Far From The MCC
~ Est. in 1998 ~
“Tour Diary:
Tennis Balls in the Park”
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Sunday 19th
July 2007 |
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Result: Drunk and disorderly |
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Venue: |
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Midday – early morning…. |
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I wake up. It’s 8am.
I go back to sleep. I wake up. James is still asleep. I look at my watch. “Dude, we’ve got five minutes to make
breakfast!” “Oh… better get up
then… what happened to my alarm?”
Followed by more cobbing and grumbling about his phone being far too
quiet.
Mr. Howarth and Mr. Smith strut their stuff on the Courtlands
Hotel catwalk. In the dining hall
cellar, I check 9.29 isn’t too late for the 9.30 shut-off. “No that’s fine.” Surprisingly unsarcastic from our waitress. I notice Forty minutes later,
I’ve choked down some bread, coffee and eggs, and go out for a fag. Light drizzle. Haven’t even thought about the weather up
till now. Steve’s hamstring
injury hasn’t shown much improvement, despite eight litres of muscle relaxant
in the last twelve hours, so he deserts us and heads home. * * * Today’s pre-match
warm-up is a round of crazy golf, or, as it would turn out, ‘adventure golf’:
rope bridges across fake water; realistic-looking rocks with life-size
plastic pirates clambering all over them.
It’s about a 20 minute walk, the other side of the pier, or a 20
minute drive. We drive. There, it’s also raining lightly, the golf
is £4.50, and there aren’t many on the course yet… We check the
amusement arcade. A couple of games of
Air Hockey. Dave, today’s skipper,
beats John; I help Zac defeat sister Tash with lack of assistance from Dave. Then the real game begins: crane operated
grabbers to pick up cuddly toys.
Sometime after James has changed his second £20, we figure the
hydraulic fingers aren’t actually up to the job of even picking up the
poodles or
D. Shorten sticks his arm up Bob’s arse, much to J. Hoskin’s
amusement. Outside, the weather
has failed to deteriorate sufficiently to prevent the golf. There’s some Wild West thing with a shotgun
to shoot at targets and make things happen, with the advantage of shelter for
the player and a seat for the non-player.
Dave cheats, clambering into enemy territory, before getting shot by a
water pistol disguised as a cannon. I’m in the second
group on the course, with Ant, Zac and Mike.
The first hole has a right angle bend and seems to require a precise
calculation of angles. Zac tees off
and gets a hole in one. In the end he
finishes two shots behind us pros – not bad for an eight year old at a game
dubbed (on the till receipt) as ‘ADULT GOLF’, especially considering he beats
most of the numpties (Ian, Thorn, Nick, etc.) from the third group who even
by the 18th hole still think they’re on the driving range. I’m trying to take photos – I think they’re
trying to take me out. Of our group,
Ant has the only other and somewhat flukier hole-in-one on the 15th,
and is marginally best with a round of 50.
Martin wins overall by five shots with an impressive par 44, Geoff
taking the silver.
A sailor (background) takes a shit on T. Smith as he hits a
3-iron. Meanwhile the
message arrives that today’s proper
cricket is off. * * * Ball games aren’t
allowed on the strip of green behind the hotel, so we don our club hats,
shirts and boots, and head off on foot to a nearby park. I’m carrying my shirt and boots to change
into; after some distance I realize I’ve picked up whites instead of a
shirt. Eventually we find the park in
a nearby town. A six-a-side format is
devised whereby three pairs of bats take four overs each, with the opposition
players bowling two overs each in rotation.
Players from the batting team must also field (and make an
effort). Runs can only be scored if
the ball is hit in front of square, and at least one run must be
attempted. A wicket costs five runs,
as does a dropped catch (or lack of attempt) by a fielder from the batting
side. A no-ball is followed by a free
hit. The stumps at the bowlers end are
replaced by a jumper, so run-outs can only be taken at the keepers end, where
a stick acts as both bails. Dave and I are
elected captains, and we pick teams is schoolyard fashion. With Dave, the opposition are Martin,
Thorn, James, Matt and Geoff. On my
side are Ian, John, Mike and Nick. Dan
has arrived but is miles away the other side of the pier, where we were
playing golf, so he’ll join our team later.
There is no scorer; we’ll have to keep track of it in our collective
heads.
“Fuckin’ hell, Geoff – has it really come to this…?” Dave wins the toss
and elects to bat. Thorn and Matt open
and soon the score is below zero, though I have to give the bail extra help
for the bowled and the stumping.
Another stumping attempt leads to some dispute, not on who owns the
line, but where it actually is. As
Geoff and James take over, a steady supply of wickets continues keeps the run
rate just below zero, but in the end they get the hang of it and push the
score into positive double figures.
Dave and Martin complete the innings, Ant arriving with kids in tow
just in time to bowl the last two overs.
