mr Kaye had completed his yoga routine and returned to crease with ball in hand. He put himself into first gear and rumbled up the hill. His first over was a maiden, during his second Phillips lashed a couple of boundaries, and his last was surely one of the most bizarre in the annals of Trundlers cricket, and that is saying something.
Mr. Kaye’s figures for those six balls – a wicket maiden – suggest a brief flurry at the outset and an uneventful remainder. Nothing could be further from the truth. During this sequence not one but three Trundlers concluded their appointments at the crease, and in each case a Trundler was the main operating cause of the dismissal.
First, the curtain came down on Phillips’ splendid innings. Buxton saw to that, accepting a bowler’s appeal unsupported by anyone else on the ground (except The Substitute Fielder, at deep extra cover). Kaye, who had already troubled Phillips on the pads a couple of times, put his first ball on off. It hurried through, catching Phillips low on the back pad as he tried to work it through the covers. The bowler made a salutary grunt, supported by none of his regular team-mates, resigned to the fact that it wouldn’t be a day for L.B.W.s.
But Buxton surprised everyone by construing this as a formal appeal and voting to uphold it. There were scarce few overs left and Phillips had had a good old go, but as he returned to his applauding mates, Phillips couldn’t escape the feeling that Buxton’s then-prevailing high score had something to do with his decision. But the wicket keeper looked to have the last laugh: he had already made the top score with a commanding 61.
But, of course, it was by no means the last laugh. How could it be, with the man from Karori yet to bat? The sight of Gordon approaching a wicket in pads and gloves is enough to cheer up the grimmest curmudgeon.
Mr Kaye, after an earnest conversation with The Substitute Fielder stipulated, out of the blue, a fly leg slip. Few cricketers at our level even know what one of those is, but The Substitute Fielder, trotting happily back to deep extra cover, is one.
Kaye served up his next delivery. Gordon swung wildly, caught a thick inside edge, and without a backward glance unleashed an unholy roar and charged towards the bowler, brandishing his bat like a claymore. Ritterband, looking his usual composed self, was perched on his bat enjoying a view of the ladies promenading the Long Leg boundary, and was in no frame of mind to react – it was his call, and he had decided before the ball was bowled he wasn’t going to make it – so could only watch in horror as the newly positioned fly slip quietly returned the ball to the wicket keeper whereupon, for the first time ever in Trundlers’ colours, his wicket was broken.
Two balls, and two wickets, and Gordon was not done yet. Mr Binns – no stranger to running controversy – arrived in lieu of Ritterband.
We should pause to imagine what was occupying Gordon’s thoughts as he watched Ritterband dejectedly quit the arena. Was it runner’s remorse? Or continuing the re-enactment of Braveheart? We had not long to wait to find out.
Binns dug his first delivery out with the toe of his bat. As it rolled harmlessly towards short mid-off, Gordon bellowed “FREEDOM!” and thundered back towards Bannockburn. The keeper received the outfield throw and removed the bails long before Gordon reached the theatre of conflict. The man from Karori deviated by a few degrees and continued his tartan charge all the way to the pavilion.
Mr Kohler arrived. Kohler is just the chap you might look to should you need to rescue an innings. But Frais felt little need for that and, if he did, it was his own silly fault for putting Kohler in at 11 anyway. So Kohler played only an observing role in an ensuing drama which did not take long to unfold.
Mr Binns was a notable truant from our winter sessions. He says this is due to demanding clients but, whoever they are they did not impress upon him, the way Mr Newman has on us, the importance of a stable back foot, a level head and a straight follow through. Mr Kaye sent his next delivery down that uncertain corridor outside off. Binns looked to the midwicket horizon and swung with all his might. Were it not for the twelve inches between bat and ball at their closest point of orbit, it might have flown there, too.
Kaye lobbed his next ball gently at middle stump. Binns played an identical stroke, only harder. It spun him fully 900 degrees – two and a half full rotations, for the less mathematically inclined – in which time Binns’ blade passed by the cherry twice, but never close enough to interfere with its gravitational field, much less intersect with it. Binns came eventually to rest facing his wicket, and in good time to see Kaye’s delivery arrive on it.
All out in the final over. After a splendid tea under a mature horse chestnut, the Trundlers took the field.
Hainault and Chigwell’s Innings
PERHAPS NOW IS the time to concede that the Chigwell and Hainault were a little under-manned. Not only was the athletic Mr Jay on the side-line nursing a swollen knee, but the team had anyway been a man short and reached even that strength only courtesy of three generations of the same family agreeing to turn out. Of these men two, aged 8 and 79 respectively, might have passed up the opportunity had there been an alternative.
The kiwis opened the attack, as usual. Gordon didn’t query his countryman’s right to choose ends, and found himself trotting up the steep incline. He might feel entitled to take first pick in the next fixture as, for the second match in a row, the Wellingtonian bowled with more discipline, greater economy and to the tune of better figures than his old pal from the South Island. Seven overs straight, into the wind and up the hill, to finish with a maiden, a wicket and just eight culpable runs in his ledger: if anything exemplified Newman’s new men, Gordon’s bowling effort surely did. Grainger’s extreme parsimony, too, a product of crafty flight and exacting length, and three well taken catches also spoke of the Newman dividend.
The Middlesex man couldn’t claim credit for Binns’ bowling, though. While Binns’ action owes more to the traditional Trundlers’ model than any modern coaching philosophy it is no less effective for it. And in any case four wickets in an innings, when there were only eight to be had, cannot pass unremarked. It would be a churlish to cast aspersions as to the capricious means by which many of them fell.
Our usual vulnerability in the catching department was, this day not much in evidence: Grainger had his catching hands on in the covers and, for once in his life, so did Frais. Grainger having snapped up Duddridge at breast height early in Gordon’s second over, a short while later Binns accounted for the danger man, Ormsby, when his skipper executed what can only be described as a screamer.
Whilst keeping, Ormsby had been dropping into any conversation he could drum up with our men that he’d played a league game the previous day. With bat in hand, gamely unhelmeted, he looked anxious to continue wherever it was that he had left off. He brandished his Gunn & Moore the way a mugger might, plastering Buxton to the fence in the first over. To Gordon he was watchful, but in Binns he saw opportunity. Off Binns’ first over Ormsby plundered eleven, but off his second disaster – and irony – struck: Ormsby fell to a dismissal strikingly similar to one suffered by the very same Binns, last year in Fuengirola. How the worm turns!
There is a point, quite early in his delivery sequence, when a bowler knows how things are going to turn out. He can feel a “jaffa” as he arrives at the popping crease: his front foot exactly bisects the whitewash, his head is level, shoulder is high, his hips swivel cleanly, his follow-through is effortless, like the logical conclusion to sound premises that it is. All is fluid: nothing jars; the ball comes through in a poetic parabolic arc. Likewise, when a ball is not destined for great things, a bowler knows that too, often before he passes the umpire. His skeletal mechanics are unknitted, his follow-through falters, he wobbles like a Meccano crane with untightened nuts.
As he passed the point of no return, Binns had that look. His shoulders sagged and his head dropped, as if he would rather not see in which tree Ormsby was about to deposit his delivery. It pitched half-way down the track and sat up obediently.
Mr Ormsby made his plans. They involved hammering the ball hard, flat and downwards in the direction of midwicket: a disciplined stroke; apparently certain to yield four magnificent runs.
Much as Binns had done in last year’s Iberian fixture, Mr Ormsby affected that salutary trot up the wicket which spoke of no intention at all to go to the other end. A boundary was coming his way for certain. Out came his gloved fist, ready to bump against his colleague’s. All that remained was for the ball to bypass Skipper Frais, who had been fielding in an old pair of his wife’s sunglasses, at short midwicket.
So inevitable did that outcome seem that the umpire turned to the pavilion, the scorer began an acknowledging wave and started to ink in the runs, and poor old Binns collected himself, hangdog, his hands on his knees.