Another line-call dispute erupts; this time on whether the whole of
the path counts as the boundary rope at long on. Apparently it does, so Martin hits the only
six of the game. A perfectly gettable
34 required. I open with Ian, and
after four balls we are on -19 – a couple of catches, a stumping, and a
run-out going for a second – four wickets in four balls. Despite my attempts at extreme backing up
from the completely safe end, we continue to throw our wickets away and
recover only slightly to -12. By this
time a crowd has amassed on the cover boundary. I look over and find they are all sat with
their backs to us, looking at something more interesting in the next field,
or the lake, or something. Nick and
Zac take over. Despite the bat
weighing more than him, Zac manages to smear a healthy supply of singles and
the pair finish with the score just short of zero. Finally, John and Mike need nearly 40 in
four overs. They manage to find the
boundary quite a few times and mostly avoid getting out, but 24 off the last
over seems unlikely…. Four off the first
ball… Another boundary… An all-ran six
from the last ball! But it’s not enough,
we lose by 15 runs. * * * We trek back to the
hotel. James, Ian, Thorn and I have no
particular need to go to the hotel – I’ve managed to lumber most of what I
was carrying on Geoff and Thorn – so look for a pub for late lunch. We settle on one which doesn’t serve food
on a Sunday – today being a Sunday – but it does serve Stowford Press. The others arrive in the area; James has
finished his drink so he joins them as they select the Slug and Lettuce. It’s a fake pub but it does do food.
The Red Arrows did their stuff all weekend in After a brief search
we also find it. Matt is drinking coke
because they don’t sell any beer which isn’t lager or Guinness, which is a
plausible excuse. Ian is told to take
his ‘baseball’ cap off, has a sulky cob, so he and Thorn leave their pints
and get sandwiches from Subway. James
continues to wear his cricket cap. I
order food and am told it’ll be quite a wait.
We’re all still waiting when Ian and Thorn return, singing the praises
of Subway. Eventually a meal arrives
and we think its Dave’s; he’s busy on the phone to the AA trying to organize
a lift from the pub to his car. But
no, he didn’t order the same as I did, and I’m rewarded for avoiding the rush
and ordering after everyone else. When
I come back in after a cigarette after, the rest of the meals have finally started
to arrive. Dave’s has just made it
before the AA; he leaves £20 on the table and bids us farewell. Meanwhile it seems Dan has also headed back
after a 450 mile round trip to take Joe for a swim in the sea – in an
(almost) complete reversal of normality, Joe is the only one to have obeyed
captain’s orders today. Another
challenger for tomorrow’s captaincy emerges in John. It is to be decided by seven rounds of
tic-tac-toe. I win in four straight
rounds. Ian, Thorn and I are ready to
move on to a pub, perhaps one showing the * * *
“We do like a walk beside the seaside, oh we do….” We incline 1,700ft
along a mountain pass through the beautiful James is first to
arrive of the others, and is hysterical.
Having been given Dave’s £20 to gamble at double-or-nothing on behalf
of the club and lost two £5 bets on the toss of a coin with Nick, he’s gone
to the bookies with the remaining £10, won on a horse and a dog, and finally
put £10 at 7-1 on Chelsea winning. As
he walks in The game ends in a
draw.
Paul Newman wouldn’t stand a chance against the Mad. The pub has a pool
table, and soon a game of Killer Pool is established. With a life to be gained for potting the
black, Martin takes an early lead. But
Mike doesn’t miss many and after a 30 move endgame takes the drinks
money. The second game sees Ian
storming ahead and ultimately winning with five lives still left – as if he
doesn’t get enough lives batting anyway.
We think about a third game.… * * * It’s 8pm. There are some fireworks later to celebrate
the end of the air show; James and Thorn want to call in at the hotel to
change into their evening wear, so take a taxi there. The rest of us are quite happy to try
another pub ‘on the way back’ (round the corner). Then, round another corner past ‘Pizza
Stop’, another pub, The Lamb, which has a well inside it. We think about pizza. Pizza Stop doesn’t do Scotch Bonnet pizzas,
but their ‘Jalapeño Stop’ is probably the best in the world so we insist Ian
has it. John passes him a slice, which
he promptly drops it on the floor, butter side down. We stroll down the
hill as the fireworks begin, to general grumbling that not quite enough pizza
was ordered. Ian invents a new animal
for the club mascot: the giranha.
Apparently, one can ‘have a giranha’ like one can ‘have a giraffe.’ As the fireworks finish, we’re passing the
Wetherspoon’s pub back in town, so we drop in to discuss what a giranha is,
what it looks like, what colour it is, etc.
After a round of beers, Nick suggests a round of Jägermeisters. It sounds like a German beer to me, all good. It turns out to be an aniseed spirit. James and Thorn rejoin us. It’s decided that any ‘fineable’ comment
should be rewarded with a Jägermeister.
We drink the bar dry of it and switch to Sambuca, pink for those who
dropped catches, and strong rum. As
captain for tomorrow, I’m slightly worried by this excessive drinking the night
before a game, but the weather forecast was for rain anyway.
“Thish is my besht friend. I
fackin’ love him.” Back at the ranch, I
tackle the kettle for the first time on a cricket tour since that fateful
incident of 2004. James uses his
video-camera-phone to interview me about kettle safety; I suggest that the
jaws of a kettle could be like the jaws of a giranha – neck like a giraffe,
teeth like a piranha… venomous spit… We catch
a weather forecast. A belt of dry
weather will be passing over tomorrow.
Game on. But what state will
this group of piss heads formerly known as a cricket team be in? ‘Judge Mental’ |