Frais leapt full-length to his right – nay, further than that – and dangled his hand an inch above the turf. The ball was travelling fast enough to have been red-shifted, and not a man on the park gave him a show in hell of stopping it. So exactly how the skipper came to hold it at all, let alone one-handed, we will never know, but the danger man was out, and momentum was ever more firmly with the men from N10.
Both openers were accounted for. When Mr Murray spooned Binns to Grainger for nought and Mr Salador steered a Binns full toss onto his wicket for one, Hainault were four down for forty odd. Frais felt the game all but won, and called off the full-court press. You would think he’d have learned by now to wait for the fat lady to sing, for blocking her entrance were two men: Myers and Khan. They were, as yet, in no mood for music.
For the second time in the match, competent if dreary cricket displaced our standard slapstick. The action palled. Khan batted with great elegance and some patience. Myers batted with great patience and some elegance. Neither man showed any inclination to risk his wicket. With Gordon spent, Frais looked to Ritterband, Kohler, and himself: none made an impact. There were no particular fireworks with the bat but, while runs accumulated steadily, nor did Hainault ever look like knocking off our score. The remaining hi-jinks had to wait for the final couple of overs and the return of Binns and Hayward.
As ever, it required our own special brand of disarming incompetence to pick the opposition’s lock. This arrived in the form of an over-tossed belter from Hayward which Myers lobbed to Grainger at point. Grainger wasn’t of a mind to drop anything, in any circumstances, on this day, as we were presently to see. The levy was almost breached. The incoming Mr Kaye provided a bit more resistance, but betrayed his tendency to swing to the leg side where that excellent reader of the game Colley had cannily stationed himself. Night followed day, and Mr Kaye’s time amongst us drew nigh.
Master Ormsby, 8, took up his bat. This was his first spell in the limelight, having been uncomplainingly covering the downhill fine leg, behind his wicket-keeping father, for the Trundlers’ entire innings. We are all parents, and each of us could see the swelling pride in his father’s chest as he watched his boy stride to the middle. Young Ormsby’s jaw was set: if I had to pick a cricketing type, I would predict a resolute No. 3.
Hayward commenced the last over of the innings. Khan’s first order of priority was to complete his half century, which he did at once, launching a towering six over wide long on. To Hayward’s second ball – deserving of no greater respect, in all honesty – Khan pushed carefully into a gap on the on side and urged his partner through for a single. We saw at once this superb gesture for what it was. Young Ormsby would see out the four balls left to acquire his First Senior Run.
We Trundlers all knew what was required: the game’s result was in no doubt, Hainault being still forty short of our total. All on the playing arena had one objective, and that was for Master Ormsby to take a single. Each man privately contemplated how he might contrive an overthrow should the youngster not have the strength to hit the ball far enough by himself.
Hayward bowled a kindly line toward the lad’s leg stump. He quickly got in position for a sweep. It wasn’t a badly executed stroke by any means, but he was slightly under the ball and it ballooned onto the leg-side.
Then something deep in Grainger’s psyche intervened. He beheld the ball, loping guilelessly through the air nearby with enough momentum, if he left it, to vouchsafe this young man his run. But animal instinct overwhelmed the Trundlers Vice-Captain. He snatched at it. He gobbled it. The ball was taken, gone, withdrawn from the field of play and, in an indecently short time, it was clear this action could not be undone. There was no boundary nearby that Grainger could “accidentally” step over; no “butterfingers” fumble he could plausibly affect. It was too late for the umpire to contrive a no-ball. The boy was out, for a duck, and it was Grainger wot done it.
But in such moments do boys become men. On this day did young Ormsby cross that threshold: he did not look imploringly at the umpire, his lip did not quiver. He set his taciturn jaw, threw back his shoulders, and marched bravely whence he had come. On a day of three fine half-centuries his innings brought the warmest applause.
There was but a single ball for his great-grandfather to negotiate for the game to conclude, and that was done with little ado. The Trundlers had thoroughly, unequivocally, and with accompanying documentary evidence, won. I dare say the shandies of Chigwell Hall have rarely tasted better.